The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume VII: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories – Read Now and Download Mobi
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Halcyon Classics Series
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME VII:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF 50 SHORT STORIES
Contents
THE BARBARIAN by Poul Anderson
FLIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW by Stanton Coblentz
THE PLAYERS by Everett B. Cole
THE SOUND OF SILENCE by Barbara Constant
A CHOICE OF MIRACLES by James A. Cox
ONE OUT OF TEN by J. Anthony Ferlaine
THE CIRCUIT RIDERS by R. C. FitzPatrick
THE FLYING CUSPIDORS by V. R. Francis
I LIKE MARTIAN MUSIC by Charles E. Fritch
IRRESISTIBLE WEAPON by H. B. Fyfe
SATELLITE SYSTEM by H. B. Fyfe
BELLY LAUGH by Randall Garrett
FIFTY PER CENT PROPHET by Randall Garrett
THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW by Anthony Gilmore
THE STARS, MY BROTHERS by Edmond Hamilton
IT'S A SMALL SOLAR SYSTEM by Allan Howard
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES by Fritz Leiber
THE SKY TRAP by Frank Belknap Long
INFINITE INTRUDER by Alan E. Nourse
LETTER OF THE LAW by Alan E. Nourse
GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS by H. Beam Piper
DOGFIGHT—1973 by Mack Reynolds
THE DOPE ON MARS by Jack Sharkey
HELLHOUNDS OF THE COSMOS by Clifford D. Simak
HISTORY REPEATS by George O. Smith
PYGMALION'S SPECTACLES by Stanley G. Weinbaum
THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells
THE TERROR FROM THE DEPTHS by Sewell Peaslee Wright
VAMPIRES OF SPACE by Sewell Peaslee Wright
UNSPECIALIST by Murray F. Yaco
STAR MOTHER by Robert F. Young
THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY by Arthur L. Zagat
THE BARBARIAN
By Poul Anderson
Since the Howard-de Camp system for deciphering preglacial inscriptions first appeared, much progress has been made in tracing the history, ethnology, and even daily life of the great cultures which flourished till the Pleistocene ice age wiped them out and forced man to start over. We know, for instance, that magic was practiced; that there were some highly civilized countries in what is now Central Asia, the Near East, North Africa, southern Europe, and various oceans; and that elsewhere the world was occupied by barbarians, of whom the North Europeans were the biggest, strongest, and most warlike. At least, so the scholars inform us, and being of North European ancestry they ought to know.
The following is a translation of a letter recently discovered in the ruins of Cyrenne. This was a provincial town of the Sarmian Empire, a great though decadent realm in the eastern Mediterranean area, whose capital, Sarmia, was at once the most beautiful and the most lustful, depraved city of its time. The Sarmans" northern neighbors were primitive horse nomads and/or Centaurs; but to the east lay the Kingdom of Chathakh, and to the south was the Herpetarchy of Serpens, ruled by a priestly cast of snake worshipers or possibly snakes.
The letter was obviously written in Sarmia and posted to Cyrenne. Its date is approximately 175,000 B.C.
Marilion Quaestos, sub-sub-sub-prefect of the Imperial Waterworks of Sarmia, to his nephew Thyaston, Chancellor of the Bureau of Thaumaturgy, Province of Cyrenne:
Greetings!
I trust this finds you in good health, and that the gods will continue to favor you. As for me, I am well, though somewhat plagued by the gout, for which I have tried [here follows the description of a home remedy, both tedious and unprintable]. This has not availed, however, save to exhaust my purse and myself.
You must indeed have been out of touch during your Atlantean journey, if you must write to inquire about the Barbarian affair. Now that events have settled down again, I can, I hope, give you an adequate and dispassionate account of the whole ill-starred business. By the favor of the Triplet Goddesses, holy Sarmia has survived the episode; and though we are still rather shaken, things are improving. If at all times I seem to depart from the philosophic calm I have always tried to cultivate, blame it on the Barbarian. I am not the man I used to be. None of us are.
To begin, then, about three years ago the war with Chathakh had settled down to border skirmishes. Now and then a raid by one side or the other would penetrate deeply into the countries themselves, but with no decisive effect. Indeed, since these operations yielded a more or less equal amount of booty for both lands, and the slave trade grew brisk, it was good for business.
Our chief concern was the ambiguous attitude of Serpens. As you well know, the Herpetarchs have no love for us, and a major object of our diplomacy was to keep them from entering the war on the side of Chathakh. We had, of course, no hope of making them our allies. But as long as we maintained a posture of strength, it was likely that they would at least stay neutral.
Thus it stood when the Barbarian came to Sarmia,
We had heard rumors of him for a long time. An accurate description was available. He was a wandering soldier of fortune from some kingdom of swordsmen and seafarers up in the northern forests. He had drifted south, alone, in search of adventure or perhaps only a better climate. Seven feet tall, and broad in proportion, he was one mass of muscle, with a mane of tawny hair and sullen blue eyes. He was adept with any weapon, but preferred a four-foot double-edged sword with which he could cleave helmet, skull, neck, and so on down at one blow. He was also said to be a drinker and lover of awesome capacity.
Having overcome the Centaurs singlehanded, he tramped down through our northern provinces and one day stood at the gates of Sarmia herself. It was a curious vision the turreted walls rearing up over the stone-paved road, the guards with helmet and shield and corselet, and the towering near-naked giant who rattled his blade before them. As their pikes slanted down to bar his way, he cried in a voice of thunder:
"I yam Cronkheit duh Barbarian, an' I wanna audience widjer queen!"
His accent was so ludicrously uneducated that the watch burst into laughter. This angered him; flushing darkly, he drew his sword and advanced stiff-legged. The guardsmen reeled back before him, and the Barbarian swaggered through.
As the captain of the watch explained it to me afterward: "There he came, and there we stood. A spear length away, we caught the smell. Ye gods, when did he last bathe?"
So with people running from the streets and bazaars as he neared, Cronkheit made his way down the Avenue of Sphinxes, past the baths and the Temple of Loccar, till he reached the Imperial Palace. Its gates stood open as usual, and he looked in at the gardens and the alabaster walls beyond, and grunted. When the Golden Guardsmen approached frim upwind and asked his business, he grunted again. They lifted their bows and would have made short work of him, but a slave came running to bid them desist.
You see, by the will of some malignant god, the Empress was standing on a balcony and saw frini,
As is well known, our beloved Empress, Her Seductive Majesty the Illustrious Lady Larra the Voluptuous, is built like a mountain highway and is commonly believed to be an incarnation of her tutelary deity, Aphrosex, the Mink Goddess. She stood on the balcony with the wind blowing her thin transparent garments and thick black hair, and a sudden eagerness lit her proud lovely face. This was understandable, for Cronkheit wore only a bearskin kilt
So the slave was dispatched, to bow low before the stranger and say: "Most noble lord, the divine Empress would have private speech with you."
Cronkheit smacked his lips and strutted into the palace. The chamberlain wrung his hands when he saw those large muddy feet treading priceless rugs, but there was no help for it, and the Barbarian was led upstairs to the Imperial bedchamber.
What befell there is known to all, for of course in such interviews the Lady Larra posts mute slaves at convenient peepholes, to summon the guards if danger seems to threaten; and the courtiers have quietly taught these mutes to write. Our Empress had a cold, and had furthermore been eating a garlic salad, so her aristocratically curved nose was not offended. After a few formalities, she began to pant Slowly, then she held out her arms and let the purple robe slide down from her creamy shoulders and across the silken thighs.
"Come," she whispered. "Come, magnificent male."
Cronkheit snorted, pawed the ground, rushed forth, and clasped her to him.
"Yowww!" cried the Empress as a rib cracked. "Leggo! Help!"
The mutes ran for the Golden Guardsmen, who entered at once. They got ropes around the Barbarian and dragged him from their poor lady. Though in considerable pain, and much shaken, she did not order his execution; she is known to be very patient with some types.
Indeed, after gulping a cup of wine to steady her, she invited Cronkheit to be her guest. After he had been conducted off to his rooms, she summoned the Duchess of Thyle, a supple, agile little minx.
"I have a task for you, my dear," she murmured. "You will fulfill it as a loyal lady in waiting."
"Yes, Your Seductive Majesty," said the Duchess, who could well guess what the task was and thought she had been waiting long enough. For a whole week, in fact. Her assignment was to take the edge off the Barbarian's impetuosity.
She greased herself so she could slip free if in peril of being crushed, and hurried to Cronkheit's suite. Her musky perfume drowned out his odor, and she slipped off her dress and crooned with half-shut eyes: "Take me, my lord!"
"Yahoo!" howled the warrior. "I yam Crontheit duh Strong, Cronkheit duh Bold, Cronkheit what slew a mammot' singlehanded an' made hisself chief o' duh Centaurs, an' dis's muh nigjit! C'mere!"
The Duchess did, and he folded her in his mighty arms. A moment later there was another shriek. The palace attendants were treated to the sight of a naked and furious greased Duchess speeding down the jade corridor.
"Fleas he's got!" she cried, scratching as she ran.
So all in all, Cronkheit the Barbarian was no great success as a lover. Even the women in the Street of Joy used to hide when they saw him coming. They said they'd been exposed to clumsy technique before, but this was just too much.
However, his fame was so great that the Lady Larra put him in command of a brigade, infantry and cavalry, and sent him to join General Grythion on the Chathakh border. He made the march in record time and came shouting into the city of tents which had grown up at our mam base.
Now admittedly our good General Grythion is somewhat of a dandy, who curls his beard and is henpecked by his wives. But he has always been a competent soldier, winning honors at the Academy and leading troops in battle many times before rising to the strategfc-planning post One could understand Cronkheit's incivility at their meeting. But when the general courteously declined to go forth in the van of the army and pointed out how much more valuable he was as a coordinator behind the lines -- that was no excuse for Cronkheit to knock his superior officer to the ground and call him a coward, damned of the gods. Giythion was thoroughly justified in having him put in irons, despite the casualties involved. Even as it was, the spectacle had so demoralized our troops that they lost three important engagements in the following month.
Alas! Word of this reached the Empress, and she did not order Cronkheit's head struck off. Indeed, she sent back a command that he be released and reinstated. Perhaps she still cherished him enough to be an acceptable bed partner.
Grythion swallowed his pride and apologized to the Barbarian, who accepted with an ill grace. His restored rank made it necessary to invite him to a dinner and conference in the headquarters tent
It was a flat failure. Cronkheit stamped in and at once made sneering remarks about the elegant togas of his brother officers. He belched when he ate and couldn't distinguish the product of one vineyard from another. His conversation consisted of hourlong monologues about his own prowess. General Grythion saw morale zooming downward, and hastily called for maps and planning.
"Now, most noble sirs," he began, "we have to lay out the summer campaign. As you know, we have the Eastern Desert between us and the nearest important enemy positions. This raises difficult questions of logistics and catapult emplacement." He turned politely to the Barbarian. "Have you any suggestion, my lord?"
"Duh," said Cronkheit
"I think," ventured Colonel Pharaon, "that if we advanced to the Chunling Oasis and dug in there, building a supply road--"
"Dat reminds me," said Cronkheit "One time up in duh Norriki marshes, I run acrost some swamp men an' dey uses poisoned arrers--"
"I fail to see what that has to do with this problem," said General Grythion.
"Nuitin'," admitted Cronkheit cheerfully. "But don't innerup' me. Like I was sayin'--" And he was off for another dreary hour.
At the end of a conference which had gotten nowhere, the general stroked his beard and said shrewdly: "Lord Cronkheit, it appears your abilities are more in the tactical than the strategic field."
The Barbarian snatched for his sword.
"I mean," said Grythion quickly, "I have a task which only the boldest and strongest leader can accomplish."
Cronkheit beamed and listened closely for a change. He was to be sent out with his men to capture Chantsay. This was a fort in the mountain passes across the Eastern Desert, and a major obstacle to our advance. However, in spite of Grythion's judicious flattery, a full brigade should have been able to take it with little difficulty, for it was known to be undermanned.
Cronkheit rode off at the head of his men, tossing his sword in the air and bellowing some uncouth battle chant. Then he was not heard of for six weeks.
At the close of that time, the ragged, starving, fever-stricken remnant of his troops staggered back to the base and reported utter failure. Cronkheit, who was in excellent health himself, made some sullen excuses. But he had never imagined that men who march twenty hours a day aren't fit for battle at the end of the trip -- the more so if they outrun their own supply train.
Because of the Empress's wish, General Grythion could not do the sensible thing and cashier the Barbarian. He could not even reduce him to the ranks. Instead, he used his well-known guile and invited the giant to a private dinner.
"Obviously, most valiant lord," he purred, "the fault is mine. I should have realized that a man of your type is too much for us decadent southerners. You are a lone wolf who fights best by himself."
"Duh," agreed Cronkheit, ripping a fowl apart with his fingers and wiping them on the damask tablecloth.
Grythion winced, but easily talked him into going out on a one-man guerrilla operation. When he left the next morning, the officers' corps congratulated themselves on having gotten rid of the lout forever.
In the face of subsequent criticism and demands for an investigation, I still maintain that Grythion did the only rational thing under the circumstances. Who could have known that Cronkheit the Barbarian was so primitive that rationality simply slid off his hairy skin?
The full story will never be known. But apparently, in the course of the following year, while the border war continued as usual, Cronkheit struck off into the northern uplands. There he raised a band of horse nomads as ignorant and brutal as himself. He also rounded up a herd of mammoths and drove them into Chathakh, stampeding them at the foe. By such means, he reached their very capital, and the King offered terms of surrender.
But Cronkheit would have none of this. Not he! His idea of warfare was to kill or enslave every last man, woman, and child of the enemy nation. Also, his irregulars were supposed to be paid in loot. Also, being too unsanitary even for the nomad girls, he felt a certain urgency.
So he stormed the capital of Chathakh and burned it to the ground. This cost him most of his own men. It also destroyed several priceless books and works of art, and any possibility of tribute to Sarmia.
Then he had the nerve to organize a triumphal procession and ride back to our own city!
This was too much even for the Empress. When he stood before -- for he was too crude for the simple courtesy of a knee bend -- she exceeded herself in describing the many kinds of fool, idiot, and all-around blockhead he was.
"Duh," said Cronkheit. "But I won duh war. Look, I won duh war, I did. I won duh war,"
"Yes," hissed the Lady Larra. "You smashed an ancient and noble culture to irretrievable ruin. And did you know that one half our peacetime trade was with Chathakh? There'll be a business depression now such as history has never seen before."
General Grythion, who had returned, added his own reproaches. "Why do you think wars are fought?" he asked bitterly. "War is an extension of diplomacy. It's the final means of making somebody else do what you want. The object is not to kill them all off--how can corpses obey you?"
Cronkheit growled in his throat.
"We would have negotiated a peace in which Chathakh became our ally against Serpens," went on the general. "Then we'd have been safe against all comers. But you -- You've left a howling wilderness which we must garrison with our own troops lest the nomads take it over. Your atrocities have alienated every civilized state. You've left us alone and friendless. You've won this war by losing the next one!"
"And on top of the depression which is coming," said the Empress, "we'll have the cost of maintaining those garrisons. Taxes down and expenditures up--It may break the treasury, and then where are we?"
Cronkheit spat on the floor. "Yuh're all decadent, dat's what yuh are," he snarled, "Be good for yuh if yer empire breaks up. Yuh oughtta get dat city rabble o' years out in duh woods an' make hunters of 'em, like me. Let 'em eat steak."
The Lady Larra stamped an exquisite gold-shod foot "Do you think we've nothing better to do with our time than spend the whole day hunting, and sit around in some mud hovel at night licking the grease off our fingers?" she cried "What the hell do you think civilization is for, anyway?"
Cronkheit drew his great sword so it flashed before their eyes. "I hadda nuff!" he bellowed. "I'm t'rough widjuh! It's time yuh was all wiped off duh face o' duh eart', an I'm jus' duh guy t' doit!"
And now Genegal Grythion showed the qualities which had raised him to his high post. Artfully, he quailed. "Oh no!" he whimpered. "You're not going to -- to -- to fight on the side of Serpens?"
"I yam," said Cronkheit. "So long." The last we saw of him was a broad, indignant, flea-bitten back, headed south, and the reflection of the sun on a sword.
Since then, of course, our affairs have prospered and Serpens is now frantically suing for peace. But we intend to prosecute the war till they meet our terms. We are most assuredly not going to be ensnared by their treacherous plea and take the Barbarian back!
EXPERIMENT
By Fredric Brown
"The first time machine, gentlemen," Professor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. "True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works."
The small-scale model looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part under the platform.
Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. "Our experimental object," he said, "is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point three ounces. First, I shall send it five minutes into the future."
He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. "Look at your watches," he said.
They looked at their watches. Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine's platform. It vanished.
Five minutes later, to the second, it reappeared.
Professor Johnson picked it up. "Now five minutes into the past." He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. "It is six minutes before three o'clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the cube on the platform—at exactly three o'clock. Therefore, the cube should, at five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there."
"How can you place it there, then?" asked one of his colleagues.
"It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o'clock. Notice, please."
The cube vanished from his hand.
It appeared on the platform of the time machine.
"See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!"
His other colleague frowned at the cube. "But," he said, "what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o'clock? Wouldn't there be a paradox of some sort involved?"
"An interesting idea," Professor Johnson said. "I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not ..."
There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.
But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.
SENTRY
By Fredric Brown
He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.
A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.
But in tens of thousands of years this part of war hadn't changed. The flyboys were fine with their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down, though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he'd never heard of until they'd landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy ... cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.
Contact had been made with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow, difficult colonization of a dozen thousand planets; and it had been war at sight; they'd shot without even trying to negotiate, or to make peace.
Now, planet by bitter planet, it was being fought out.
He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.
He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he'd ever live to see home again.
And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.
He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he'd never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.
FLIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW
BY STANTON A. COBLENTZ
Super warfare has destroyed the old race of man, but elsewhere a new civilization is dawning....
I
Nothing was further from my mind, when I discovered the "Release Drug" Relin, than the realization that it would lead me through as strange and ghastly and revealing a series of adventures as any man has ever experienced. I encountered it, in a way, as a mere by-product of my experiments; I am a chemist by profession, and as one of the staff of the Morganstern Foundation have access to some of the best equipped laboratories in America. The startling new invention--I must call it that, though I did not create it deliberately--came to me in the course of my investigations into the obscure depths of the human personality.
It has long been my theory that there is in man a psychic entity which can exist for at least brief periods apart from the body, and have perceptions which are not those of the physical senses. In accordance with these views, I had been developing various drugs, compounded of morphine and adrenalin, whose object was to shock the psychic entity loose for limited periods and so to widen the range and powers of the personality. I shall not go into the details of my researches, nor tell by what accident I succeeded better than I had hoped; the all-important fact--a fact so overwhelming that I shudder and gasp and marvel even as I tell of it--is that I did obtain a minute quantity of a drug which, by putting the body virtually in a state of suspended animation, could release the mind to travel almost at will across time and space.
Yes, across time and space!--for the drag of the physical having been stricken off, I could enter literally into infinity and eternity. But let me tell precisely what happened that night when at precisely 10:08 in the solitude of my apartment room, I swallowed half an ounce of Relin and stretched myself out on the bed, well knowing that I was taking incalculable risks, and that insanity and even death were by no means remote possibilities of the road ahead. But let that be as it may! In my opinion, there is no coward more despicable than he who will not face danger for the sake of knowledge.
My head reeled, and something seemed to buzz inside it as soon as the bitter half ounce of fluid slipped down my throat. I was barely able to reach the bed and throw myself upon it when there came a snapping as of something inside my brain ... then, for a period, blankness ... then a gradual awakening with that feeling of exhilaration one experiences only after the most blissful sleep. I opened my eyes, feeling strong and light of limb and charged with a marvelous vital energy--but, as I peered about me, my lips drew far apart in astonishment, and I am sure that I gaped like one who has seen a ghost.
Where were the familiar walls of my two-by-four room, the bureau, the book-rack, the ancient portrait of Pasteur that hung in its glass frame just above the foot of the bed? Gone! vanished as utterly as though they had never been! I was standing on a wide and windy plain, with the gale beating in my ears, and with rapid sunset-colored clouds scudding across the blood-stained west. Mingled with the wailing of the blast, there was a deep sobbing sound that struck me in successive waves, like the ululations of great multitudes of far-off mourners. And while I was wondering what this might mean and felt a prickling of horror along my spine, the first of the portents swept across the sky. I say "portents," for I do not know by what other term to describe the apparitions; high in the heavens, certainly at an altitude of many miles, the flaming thing swept across my view, comet-shaped and stretching over at least ten degrees of arc, swift as a meteor, brilliantly flesh-red, sputtering sparks like an anvil, and leaving behind it a long ruddy trail that only slowly faded out amid the darkening skies.
It must have been a full minute after its disappearance before the hissing of its flight came to my ears--a hissing so sharp, so nastily insistent that it reached me even above the noise of the wind. And more than another minute had passed before the earth beneath me was wrenched and jarred as if by an earthquake and the most thunderous detonations I had ever heard burst over me in a prolonged series.
Let me emphasize that none of this had the quality of a dream; it was clear-cut, as vivid as anything I had ever experienced; my mind worked with an unusual precision and clarity, and not even a fleeting doubt came to me of the reality of my observations. "This is some sort of bombing attack," I remember reflecting, "some assault of super-monsters of the skies, perfected by a super science." And I did not have to be told the fact; I knew, as by an all-illuminating inner knowledge, that I had voyaged into the future.
Even as this realization came to me, I made another flight--and one that was in space more than in time. It did not surprise me, but I took it as the most natural thing in the world when I seemed to rise and go floating away through the air. It was still sunset-time, but I could see clearly enough as I went drifting at a height of several hundred yards above a vast desolated space near the junction of two rivers. Perhaps, however, "desolated" is not the word I should use; I should say, rather, "shattered, pulverized, obliterated," for a scene of more utter and hopeless ruin I have never seen nor imagined. Over an area of many square miles, there was nothing but heaps and mounds of broken stone, charred and crumbling brick, fire-scarred timbers, and huge contorted masses of rusting steel like the decaying bones of superhuman monsters. From the great height and extent of the piles of debris, and from the occasional sight of the splintered cornice of a roof or of some battered window-frame or door, I knew that this had once been a city, one of the world's greatest; but no other recognizable feature remained amid the gray masses of ruins, and the very streets and avenues had been erased. But here and there a tremendous crater, three hundred feet across and a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet deep, indicated the source of the destruction.
As if to reinforce the dread idea that had taken possession of my brain, one of the comet-like red prodigies went streaking across the sky even as I gazed down at the dead city; and I knew--as clearly as if I had seen the whole spectacle with my own eyes--that the missile had sprung from a source hundreds or thousands of miles away, possibly across the ocean; and that, laden with scores of tons of explosives, it had been hurled with unerring mechanical accuracy upon its mission of annihilation.
Then I seemed to float over vast distances of that sunset-tinted land, and saw great craters in the fields, and villages shot to ribbons, and farms abandoned; and the wild dogs fought for the wild cattle; and thistles grew deep on acres where wheat had been planted, and weeds sprouted thickly in the orchards, and blight and mildew competed for the crops. But though here and there I could see a dugout, with traces of fire and abandoned tools flung about at random, nowhere in all that dismal world did I observe a living man.
After a time I returned to a place near the ruined city by the two rivers; and in the rocky palisades above one of the streams, I made out some small circular holes barely large enough to admit a man. And, borne onward by some impulse of curiosity and despair, I entered one of these holes, and went downward, far downward into the dim recesses. And now for the first time, at a depth of hundreds of yards, I did at last encounter living men. My first thought was that I had gone back to the day of the cave-man, for a cave-like hollow had been scooped out in the solid rock. It was true that the few hundreds of people huddled together there had the dress and looks of moderns; it was true, also, that the gloom was lighted for them by electric bulbs, and that electric radiators kept them warm; yet Dante himself, in painting the ninth circle of his Inferno, could not have imagined a drearier and more despondent group than these that slouched and drooped and muttered in that cavernous recess, seated with their heads fallen low upon their knees, or moodily pacing back and forth like captives who can hope for no escape. "Here at least we will be safe from the sky marauders," I heard one of them muttering. Yet I could not help wondering what the mere safety of the body could mean when all the glories of man's civilization were annihilated.
II
There came a whirring in my head, and another blank interval; and when I regained my senses I knew that another period of time had passed, possibly months or even years. I stood on the palisade above the river, near the entrance of the caves; and the sun was bright above me; but there was no brightness in the men and women that trailed out of a small circular hole in the ground. Drab as dock-rats, and pasty pale of countenance as hospital inmates, and with bent backs and dirty, tattered clothes and a mouse-like nosing manner, they emerged with the wariness of hunted refugees; and they flung up their hands with low cries to shield them from the brilliance of the sun, to which they were evidently unaccustomed. From the packs on their backs and the bundles in their hands, I knew that they were emerging from their subterranean refuge, to try to begin a new life in the ravaged world above; and my heart went out to them, for I saw that, few as they were--not more than fifty in all--they were the sole survivors of a once-populous region, and would have a bitter fight to wage in the man-made wilderness that had been a world metropolis.
But as they roamed above through the waste of ash and rubble, and as they wandered abroad where the fields had been and saw how every brush and tree had been seared from the earth or poisoned by chemical brews, I knew that their fight was not merely a bitter one--it was hopeless. And I heard them muttering among themselves, "We have not even any tools!", and again, "We have no fuel left for the great machines!" ... For they had lived in a highly mechanical world, and the technicians who alone understood the workings of that world had all been destroyed, and the sources of power had all been cut off--and power was the food without which they could not long survive.
Unable to endure their haggard, hangdog looks and grim, despondent eyes, I went wandering far away, over the length and breadth of many lands. And nowhere did I see a factory that had not been hammered to dust, nor a village that had not been unroofed or burnt, nor a farm where the workers went humming on their merry, toilsome way. Yet here and there I did observe little knots of survivors. Sometimes they were half-clad groups, lean and ferocious as famished wolves, who roamed the houseless countryside with stones and clubs, hunting the wild birds and hares, or making meager meals from bark and roots. Sometimes three or four men, with the frenzied eyes and hysterical shrieks and shouts of maniacs, would emerge from a brush hut by a river flat. Sometimes little bands of men and women, in a dazed aimless way, would go wandering about a huge jagged hole in the ground, where their homes and their loved ones lay buried. I came upon solitary refugees high up on the scarred mountain slopes, with nothing but a staff to lean upon and a deer-skin to keep them warm. I saw more than one twisted form lying motionless at the foot of a precipice. I witnessed a battle between two half-crazed, ravenous bands, with murder, and cannibalism, and horrors too grisly to report. I observed brave men resolutely trying to till the soil, whose productive powers had been ruined by a poison spray from the sky; and I noted some who, though the fields remained fertile enough, had not the seed to plant; and others who had not the tools with which to plow and reap. And some who, with great labor, managed to produce enough for three or four mouths, had twenty or thirty to feed; and where the three or four might have lived, the twenty or thirty perished.
Then, with a great sadness, I knew that man, having become civilized, cannot make himself into a savage again. He has come to depend upon science for his sustenance, and when he himself has destroyed the means of employing that science, he is as a babe without milk. And it is not necessary to destroy all men in order to exterminate mankind; one need only take from him the prop of his mechanical inventions.
III
Again there came a blankness, and I passed over a stretch of time, perhaps over years or even decades. And I had wandered far in space, to an island somewhere on a sunny sea; and there once more I heard the sound of voices. And somehow, through some deeper sense, I knew that these were the voices of the only men left anywhere on the whole wide planet. And I looked down on them, and saw that they were but few, no more than a dozen men and women in all, with three or four children among them. But their faces, unlike those which I had seen before, were not haggard and seamed, nor avid like those of hunting beasts, nor distorted by fury or famine. Their brows were broad and noble, and their eyes shone with the sweetness of great thoughts, and their smiles were as unuttered music; and when they glanced at me with their clear, level gaze, I knew that they were such beings as poets had pictured as dwellers in a far tomorrow. And I did not feel sad, though I could not forget that they were the only things in human form that one could find on all earth's shores, and though I knew that they were too few to perpetuate their kind for long. Somehow I felt some vast benevolent spirit in control, that these most perfect specimens of our race should endure when all the wreckers had vanished.
As I watched, I saw the people all turning their eyes to an eastern mountain, whose summit still trailed the golden of the dawn-clouds. And from above the peak a great illuminated sphere, like a chariot of light, miraculously came floating down; and the blaze was such that I could hardly bear to look at it. And exclamations of wonder and joy came from the people's throats; and I too cried out in joy and wonder as the radiant globe descended, and as it alighted on the plain before us, casting a sunlike aura over everything in sight. Then through the sides of the enormous ball--I would not say, through the door, for nothing of the kind was visible--a glorious being emerged, followed by several of his kind. He was shaped like a man, and was no taller than a man, and yet there was that about him which said that he was greater than a man, for light seemed to pour from every cell of his body, and a golden halo was about his head, and his eyes shot forth golden beams so intense and so magnetic that, once having observed them, I could hardly take my gaze away.
With slow steps he advanced, motioning the people to him; and they drew near, and flung themselves before him on the ground, and cried out in adoration. And I too threw myself to earth, in worship of this superhuman creature; and I heard the words he spoke, and with some deeper sense I translated them, though they were not uttered in any language I knew:
"Out of the stars we come, O men! and back to the stars we shall go, that the best of your race may be transplanted there, and survive through means known to us, and again be populous and great. Through the immense evil within the breasts of your kind, you have been purged and all but annihilated; but the good within your race has also been mighty, and can never be expunged; and that good has called through you surviving few to us your guardians, that we may take you to another planet, and replenish you there, and teach you that lore of love and truth and beauty which the blind members of your species have neglected here while they unfitted the earth for human habitation."
So speaking, the radiant one motioned to the people, who arose, and followed him inside the great sphere of light; and when they had all entered, it slowly began to ascend, and slowly dwindled and disappeared against the morning skies. And now, I knew, there was no longer a man left anywhere on earth; yet as I gazed at the deserted shore, the empty beach and the bare mountainside, a sense of supreme satisfaction came over me, as though I knew that in the end, after fire and agony and degradation, all was eternally well.
* * * * *
That sense of supreme satisfaction remained with me when, after still another blank interval, I opened my eyes as from a deep slumber, and stared at the familiar book-rack, the bureau, the mottled paper walls of my own room. The clock on the little table at my side indicated the hour of 10:09--in other words, all that had happened had occupied the space of one minute! Yet I know as surely as I know that I write these words--that the Release Drug had freed my spirit to range over thousands of miles of space, and that I have looked on people and events which no other eye will view for scores, hundreds or even thousands of years to come.
THE PLAYERS
BY EVERETT B. COLE
A Playboy is someone with power, too much time on his hands, and too little sense of a goal worth achieving. And if the Playboy happens to belong to a highly advanced culture....
Through the narrow streets leading to the great plaza of Karth, swarmed a colorful crowd--buyers, idlers, herdsmen, artisans, traders. From all directions they came, some to gather around the fountain, some to explore the wineshops, many to examine the wares, or to buy from the merchants whose booths and tents hid the cobblestones.
A caravan wound its way through a gate and stopped, the weary beasts standing patiently as the traders sought vacant space where they might open business. From another gate, a herdsman guided his living wares through the crowd, his working animals snapping at the heels of the flock, keeping it together and in motion.
Musa, trader of Karth, sat cross-legged before his shop, watching the scene with quiet amusement. Business was good in the city, and his was pleasingly above the average. Western caravans had come in, exchanging their goods for those eastern wares he had acquired. Buyers from the city and from the surrounding hills had come to him, to exchange their coin for his goods. He glanced back into the booth, satisfied with what he saw, then resumed his casual watch of the plaza. No one seemed interested in him.
There were customers in plenty. Men stopped, critically examined the contents of the displays, then moved on, or stayed to bargain. One of these paused before Musa, his eyes dwelling on the merchant rather than on his wares.
The shopper was a man of medium height. His rather slender, finely featured face belied the apparent heaviness of his body, though his appearance was not actually abnormal. Rather, he gave the impression of being a man of powerful physique and ascetic habits. His dress was that of a herdsman, or possibly of an owner of herds from the northern Galankar.
Musa arose, to face him.
"Some sleeping rugs, perhaps? Or a finely worked bronze jar from the East?"
The stranger nodded. "Possibly. But I would like to look a while if I may."
Musa stepped aside, waving a hand. "You are more than welcome, friend," he assented. "Perhaps some of my poor goods may strike your fancy."
"Thank you." The stranger moved inside.
Musa stood at the entrance, watching him. As the man stepped from place to place, Musa noted that he seemed to radiate a certain confidence. There was a definite aura of power and ability. This man, the trader decided, was no ordinary herdsman. He commanded more than sheep.
"You own herds to the North?" he asked.
The stranger turned, smiling. "Lanko is my name," he said. "Yes, I come from the North." He swept a hand to indicate the merchandise on display, and directed a questioning gaze at the merchant. "It seems strange that your goods are all of the East. I see little of the West in all your shop."
* * * * *
Normally, Musa kept his own council, assuming that his affairs were not public property, but his alone. There was something about this man, Lanko, however, which influenced him to break his usual reticence.
"I plan a trading trip to the Eastern Sea," he confided. "Of course, to carry eastern goods again to the East would be a waste of time, so I am reserving my western goods for the caravan and clearing out the things of the East."
Lanko nodded. "I see." He pointed to a small case of finely worked jewelry. "What would be the price of those earrings?"
Musa reached into the case, taking out a cunningly worked pair of shell and gold trinkets.
"These are from Norlar, a type of jewelry we rarely see here," he said. "For these, I must ask twenty balata."
Lanko whistled softly. "No wonder you would make a trip East. I wager there is profit in those." He pointed. "What of the sword up there?"
Musa laughed. "You hesitate at twenty balata, then you point out that?"
He crossed the tent, taking the sword from the wall. Drawing it from its scabbard, he pointed to the unusually long, slender blade.
"This comes from Norlar, too. But the smith who made it is still farther to the east, beyond the Great Sea." He gripped the blade, flexing it.
"Look you," he commanded, "how this blade has life. Here is none of your soft bronze or rough iron from the northern hills. Here is a living metal that will sever a hair, yet not shatter on the hardest helm."
Lanko showed interest. "You say this sword was made beyond the Great Sea? How, then, came it to Norlar and thence here?"
Musa shook his head. "I am not sure," he confessed. "It is rumored that the priests of the sea god, Kondaro, by praying to their deity, are guided across the sea to lands unknown."
"Taking traders with them?"
"So I have been told."
"And you plan to journey to Norlar to verify this rumor, and perhaps to make a sea voyage?"
Musa stroked his beard, wondering if this man could actually read thoughts.
"Yes," he admitted, "I had that in mind."
"I see." Lanko reached for the sword. As Musa handed it to him, he extended it toward the rear of the booth, whipping it in an intricate saber drill. Musa watched, puzzled. An experienced swordsman himself he had thought he knew all of the sword arts. The sword flexed, singing as it cut through the air.
"Merchant, I like this sword. What would its price be?"
* * * * *
Musa was disappointed. Here was strange bargaining. People just didn't walk in and announce their desire for definite articles. They feigned indifference. They picked over the wares casually, disparagingly. They looked at many items, asking prices. They bargained a little, perhaps, to test the merchant. They made comments about robbery, and about the things they had seen in other merchants' booths which were so much better and so much cheaper.
Slowly, and with the greatest reluctance, did the normal shopper approach the object he coveted.
Then, here was this man.
"Well," Musa told himself, "make the most of it." He shrugged.
"Nine hundred balata," he stated definitely, matching the frank directness of this unusual shopper, and incidentally doubling his price.
Lanko was examining the hilt of the sword. He snapped a fingernail against its blade. There was a musical ping.
"You must like this bit of metal far better than I," he commented without looking up. "I only like it two hundred balata worth."
Musa felt relief at this return to familiar procedure. He held up his hands in a horrified gesture.
"Two hundred!" he cried. "Why, that is for the craftsman's apprentices. There is yet the master smith, and those who bring the weapon to you. No, friend, if you want this prince of swords, you must expect to pay for it. One does not--" He paused. Lanko was sheathing the weapon, his whole bearing expressing unwilling relinquishment.
Musa slowed his speech. "Still," he said softly, "I am closing out my eastern stock, after all. Suppose we make it eight hundred fifty?"
"Did you say two hundred fifty?" Lanko held the sheathed sword up, turning to the light to inspect the leather work.
The bargaining went on. Outside, the crowds in the street thinned, as the populace started for their evening meals. The sword was inspected and re-inspected. It slid out of its sheath and back again. Finally, Musa sighed.
"Well, all right. Make it five hundred, and I'll go to dinner with you." He shook his head in a nearly perfect imitation of despair. "May the wineshop do better than I did."
* * * * *
"Housewife, this is Watchdog. Over."
The man at the workbench looked around. Then, he laid his tools aside, and picked up a small microphone.
"This is Housewife," he announced.
"Coming in."
The worker clipped the microphone to his jacket, and crossed the room to a small panel. He threw a switch, looked briefly at a viewscreen, then snapped another switch.
"Screen's down," he reported. "Come on in, Lanko."
An opening appeared in the wall, to show a fleeting view of a bleak landscape. Bare rocks jutted from the ice, kept clear of snow by the shrieking wind. Extreme cold crept into the room, then a man swept in and the wall resumed its solidity behind him.
He stood for an instant, glancing around, then shrugged off a light robe and started shedding equipment.
"Hi, Pal," he was greeted. "How are things down Karth way?"
"Nothing exceptional." Lanko shrugged. "This area's getting so peaceful it's monotonous." He unsnapped his accumulator and crossed to the power generator.
"No wars, or rumors of wars," he continued. "The town's getting moral--very moral, and it's developing into a major center of commerce in the process." He kicked off his sandals, wriggled out of the baggy native trousers, and tossed his shirt on top of them.
"No more shakedowns. Tax system's working the way it was originally intended to, and the merchants are flocking in."
He walked toward the wall, flicking a hand out. An opening appeared, and he ducked through it.
"Be with you in a minute, Banasel," he called over his shoulder. "Like to get cleaned up."
Banasel nodded and went back to the workbench. He picked up a small part, examined it, touched it gently a few times with a soft brush, and replaced it in the device he was working on.
He tightened it into place, and was checking another component when a slight shuffle announced his companion's return.
"Oh, yes," said Lanko. "Met your old pal, Musa. He's doing right well for himself."
Banasel swung around. "Haven't seen him since we joined the Corps. What's he doing?"
"Trading." Lanko opened a locker, glancing critically at the clothing within. "He set up shop with the load of goods we gave him long ago, and did some pretty shrewd merchandising. Now, he's planning a trip over the Eastern Sea. He hinted at a rumor of a civilization out past Norlar."
"Nothing out there for several thousand kilos," growled Banasel, "except for a few little islands." He jerked a thumb toward the workbench. "I can't show you right now, because the scanner's down for cleaning, but there isn't even an island for the first couple thousand K's. Currents are all wrong, too. No one could cross without navigational equipment."
"I know," Lanko assured him. "We haven't checked over that way for a long time, but I still remember. I didn't put it exactly that way, of course, but I did ask Musa how he planned to get over the Eastern. And, I got an answer." He paused as he gathered up the garments he had discarded.
"It seems there's a new priesthood at Norlar, who've got something," he continued. "It's all wrapped up in religious symbology, and they don't let any details get out, but they are guiding ships out to sea, and they're bringing them back again, loaded with goods that never originated in the Galankar, or in any place accessible to the Galankar." He hung up the last article of clothing and turned, a sheathed sword in his hand.
"Musa sold me this," he said, extending the hilt toward Banasel. "I never saw anything like it on this planet. Did you?"
* * * * *
Banasel accepted the weapon, drawing it from its scabbard. He examined the handwork on the hilt, then snapped a fingernail against the blade. As he listened to the musical ping, the technician looked at the weapon with more interest. Gently, he flexed it, watching for signs of strain. Lanko grinned at him.
"Go ahead," he invited, "get rough with it. That's a sword you're holding, Chum, not one of those bronze skull busters."
Banasel extended the sword, whipping it violently. The blade bent, then straightened, and bent again, as it slashed through the air.
"Well," he murmured. "Something new."
He put the sword on the workbench and took an instrument from a cabinet. For a few minutes, he busied himself taking readings and tapping out data on his computer. He sat back, looking at the sword curiously. At last, he glanced at the computer, then put the test instrument he had been using back in the cabinet, taking another to replace it. After taking more readings, he looked at the computer, then shook his head, turning to Lanko.
"This," he said slowly, "is excellent steel. Of course, it could be an accidental alloy, but I wouldn't think anyone on this planet could have developed the technology to get it just so." He held the sword away from him, looking at it closely. "Assuming an accidental alloy, an accident in getting precisely the right degree of heat before quenching, and someone who ground and polished with such care as to leave the temper undisturbed, while getting this finish--Oh, it's possible, all right. But 'tain't likely. Musa told you this came from overseas?"
"To the best of his knowledge. He got it from a trader who claimed to have been on a voyage across the Eastern Sea."
Banasel leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head. "You must have had quite a talk with Musa. Did he remember you?"
Lanko shook his head. "Don't be foolish," he grunted. "You and I were blotted out of his memory, remember? So are quite a few of the things that happened around Atakar, way back when. He's got a complete past, of course, but we're not part of it.
"No, he had a booth in the Karth market. I came through, just looking things over, and recognized him. So, I picked an acquaintance. Beat him down to about half the asking price for this sword, still leaving him a whopping profit. He went to dinner with me, still bewailing the rooking I'd given him. Told you, he's a trader. We had quite a talk, certainly. But we were strangers."
"Yeah." Banasel looked off into space. "Seems funny. You and I were born on this planet. We were brought up here, and a lot of people once knew us. But they've all forgotten, and we don't belong any more. I'm beginning to see what they mean by 'the lonely life of a guardsman.'"
He was silent for a time, then looked at his companion.
"Do you think these priests at Norlar might be in our line of business?"
"Could be," nodded Lanko. "There's a lot of seafaring out of Konassa, and there are several other busy seaports we know of. But no one in any of them ever heard of navigation out of sight of land, let alone trying it. There's nothing but pilotage, and even that's pretty sketchy. And, there's this thing." He crossed to the workbench, picked up the sword, and stroked its blade.
"Normally," he mused, "technical knowledge gets around. Part of it's developed here, part there. Then someone comes along and puts it together. And someone else adds to it. And so on.
"Then, there are other times, when there's an abnormal source, or where there are unusual conditions, and knowledge is very closely guarded. This might be one of those cases, and those priests might be fronting for someone very much in our line of business." He broke off.
"Any maedli hot?"
"Sure." Banasel picked a pot from the heater and poured two cups.
"Think we should set up a base near Norlar and have a look?"
"Probably be a good idea." Lanko accepted a cup, took a sip, and shook his head violently.
"Ouch! I said hot, not boiling." He blew on the cup and set it aside to steam itself cool.
"These mountains were an excellent base," he continued, "but this area seems to be developing perfectly. There's no outside interference, all traces of former interference have been eliminated, and there's very little excuse for us to hang around." He picked up the cup again, cautiously sampling its contents. "And it's about time we moved around and checked on the rest of the planet."
Banasel turned back to the workbench. "Good idea," he agreed. "I'll get this scanner set up again, and we'll be ready to load out." He picked up his tools. "As I remember, Norlar has a mountainous backbone where no one ever goes. We should be able to set up right on the island."
* * * * *
On the eastern slope of the Midra Kran, a cloud of dust paced a caravan, which wound up the trail, through a pass. The treachery of the narrow path was testified to by an occasional slither, followed by a startled curse.
Musa stood in his stirrups, looking ahead at the long trail which twisted a little farther up, then dropped to the wide Jogurthan plateau. Far ahead, over the poorly marked way, he knew, was another range, the Soruna Kran, which blocked his way to the Eastern Sea.
He looked back at the straggling caravan.
"Better get them to close up, Baro," he remarked. "We'd be in a lot of trouble if a robber band caught us scattered like this."
The other trader nodded and turned his mount. Then, he paused as shouts came from the rear of the line. Mixed with the shouting was the clatter of weapons.
"Come on," cried Musa. "It's happened."
He kicked his mount in the ribs, and swung about, starting up the steep bank. The bandits would have bowmen posted to deal with anyone who might try to get back along the narrow path, and he had no desire to test the accuracy of their aim.
As his beast scrambled up the bank, Musa saw a man standing on a pinnacle, alertly watching the center of the caravan. His guess had been right. The bandit leader's strategy had been to cut the caravan in two, and to deal with the rear guard first. As the watcher started to aim at something down on the trail, Musa quickly raised his own bow and sent an arrow to cut the man down before he could fire.
It was a good shot. The man made no sound as the arrow struck, but clawed for an instant at the shaft in his side, then dropped, to slide down the face of a low cliff. Musa, followed by his guards, stormed up the slope.
They went through a saddle in the hill, to find themselves confronted by a half dozen men, who swung about, trying to bring their bows to bear on the unexpected targets. Two of these went down as arrows sang through the air, then the traders were upon the rest, swords flailing, too close for archery.
One of the bandits swung his sword wildly at Musa, who had drawn a twin to that blade he had sold back in Karth. The slender shaft of steel rang against the bandit's bronze blade, deflecting it, then Musa made a quick thrust which passed through the man's leather shield, to penetrate flesh. The bronze weapon sagged, and its holder staggered. Musa jerked back violently, disengaged his sword, and made a swift cut. For an instant, the bandit sat his mount, staring at his opponent. Then, he slumped, and rolled loosely from his saddle.
The action had been fast. Only one bandit, a skilled swordsman, remained, to keep Baro busy. Musa rode quickly behind him, thrusting as he passed. Baro looked across the limp body.
"Now, what did you have to do that for?" he demanded. "I was having a good time."
"Let's get down to the trail again," Musa told him. "We can have a wonderful time there." He pointed.
The caravan's rear guard was in trouble. Several of them were in the dust of the trail, and the survivors were being pressed by a number of determined swordsmen.
Baro wheeled and slid down the incline, closely followed by the rest of the group.
The surrounded bandits fought desperately, but hopelessly. The charge from the hill had driven them off balance, and they were never given a chance to recover. At last, Musa and Baro looked over the results of the raid.
They had lost several guards. One trader, Klaron, had been killed by an arrow launched early in the attack. Several of the survivors were wounded.
"We'll have to hire some more guards and drivers in Jogurth," said Baro. "And what are we going to do about Klaron's goods?"
"We can divide them and sell them in Jogurth," Musa told him. "Klaron has a brother back in Karth who can use the money, and money's a lot easier to carry than goods. You'll see him on your return trip."
Baro nodded, and started up the line, reorganizing the caravan. At last, they got under way again, and resumed their slow way toward the plateau.
* * * * *
The caravan went on, to enter the plateau, where the traders started resting by day and traveling by night, to avoid exertion during the day's heat.
They came to the city of Jogurth, which for most of them was a terminal. From there, they would return to Karth, a few possibly going on to their homes still farther west. Musa stayed in town for a few days, trading his few remaining eastern goods for locally produced articles, and helping in the sale of Klaron's goods. At last, he joined another caravan, headed by an old trader, Kerunar, who habitually traveled between Jogurth and Manotro, on the east coast.
The trip across the Soruna Kran was uneventful, and Musa finally saw the glint of the Eastern Sea. He did not stay long in Manotro, for he discovered that the small channel ships traveled frequently, and he was able to guide his pack beasts to the wharf, where his bales were accepted for shipment. Leaving his goods, he led his animals back to the market.
Old Kerunar shook his head when he saw Musa. "Be careful, son," he cautioned. "I've been coming here for twenty years. Used to trade in Norlar, too. But you couldn't get me over there now for ten thousand caldor."
"Oh?" Musa looked at him curiously. "What's wrong?"
Kerunar looked at his newly set up booth. Hung about it were durable goods and trinkets from a dozen cities. There were articles even from far-off Telon, in the Konassan gulf. He looked back at Musa.
"Norlar," he declared, "has fallen into the hands of thieves and murderers. You can trade there, to be sure. You can even make a profit. But you cannot be sure you will not excite the avarice of the Kondarans, or arouse their anger. For they have a multitude of strange laws, which they can invoke against anyone, and which they enforce with confiscation of goods. Death or slavery await any who protest their actions or question their rules." He paused.
"Some manage to trade, and come back with profitable bales. Some leave their goods in the hands of the priests of Kondaro. Some remain, to find a quick death. But I stop here. I prefer to deal with honorable men. When I face the thief or the bandit, I prefer to have a weapon in my hand. A book of strange laws can be worse than any bandit born."
Musa looked about the market. "Here, of course," he acknowledged, "are the goods of the Far East. But I must see them at their source." He shook his head. "No," he decided, "I shall make one trip at least."
"I'll give you just one word of caution, then," he was told. "Whatever you see, make little comment. Whenever you are asked for an offering, make no objection, but give liberally. Keep your eyes open and your opinions to yourself."
"Thanks." Musa grinned. "I'll try to remember."
"Don't just remember. Follow the advice, if you wish to return."
Musa's grin widened. "I'll be back," he promised.
* * * * *
The harbor of Tanagor, chief seaport of Norlar, was full of shipping. Here were the ships which plied the trackless wastes of the Eastern Sea. Huge, red-sailed, broad-beamed, they rode at anchor in the harbor, served by small galleys from the city. Tied up at the wharves, were the smaller, yellow and white-sailed ships which crossed the channel between the mainland and the island empire.
Slowly, Musa's ship drew in toward the wharf, where a shouting gang of porters and stevedores awaited her arrival. Together with other passengers, Musa stood at the rail, watching the activity on the pier.
Four slaves, bearing a crimson curtained litter, came to the wharf and stopped. The curtains opened, and a man stepped out. He was not large, nor did his face or figure differ from the normal. But his elegantly embroidered crimson and gold robes made him a colorfully outstanding figure, even on this colorful waterfront. And the imperious assurance of his bearing made him impossible to ignore.
He adjusted his strangely shaped, flat cap, glanced about the wharf haughtily, and beckoned to one of the slaves, who reached inside the litter and took from it an ornately decorated crimson chest. Another slave joined him, and the two, carrying the chest with every evidence of reverent care, followed their crimson-cloaked master as he strode into a pier office.
Musa turned to one of the other merchants, his eyebrows raised inquiringly.
"A priest of Kondaro," whispered the other. "In this land, they are supreme. Take care never to anger one of them, or to approach too closely to the sacred chest their slaves carry. To do so can mean prompt execution."
As Musa started to thank the man for his friendly warning, a cry of "Line Ho!" caused him to turn his attention to the mooring parties. Lines had been cast aboard at bow and stern, and the ship was rapidly being secured to stout bollards ashore.
A gang of stevedores quickly rigged a gangway amidships, and porters commenced streaming aboard to carry the cargo ashore. Another gangway was rigged aft for the passengers. At the foot of this, stood one of the priest's litter bearers, a slave with a crimson loincloth. In his hands, he held a large, red bowl, which was decorated with intricate gold designs. Beside him, stood his companion, a sturdy, frowning fellow, who held a large, strangely shaped sword in his hand. Musa's previous mentor leaned toward him nodding to the group.
"Don't forget or fail to put a coin in that bowl," he cautioned. "Otherwise, you'll never get passage on one of the sacred ships."
"How much?" queried Musa.
"The more, the better. If you want quick passage across the Great Sea, better make it at least ten caldor."
Musa shrugged, reaching into his purse for a gold coin.
"Maybe I should be in the priesthood myself, instead of the trading business," he told himself silently.
As he passed the bowl, he noted that the other trader dropped only a silver piece. On the wharf, the incoming passengers were being guided into groups. Musa noted that his group was the smallest, and that his previous friend had gone to another, larger group. An official, tablet in hand, approached.
"Your name, Traveler?"
"Musa, trader, of Karth."
"You have goods?"
"I brought twelve bales. They are marked with my name."
"Very good, sir. We will hold them for your disposal. You may claim them at any time after mid-day." The man wrote rapidly on his tablet.
Musa thanked him, then turned to see how his shipboard acquaintance was progressing. He had questions to ask about gold and silver coins.
He watched the older merchant complete his conversation with an official, and, as he started to leave the wharf, quickly caught up with him. At Musa's approach, the other held up a hand.
"I know," he said. "Why did I tell you to make a generous offering, then put a smaller coin in the bowl myself? That is what you want to know?"
"Precisely," Musa replied. "I'm not a poor man, but I'm not a wealthy holiday seeker, either. This voyage has to pay."
The other smiled. "Exactly why I advised you as I did. Come into this wineshop, and I'll tell you the story."
* * * * *
Over the drinks, the older man explained himself. An experienced trader, he had been operating between the mainland and Norlar for many years. It had been a profitable business, for the island had been dependent upon the mainland for many staple items, and had in return furnished many items of exquisite craftsmanship, as well as the produce of its extensive fisheries and pearl beds.
Then, the prophet, Sira Nal, had come with his preachings of a great sea god, Kondaro, ruler of the Eastern Sea. Tonda told of the unbelief that had confronted the prophet, and of the positive proof that Sira Nal had offered, when he had gathered a group of converts, collected enough money to purchase a ship, and made a highly successful voyage to the distant lands to the east. Upon his return, Sira Nal had found a ready market for the strange and wonderful products he had brought. He also had found many more converts for his new religion.
His original group, now a priesthood, were the only men who could give protection and guidance to a ship in a voyage past the sea demons who frequented the Eastern Sea, and they demanded large offerings to compensate for their services. Of course, a few adventurous shipowners had attempted to duplicate Sira Nal's feat without the aid of a priest, but no living man had seen their ships or crews again.
The profits from the rich, new trade, plus the alms of the traders visiting Tanagor, had rapidly filled the coffers of Kondaro. A great temple had been built, and the priests had become more and more powerful, until now, not too many years after the first voyage of Sira Nal, they virtually ruled the island.
For some years, Tonda, a conservative man and a firm believer in his own ancestral gods, had paid little attention to this strange, new religion. Upon arrival at Tanagor, to be sure, he had sometimes placed small offerings in the votive bowl, but more often, he had merely strode past the Slave of Kondaro, and gone upon his affairs.
At last, however, attracted by the great profits in the new, oversea trade, he had decided to arrange for a voyage in one of the great ships. Then, the efficiency of the priestly bookkeeping methods had become apparent. The Great God had become incensed at Tonda's impiety during his many previous trips across the channel, and a curse had been placed upon him and upon his goods. Of course, if Tonda wished to do penance, and to make votive offerings, amounting to about two thousand caldor, it might be that the Great God would relent and allow his passage, but only with new goods. His former possessions had been destroyed by the angry Kondaro in his wrath at Tonda's attempts to place them in one of the sacred ships. Empty-handed, Tonda had returned to the mainland.
"But why did you return with more goods?" inquired Musa.
Tonda smiled. "The wrath of Kondaro extends only to the Great Sea. And, even though I cannot go farther east, trade here in Tanagor is quite profitable." He paused, smiling, as he sipped his drink.
"I think the priests like having a few penitents around to explain things to newcomers, and to furnish examples of the power of Kondaro."
Musa smiled in response. "But my ten caldor make me and my goods acceptable?"
Tonda looked around quickly, then turned a horrified face toward his protégé.
"Never say such things," he cautioned in a low tone of voice. "Don't even think them. Your piety makes you acceptable, so long as you continue in a way pleasing to the great Kondaro. The money means nothing. It is only the spirit of sacrifice that counts."
"I see." Musa's face was solemn. "And how else may I be sure I will remain acceptable?"
Tonda nodded approvingly. "I thought you were a man of good sense and prudence." He launched into a description of the technicalities of the worship of Kondaro, the god of the Eastern Sea.
At length, Musa left his tutor, and repaired to an inn, where he secured lodging for the night.
* * * * *
The following morning, in obedience to the advice given him by Tonda, Musa took his way toward the Temple of the Sea. As he threaded through the crowds already gathering in the streets, he took note of the types of merchandise displayed in the booths, and hawked by the street peddlers. Suddenly, one of these roving sellers approached him. In his hands he held a number of ornaments.
"Good day to you, oh Traveler," he cried. "Surely, it is a fortunate morning for both of us." With a deft gesture, he threw one of the trinkets, a cunningly contrived amulet, about Musa's neck.
Musa would have brushed the man aside, but the chain of the amulet had tangled about his neck and he was forced to pause while removing it.
"I told myself when I saw you," the man continued, "ah, Banasel, here is one who should be favored by the gods. Now, how can such a one venture upon the Eastern Sea without a sacred amulet?"
Musa had slipped the chain over his head. He paused, holding the ornament in his hand. "How, then, are you to know where I am going?"
"Oh, Illustrious Traveler," exclaimed the man, "how can I fail to know these things when it is given to me to vend these amulets of great fortune?"
In spite of himself, Musa was curious. He looked at the amulet. There was no question as to the superb workmanship, and his trading instincts took over.
"Why, this is a fair piece of work," he said. "Possibly I could spare a caldor or so."
The man before him struck his forehead.
"A caldor, he says! Why, the gold alone is worth ten."
Musa looked more closely at the ornament. The man was probably not exaggerating too much. Actually, he knew he could get an easy twenty-five balata for the bauble in Karth. A rapid calculation told him that here was a possible profit from the skies.
"Why, possibly it is worth five, at that," he said. "Look, I'll be generous. Shall we say six?"
"Oh, prince of givers! Thou paragon of generosity! After all, I, too, must live." The man smiled wryly. "However, you are a fine, upstanding young man, and one must make allowance. I had thought to ask twenty, but we'll make it ten. Just the price of the gold."
Musa smiled inwardly. The profit was secured, but maybe--
"Let's make it eight, and I'll give you my blessing with the money."
The man held out his hand. "Nine."
Musa shrugged. "Very well, most expert of vendors." He reached into his purse.
* * * * *
Banasel hesitated before accepting the money. He looked Musa over carefully, then nodded as if satisfied.
"Yes," he said softly, "I was right." He paused, then addressed himself directly to Musa.
"We must be very careful to whom we sell these enchanted amulets," he explained, "for they are talismans of the greatest of powers. The wearer of one of these need never fear the unjust wrath of man, beast, or demon, for he has powerful protectors at his call. Only wear this charm. Never let it out of your possession, and you will have nothing to fear during your voyage. Truly, you will be most favored."
He looked sharply at Musa again, took the money, glanced at it, and dropped it into a pouch.
"Do you really believe in the powers of your ornaments, then?" Musa asked skeptically.
Banasel's eyes widened, and he spread his arms. "To be sure," he said in a devout tone. "How can I believe else, when I have seen their miraculous workings so often?" He held up a hand. "Why, I could spend hours telling you of the powers these little ornaments possess, and of the miracles they have been responsible for. None have ever come to harm while wearing one of these enchanted talismans. None!" He spread his arms again.
Musa looked at him curiously. "I should like to hear your stories some day," he said politely.
He felt uncomfortable, as many people do when confronted by a confessed fanatic. His feelings were divided between surprise, a mild contempt, and an unease, born of wonder and uncertainty.
Obviously, the man was not especially favored. He was dressed like any street peddler. He had the slightly furtive, slightly brazen air of those who must avoid the anger, and sometimes the notice, of more powerful people, and yet, who must ply their trade. But he talked grandly of the immense powers of the baubles he vended, seeming to hold them in a sort of reverence. And, when he had spread his arms, there had been a short-lived hint of suppressed power. Musa shuddered a little.
"But I must go to the temple now, if I am to make arrangements for my voyage," he added apologetically. He turned away, then hurried down the street.
Banasel watched him go, a slight smile growing on his face.
"I don't blame you, Pal," he chuckled softly. "I'd feel the same way myself."
He glanced around noting a narrow alley. Casually, he walked into it, then looked around carefully. No one could observe him. He straightened, dropping the slightly disreputable, hangdog manner, then reached for his body shield controls.
Quickly, he cut out visibility, then actuated the levitator modulation and narrowed out of the alley, rose over the city, and headed toward the rugged mountains that formed the backbone of the island.
* * * * *
Lanko was waiting, and quickly lowered the base shield.
"Well," he asked, "how did it go?"
"I found him." Banasel walked over to the cabinets, and started sorting the goods he had been carrying. "Sold him a miniature communicator. Now, I hope he wears the thing."
"We'll have to keep a close watch on him," commented Lanko, "just in case he puts it in his luggage and forgets about it. Did you give him a good sales talk?"
"Sure. Told him to wear it always. I pawed the air, raved a little, and made him think I was crazy. But I've an idea he'll remember and grab the thing if he sees trouble coming." Banasel put the last ornament in its place, and started unhooking his personal equipment. Then, he turned.
"Look," he commented, "why bother with all this mystic business? We've got mentacoms. Why not just clamp onto him, and keep track of him that way? It'd be a lot simpler. Less chance of a slip, too."
"Yeah, sure it would." Lanko gave his companion a disgusted look. "But have you ever tried that little trick?"
"No. I never had the occasion, but I've seen guardsmen run remote surveillances, and even exert control when necessary. They didn't have any trouble. We could try it, anyway."
Lanko sat up. "We could try it," he admitted, "but I know what would happen. I did try it once, and I found out a lot of things--quick." He looked into space for a moment. "How old are you, Banasel?"
"Why, you know that. I'm forty-one."
Lanko nodded. "So am I," he said. "And our civilization is a few thousand years old. And our species is somewhat older than that. We were in basic Guard training, and later in specialist philosophical training together. It took ten years, remember?"
"Sure. I remember every minute of it."
"Of course you do. It was that kind of training. But how old do you think some of those young guardsmen we worked with were?"
"Why, most of 'em were kids, fresh from school."
"That they were. But how many years--our years--had they spent in their schooling? How old were the civilizations they came from? And how old were their species?"
Lanko eyed him wryly.
Banasel looked thoughtfully across the room. "I never thought of it that way. Why, I suppose some of their forefathers were worrying about space travel before this planet was able to support life. And, come to think of it, I remember one of them making a casual remark about 'just a period ago,' when he was starting citizen training."
"That's what I mean." Lanko nodded emphatically. "'Just a period.' Only ten or twelve normal lifetimes for our kind of people. And his civilization's just as old compared to ours as he is compared to us--older, even.
"During that period he was so casual about, he was learning--practicing with his mind, so that the older citizens of the galaxy could make full contact with him without fear of injuring his mentality. He was learning concepts that he wouldn't dare even suggest to you or to me. Finally, after a few more periods, he'll begin to become mature. Do you think we could pick up all the knowledge and training back of his handling of technical equipment in a mere ten years of training?"
Banasel reached up, taking the small circlet from his head. He held it in his hand, looking at it with increased respect.
"You know," he admitted, "I really hadn't thought of it that way. They taught me to repair these things, among other pieces of equipment, and most of the construction is actually simple. They taught me a few uses for it, and I thought I understood it.
"Of course, I knew we were in contact with an advanced culture, and I knew that most of those guys we treated so casually had something that took a long time in the getting, but I didn't stop to think of the real stretch of time and study involved." He leaned back, replacing the mentacom on his head. "Somehow, they didn't make it apparent."
"Of course they didn't." Lanko spread his hands a little. "One doesn't deliberately give children a feeling of inferiority."
"Yeah. Will we ever learn?"
"Some. Some day. But we've got a long, lonely road to travel first." Lanko stood up and adjusted the communicator.
"Right now, though, we'd better keep tabs on Musa. In fact, we'd better follow him when he leaves here."
* * * * *
The temple of Kondaro, the sea god, had been built at the edge of a cliff, so that it overlooked the Eastern Sea. The huge, white dome furnished a landmark for mariners far out at sea, and dominated the waterfront of Norlar. Atop the dome, a torch provided a beacon to relieve the blackness of moonless nights. This was the home of the crimson priests, and the center of guidance for all who wished to sail eastward.
Musa stood for some time, admiring the temple, then walked between the carefully clipped hedges and up the long line of steps leading to the arched entrance.
Again, he stopped. Overhead, the curved ceiling of the main dome was lower than its outer dimensions would lead one to believe, but Musa hardly noticed that. He gazed about the main rotunda.
It was predominantly blue. The dome was a smooth, blue sky, and the smooth blueness continued down the walls. The white stone steps were terminated at the edges of a mosaic sea, which stretched to the far walls, broken only by a large statue of the sea god. Kondaro stood in the center of his temple, facing the entrance. One arm stretched out, the hand holding a torch, while the other arm cradled one of the great ships favored by the god. Beneath one foot was one of the batlike sea demons, its face mirroring ultimate despair. About the feet lapped conventionally sculptured waves, which melted into the mosaic, to be continued to the walls by the pattern of the tiles. At the far side of the rotunda, the double stairs, which led to bronze doors, were almost inconspicuous, seeming to be a vaguely appearing mirage on the horizon of a limitless sea.
The trader looked at the far side, then down, and hesitated, feeling as though he were about to walk on water. Then, he turned, remembering the pedestal nearby. A crimson bowl rested on this stand, and beside it was a slave in the crimson loincloth which marked the menials of Kondaro.
Musa stepped over to the pedestal, dropped a coin into the bowl, and walked toward the rear of the temple, making proper obeisance to the huge statue. A young priest approached him.
"I crave blessings for a voyage I propose to take," announced the trader.
The priest inclined his head.
"Very well, Traveler, follow me."
He led the way to a small office. An older priest sat at a large table, reading a tablet. Conveniently placed were writing materials, and on the table before him was another votive bowl. Musa dropped a coin into the bowl, and the priest looked up.
"I bring a voyager, O, Wise One," said the young priest.
"It is well," the older priest acknowledged in a deep voice. He turned to Musa. "Your name, Voyager?"
Musa gave his name, his age, the amount of his goods, and an account of his actions since his arrival in Tanagor. At the mention of Tonda, the priest nodded.
"The actions of Tonda have been most exemplary for the past several seasons," he remarked. "He is a good man, but he lacks the proper spirit of sacrifice." He concluded his writing.
"Well, then, Musa, you may go to those who sail ships with the blessing of Kondaro upon you. I shall only caution you as to the observance of the rites and laws for those who sail the Great Sea. Go now, in peace."
As Musa turned, the younger priest spoke. "I will lead you to one who will give you further guidance," he said.
Musa followed him to another small room, where he met still another priest. This man, he discovered, was a shrewd trader in his own right. He was familiar with goods and their values, and in addition to the rites he described, he presented definite advice as to what to take and what to leave behind. Fortunately, Musa discovered as he talked to this priest, he had picked very nearly as good a selection as he could wish.
During the days that followed, Musa made more votive offerings, practiced the rites ordered by the priest, and watched his goods as they were delivered to the Bordeklu, a ship belonging to Maladro, beloved of Kondaro, a shipowner whose ships were permitted by the sea god and his priests to sail the Eastern Sea.
At last, the day arrived when Musa himself boarded the ship and set sail past the headland of Norlar.
* * * * *
As the ship was warped out of the harbor, Musa took stock of his fellow passengers. Among them were a slender, handsome man named Ladro, who had been on many previous voyages to the land of the East, and Min-ta, a native of the eastern continent, who was returning from a trading voyage to Norlar. There were several others, but they kept to themselves, seeming to radiate an aura of exclusiveness. Ladro and Min-ta on the other hand, were more approachable.
Surely, thought Musa, these two can teach me a great deal of the land I am to visit, if they will.
He walked over to the rail, where the two stood, looking out over the shoreline. The ship was coming abreast of the great temple of Kondaro.
"It's the most prominent landmark on the island, isn't it?" Musa commented.
"What?" Ladro turned, looking at him curiously. "Oh, yes," he said, "the temple. Yes, it's the last thing you see as you leave, and the first when you return." He paused, examining Musa. "This is your first trip?"
"Yes, it is. I've always traded ashore before this."
"But you finally decided to visit Kneuros?"
"Yes. I've dealt with a few traders who had goods from there, and their stories interested me."
Ladro smiled. "Romance of the far places?"
"Well, there's that, too," Musa admitted, "but I'm interested in some of the merchandise I've seen."
"There's profit in it," agreed Ladro. "How long have you been trading around Norlar?"
"This is my first trip. I'm from Karth, in the Galankar."
"You mean you were never in Norlar before?" Min-ta joined the conversation.
Musa shook his head. "I left Karth for the purpose of trading east of the Great Sea."
"Unusual," mused Min-ta. "Most traders work between Tanagor and the mainland for several years before they try the Sea."
"Yes," added Ladro, "and some never go out. They satisfy themselves with the channel trade." He pointed. "We're getting out to the open sea now, past the reef."
The ship drew away from the island kingdom, setting its course toward the vague horizon. The day wore on, to be replaced by the extreme blackness of night. Then, the sky lit up again, heralding another day.
The ship's company had settled to sea routine, and the traders roamed about their portion of the deck, talking sometimes, or napping in the sun. Musa leaned over the low rail, watching the water, and admiring the clear, blue swells.
He raised his head as the door of the forward cabins opened. A priest, followed by a group of slaves, went up to the raised forecastle. Under the priest's direction, the slaves busied themselves putting up a high, crimson and yellow curtain across the foredeck. They completed their task and went below.
Again, the door opened, and a procession, headed by the chief priest, slowly mounted the ladder to the forecastle. Each of the three priests was followed by his slave, who bore a crimson casket. The curtain closed behind them, then the slaves came out and ranged themselves across the deck, facing aft.
"I wonder," said Musa, turning to Ladro, "what ritual they are performing."
Ladro shook his head. "The less a man knows of the activities of the priests, the better he fares," he declared. "Truly, on a great ship, curiosity is a deadly vice."
Musa nodded to the stern. "I see that one of the priests is not at the bow."
"That is right. One priest always remains by the steersman, to ward off the spells of the sea demons." Ladro paused, pointing overside. "See," he said in a pleased tone, "here is an envoy from Kondaro."
* * * * *
Musa's gaze followed the pointing finger. A huge fish was cruising alongside, gliding effortlessly through the waves, and occasionally leaping into the air.
"An envoy?"
"Yes. So long as a kontar follows a ship, fair weather and smooth sailing may be expected. They are sent by Kondaro as guardians for those ships he especially favors."
At a call from the priest in the stern, two sailors appeared, carrying chunks of meat. As the priest chanted, they tossed these overside. The great fish rose from the water, catching one of the chunks as it fell, then dropped back, and the water frothed whitely as he retrieved the other. He gulped the meat, then swam contentedly, still pacing the ship.
"Suppose someone fell overboard?" Musa gazed at the kontar in fascination.
Ladro and Min-ta exchanged glances.
"If one is favored by the Great One," replied Min-ta slowly, "it is believed that the kontar would guard him from harm. Otherwise, the sacrifice would be accepted."
Musa looked at the clear water, then glanced back to the spot of foam which drew astern.
"I don't believe I'll try any swimming from the ship." He backed slightly from the rail, glancing quickly at Ladro and Min-ta, then looking away again.
He suddenly realized that he had exceeded his quota of questions, and that he could get into trouble. He had noted that most of the ship's company appeared to know the other traders aboard, even though some of them hadn't been to sea before. Min-ta and Ladro were obviously well acquainted with several of the ship's officers. But he, Musa, was a stranger.
He had already observed that the priesthood of Kondaro was not averse to a quick profit, and that they placed a low value on the lives and possessions of others. He had dealt with tribes ashore, who had the simple, savage ethic:
"He is a stranger? Kill him! Take his goods, and kill him."
Ashore, he had protected himself during his many trips by consorting with other traders of good reputation, and by hiring guards. But here? He remembered the remarks made by Kerunar back in Manotro.
"When I face the thief or the bandit, I prefer to have a weapon in my hand."
Slowly, he collected himself, and looked back at Ladro and Min-ta.
"If you gentlemen will excuse me," he apologized, "I have some accounts to cast, so I believe I'll go to my quarters." He turned and went below.
As he disappeared down the ladder, Ladro turned to his companion.
"Of course," he said thoughtfully, "if all goes well, this man will be most favored. But if the Great One shows signs of displeasure--"
Min-ta nodded. "Yes," he agreed, "I have heard of strangers who excited the wrath of Kondaro." His eyes narrowed speculatively. "Those of the faithful who keep watch on such unfavored beings are rewarded by the priests, I am told."
Ladro nodded. "I believe that is correct," he agreed. "We should be watchful for impiety in any event." He stretched. "Well, I think I shall take a short nap before dinner."
Below, the traders' quarters were cramped. There was a small, common space, with a table, over which hung the single light. About the bulkheads were curtained recesses, sufficiently large for a bunk and with barely enough space for the occupant to stand. Musa closed the curtains, and sat down on his bunk.
Of course, he had no proof. There was no really logical sequence to prove that the situation was dangerous. There was no evidence that his fellow voyagers were other than honorable, well-intentioned men. But he simply didn't feel right. He pulled his wooden chest from under the bunk, opened it, and looked through the small store of personal effects.
There was no weapon. The law of Kondaro forbade the carrying of those by other than the priests and their slaves. His attention was attracted by a glitter, and he picked up the small amulet he had bought from the peddler in Norlar. Slowly, he turned it in his hands.
It was an unusual ornament, strangely wrought. He had never seen such fine, regular detail, even in the best handicraft. As he looked closer, he could not see how it could have been accomplished with any of the instruments he was familiar with, yet it must have been hand made, unless it were actually of supernatural origin.
He remembered the urgent seriousness of the peddler's attitude, and he could recall some of his words. The man had spoken almost convincingly of powerful protectors, and Musa could foresee the need of such. He found himself speaking.
"Oh, power that rests in this amulet," he said, "if there is any truth in the peddler's words, I--" He paused, his usual, hard, common sense taking over.
"I'm being silly!" He drew his hand back to throw the ornament into the chest. Then, he felt himself stopped. An irresistible compulsion seized him, and he dazedly secured the amulet about his neck. Feeling sick and weak, he tucked it into his garments. Then, still moving in a daze, he left the cabin and returned to the deck. He did not so much as try to resist the sudden desire.
The breeze made him feel a little better, but he was still shaken, and his head ached violently. Little snatches of undefined memory tried to creep into his consciousness, but he couldn't quite bring them into focus. He turned toward the rail, and saw Min-ta still there.
"Well," commented the easterner, "your accounts didn't take long."
Musa smiled wanly. "It was stuffy down there. I felt I had to come up for some air."
Min-ta nodded. "It does get close in the quarters during the day." He pointed alongside.
"We are favored still," he said. "Another kontar has joined us."
Two of the great fish paced the ship, gliding and leaping effortlessly from wave to wave. Musa watched them.
"We must be favored indeed."
"Yes." Min-ta smiled. "May our favor last."
Musa's head still ached, and the glints of the sun reflected from the water made it worse. He looked aft, to the faint line where sky met water. There was a low line of clouds. His gaze traveled along the horizon, and he noted that the clouds seemed a little darker forward. Still, he felt uneasy, and alone.
* * * * *
"See what I meant?"
"Ooh! Yeah. Yeah, I see. What a backlash that was! I've got the grandfather of all headaches, and I won't be able to think straight for a week. Wonder how Musa feels--But I got results, anyway."
"Yes. You got results. So did I once, when I tried something similar. But I'll live a long time before I try it again. How about you?"
"Don't worry. Next time I try to exert direct mental control on another entity, this planet'll have space travel. Wonder if some klordon tablets'll help any."
"Might. Try one, then let's get busy and scatter a few more communicators around that ship. Be more practical than beating our brains out."
* * * * *
As the days passed, Musa became familiar with the shipboard routine and lost some of his early uneasiness regarding his traveling companions. He became acquainted with other traders, finding them to be average men, engaged in the same trade as himself. He talked to members of the ship's company, and found them to be normal men, who worked at their trade in a competent manner. Only the four priests held aloof. Ignoring officers, sailors, and traders alike, they spoke only to their slaves, who passed their comments to the ship's company.
On the morning of the tenth day, Musa came to the deck, to find the sea rougher than usual. Waves rose, scattering their white plumes for the wind to scatter. Ahead, dark clouds hid the sky, and occasional spray came aboard, spattering the deck and the passengers.
Just outside the cabin entrance, a small knot of traders were gathered. As Musa came out, they separated.
Musa went over to the rail, looking overside at the waves. The two kontars were not in sight. He looked about, noting the sailors, who hurried about the deck and into the rigging, securing their ship for foul weather. Close by, Ladro and Min-ta were talking.
"It is quite possible," said Ladro, "that someone aboard has broken a law of the great Kondaro, and the kontars have gone to report the sin." He glanced at Musa calculatingly.
"Yes," agreed Min-ta, "we--"
An officer, hurrying along the deck, stopped. "All passengers will have to go below," he said. "We're in for bad weather, and don't want to lose anyone overboard."
"Could this be the wrath of Kondaro?" asked Ladro.
The officer glanced at him questioningly. "It could be, yes. Why?"
Again, Ladro cast a look at Musa, then he caught the seaman by the arm, pulling him aside. The two engaged in a low-toned conversation, directing quick glances at Musa. At last, the officer nodded and went aft, to approach one of the slaves of Kondaro.
Musa started across the deck to the ladder, his heart thudding painfully. Surely, he thought, he had done nothing to offend even the most particular of deities. Yet, the implications of Ladro's glances and his conversation with the ship's officer were too obvious for even the dullest to misinterpret. Musa took a long, shuddering breath.
His fears on that other day had been well grounded, then.
He gazed at the lowering sky, then out at the waves. Where could a lone, friendless man find help in this waste of wind and water?
Slowly, he climbed down the ladder leading to his tiny cubicle.
Once inside, he again started checking over his personal items. There was nothing there to help. Hopelessly, he looked at the collection in the chest, then he got out a scroll of prose and went to the central table to read in an effort to clear his mind of the immediate circumstances.
Minutes later, he went back to his bunk and threw the scroll aside. Possibly, he was just imagining that he was the target of a plot. Possibly there was a real sea god named Kondaro--an omnipotent sea deity, who could tell when persons within his domain were too curious, or harbored impious thoughts, and who was capable of influencing the actions of the faithful.
Possibly, his opinions of the priesthood had been noted and had offended. Or, perhaps, that peculiar little device he had seen a priest studying was capable of warning the god that it had been profaned by an unsanctified gaze. Possibly, this storm was really the result of such a warning. He was sure the priest hadn't seen him, but it could be that the device itself might--
Musa threw himself on his bunk.
* * * * *
A deep voice resonated through the room.
"Musa of Karth," it said, "my master, Dontor, desires your presence on deck."
Musa came to his feet. Two of the slaves of Kondaro stood close by, swords in hand. One beckoned, then turned. Musa followed him into the short passage, and up the ladder. As they gained the deck, the small procession turned aft, to face the senior priest.
Dontor stood on the raised after deck, just in front of the helmsman. The wind tugged at his gold and crimson robe, carrying it away from his body, so that it rippled like a flag, and exposed the bright blue trousers and jacket. Dontor, chief priest of the Bordeklu, stood immobile, his arms folded, his feet braced against the sway of his vessel. As the trio below him stopped, he frowned down at them.
"Musa, of Karth," he intoned, "it has been revealed to me that you have displayed undue curiosity as to the inner mysteries of the worship of the Great God. In your conversations, you have hinted at knowledge forbidden any but the initiated.
"You came to us, a stranger, and we trusted you. But now, we are all faced with the wrath of the Great One as a result of your impieties. A sacrifice, and only a sacrifice, will appease this wrath. Can you name any reason why we should protect you further, at the expense of our own lives? What say you?"
Musa stared up at him. The cotton in his throat had suddenly become thick, and intensely bitter. Unsuccessfully, he tried to swallow, and a mental flash told him that whatever he said, he was already convicted. Regardless of what defense he might offer, he knew he would be condemned to whatever punishment these people decided to deal out to him. And that punishment, he realized, would be death. He straightened proudly.
"Oh, priest," he said thickly, "I am guilty of no crime. You, however, are about to commit a serious crime, which is beyond my power to prevent." He hesitated, then continued. "Be warned, however, that if there are any real gods above or below, you will receive punishment. The gods, unlike men, are just!"
Aware of sudden motion in his direction, he rapidly finished.
"So, make your sacrifice, and then see if you can save your vessel from the natural forces of wind and water."
The priest stiffened angrily.
"Blasphemy," he said. "Blasphemy, of the worst sort." He looked away from Musa. "I believe that in this case, the Great One will require the ship's company to deal with you in their own way, that they may be purged of any contamination due to your presence." He raised his arms.
"Oh, Great Kondaro, Lord of all the seas, and the things within the seas," he began.
Musa evaded the two slaves with a quick weave of his shoulders. Covering the distance to the side of the ship with a few quick steps, he jumped over the rail. As he fell, the wind tore at him, and his windmilling arms and legs failed to find any purchase to right him.
He hit the water with a splash and concussion that nearly knocked the breath from his body, and promptly sank. As the water closed over his head, he struck out with hands and feet in an effort to climb again to light and air. His head broke the surface, and he flailed the water in an effort to keep his nose in air. The ship was drawing away from him, its storm sails set.
As he struggled in the water, he wondered if it was worth while. After all, he had only to allow himself to sink, and all his troubles would be over shortly. Wouldn't it be easier to do this than to continue torturing himself with a hopeless fight?
Too, he wondered if he had been right in leaving the ship, but he quickly dismissed that thought. The sea was impersonal, neither cruel nor kind. It was far better, he thought, to surrender to the forces of nature than to subject himself to the viciousness of angry men.
Suddenly, a constraining force seized him. He instinctively fought to free himself, then realized that he was being drawn upward, out of the water. Possibly, he thought, the Great One wanted to speak to him.
* * * * *
He rose swiftly through the air, passed through complete darkness for an instant, then found himself in a small room. Two men stood facing him, both of them vaguely familiar. As his mind refocused, Musa recognized the peddler of amulets, then the herder to whom he had once sold a sword. They were strangely familiar, but they were in strange costumes. He stared at them.
"Well, Musa," said the herder. "I see you got into trouble."
Musa blinked. "Who are you?" he demanded. "How do you know of my affairs?"
The peddler of amulets grinned. "Why, we are old companions, Musa," he said. "Of course, you have forgotten us, but we never forgot you." He pointed.
"This is Resident Guardsman Lanko. I am Banasel, also of the Stellar Guard. Our job is to prevent just such situations as the one you just found yourself in." His grin faded. "That, and a few other things."
Musa frowned. "Stellar Guard? What is that?"
Lanko studied him for a moment, then crossed the small room. "You knew once," he tossed over his shoulder, "but you rejected the knowledge, and it had to be taken from you. Since you'll be working with us for a while, I think we will have to restore your memories. Perhaps you'll want to retain them." He removed equipment from a cabinet.
"Some of this will have to be secondhand, since neither Banasel nor myself have been in the spots shown. But some of it is firsthand."
His hand flicked a switch.
A power unit hummed, and Musa found himself recalling a campsite near the now destroyed and rebuilt city of Atakar. As the imposed mental blocks fell away, he remembered who Banasel and Lanko were. And he realized why he had been drawn to them in the recent past.
Memories of his days of slavery in Atakar flashed before his mind, and he remembered the part these two had taken in his escape. He recalled the days of banditry, and the strange visitors, who had brought with them disturbing knowledge, and strange powers.
He saw the destruction of Atakar, and the capture of the galactic criminals who had depraved that city. He shared the experiences of his two companions during their introduction to the advanced culture of the Galactic Federation, and he saw snatches of their training at Aldebaran Base. He went with them on some of their missions.
The humming stopped, and he looked up at the two.
"So," Lanko told him, "now you know."
Musa nodded. "I turned something down, didn't I?"
* * * * *
As Musa disappeared over the vessel's side, the priest, Dontor, lowered his arms. Quickly turning the unscheduled event to advantage, he cried, "We need worry no further, my children. The Great One has called this blasphemer to final account."
He turned to one of his juniors, lowering his voice.
"Go below, Alnar, and break out this man's goods. We must reward those who informed us."
The junior bowed. "Yes, sir." He hesitated. "Will this storm blow over soon?" he queried.
Dontor smiled. "You should have paid more attention to your course in practical seamanship," he chided. "We are sailing fairly close hauled, so our speed is added to that of the wind. And, since storms move, it'll pass us shortly." He pointed to the horizon.
"See that small break in the clouds? That indicates a possibility of clear weather beyond. We should be through the worst of the storm in a matter of a few hours. And we'll never reach the really dangerous core of the storm, for we are passing through an edge of it. Our only problem is to keep from losing a mast during the time we are close to the storm's heart." He paused, looking aloft.
"The crew is competent. They have the sails properly reefed, and, if necessary, they can furl them in short order. What trouble can we have?"
"Thank you, sir." The younger priest bowed again. "I will make the necessary arrangements for those goods."
Dontor stood for a moment, surveying the ship, then walked toward the helm.
"If I am ever in charge of operations," he told himself, "I will replace some of these sailors by neophyte priests, and let them steer by their own compasses. This method is too cumbersome. Besides, the neophytes should get to sea earlier, anyway."
He approached the pilot priest, who stood apart from the helmsman, his slave holding the little red box with the compass.
"How is our course?"
The priest turned, then bowed. "We are off course twelve degrees to the north, sir," he reported. "I have instructed the helmsman to come as close to the wind as possible."
Dontor nodded. "Very good," he approved. "Keep track of your time, and we'll correct when we get a chance to shift course to the south. We can determine whatever final correction is necessary at noon sight tomorrow."
Alnar came up the ladder to the quarterdeck. Approaching Dontor, he bowed in salute, then reported.
"The goods are ready, sir."
"Very well. Find those two traders and give them the usual ten per cent, then bring me an inventory of the remainder."
* * * * *
Musa stood, fists clenched, facing the recorder play-back. "The usual ten per cent, he says! Why, I'd like to slaughter the lot of those murdering thieves!"
Lanko snapped off the switch. "Don't blame them too much," he laughed. "After all, they're only trying to make a living, and it's the only trade they know."
As Musa nearly choked on his attempted reply, Banasel broke in.
"Sure," he chuckled. "Besides, it's guys like them that keep guys like us in business."
Lanko noticed the horrified expression on Musa's face, and quickly composed himself. He put his hand on the man's shoulder.
"Look," he explained seriously, "if we got so we took people like these to heart, we'd spend half our time getting psyched to unsnarl our own mental processes." He gestured to the reels of tape in a cabinet.
"Here, we have the records of hundreds of cases like this one. Some are worse, some are not so bad. Every one of them had to be--and was--cracked by members of our Corps. This is just another of those minor, routine incidents that keep cropping up all over the galaxy. It's our problem now, and we'll get to work on it." He turned.
"Where do you want to start, Banasel?"
"Well--competition's the life of trade."
"That comes later." Lanko shook his head. "There's an alien or so to be taken care of first, you know."
"I know. It's fairly obvious."
"So, we've got to find him--or them."
Musa had regained his self-control. "What about these birds in hand?"
Banasel shrugged. "Small fry. We'll take care of them later." He walked over to the workbench, picking up Lanko's sword.
"I wondered about this before," he said. "Now, I'm sure about it. It simply doesn't match a normal technology for this period."
Musa looked at him curiously. "But there are a lot of those around Norlar," he said. "They're a rarity in the Galankar, to be sure, but--"
"That's what we mean," Lanko told him. "Too many anachronisms. First, we have this sword. Then, we meet these priests of Kondaro, who discuss meteorology, navigation, and pilotage with considerable understanding. We've had communicators planted on that ship for several days now, and I still can't see how the technology was developed that allowed the manufacture of some of their instruments. We should have noticed something wrong a long time ago.
"The priests use sextants, watches, compasses. And, just to make it worse, we have one video recording of a priest laying out a course on an accurate chart. He was using a protractor, which was divided into Galactic degrees. That was the clincher. Somebody's out of place, and we've got to find him--or them."
He took the sword from Banasel. "I think we'd better go on to the eastern continent, see what we can find, then we can deal with our friends. But first, Ban, you'd better run out a call for one of the Sector Guardsmen to back us up if necessary. We could run into something too hot for us to handle."
Banasel nodded and turned to the communicator. Lanko dropped into the pilot seat, glanced at the screens, and moved controls. In the viewscreen, the sea tilted, drew farther away, then became a level, featureless blue expanse.
* * * * *
"Well, here's your eastern continent. In fact, this is the city of Kneuros. It's where you wanted to go, isn't it?"
Musa looked at Banasel thoughtfully.
"Yes," he admitted. "It's where I thought I wanted to go, but now I really know what I wanted in the first place."
"Oh?"
"Certainly. I was restless. I thought I liked being a trader in Karth, and I was a fairly good trader, too. But I was just getting things at secondhand. I turned down just what I really wanted, because it scared me. That was a long time ago." He looked at the control panel. He'd understood such panels once, some years ago.
"How do you plan to find your aliens--if there are any?"
"Search pattern." Lanko shrugged. "We'll cruise around in a grid pattern until we pick up some sort of reading, or until we spot something abnormal." He pointed at a series of instruments.
"They're bound to have a ship somewhere, and we'll pick up a small amount of power radiation from their screens. If their ship were orbiting in space, we'd have picked it up long ago, so we must assume it's grounded. I think we'd better go right into a pattern. We can use Kneuros as origin." He stared at the plotting instruments.
"Let's see. If I wanted to hide a ship, I'd use the most inaccessible location I could find. We do that ourselves, in fact. And there are some mountainous regions inland." He set up course and speed.
"Yeah," Banasel added, "and I'd worry a lot more about ground approach than air accessibility, at least on this planet."
The ship gained altitude, accelerated, and sped eastward.
Day by day, the course trace built up, the cameras recorded the terrain under the ship, and the two guardsmen built up their mosaic. The ship crossed and re-crossed the continent, mapping as it went.
From time to time, Lanko made careful comparison of the new mosaic with an earlier survey, noting differences. There were new settlements. Where members of a nomadic culture had roamed the prairie, an industrial civilization was rapidly growing.
Lanko tapped on the map. "Two cultures," he observed. "Two cultures, separated by mountains and desert. Absolutely no evidence of contact, but considerable similarity between them. This pattern begins to look familiar."
He picked a tape from the shelves, ran it through a viewer, then reversed it, and picked out various portions for recheck. Finally, he made a superposition of some of their observation tape, examined it, and turned. Banasel held up a hand.
"Don't tell us," he growled. "I studied about drones, too."
"Drones?" Musa looked at him, then glanced back at the viewer.
"Yes. Characters from one of the advanced cultures, who feel frustrated, and fail to fit in. They often turn into pleasure seekers, and frequently end up by monkeying with primitive cultures, to prove their ability to themselves, at least."
"Things like this happen often?"
"Oh, not too often, I suppose, but often enough so that people like us are stationed on every known primitive planet, to prevent activity of the type. You see, the drones usually start out simply, by setting up minor interference in business or government on some primitive planet. Usually, they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous as any other criminal."
Lanko grinned a little. "Only difference is, they're usually easier to combat than organized criminal groups with a real purpose. Generally, they're irresponsible youngsters who don't have the weapons, organization, or ability that the real criminals come up with." He shrugged.
"Of course," he added, "we've called for help just in case. But we'll probably be able to take care of this situation by ourselves. In fact, unless there are unusual features, we'd better, if we don't want to be regarded as somewhat ineffectual." He paused, glanced toward the detector set, and tapped on the map again, then slowly traced out an area.
"We should be picking up something pretty soon," he said, thoughtfully. "Better set up a pattern around here, in the mountain ranges, Banasel. We can worry about settled areas later."
* * * * *
A needle flickered, rose from zero, then steadied.
Somewhere, back of the instrument panel, a tiny current actuated a micro relay, and an alarm drop fell.
As the warning buzz sounded, both Lanko and Banasel looked over at the detector panel.
"Well, it's about time." Lanko leaned to his right, setting switches. A screen lit up, showing a faint, red dot. He touched the controls, bringing the dot to center screen, then checked the meters.
"Not too far," he remarked. "A little out of normal range, though. He must have all his screen power on."
Banasel turned back to the workbench, studied the labels on the drawers for a moment, then opened one.
"Guess we'll need a can opener?"
"We might. If he's aboard, we may have to get a little rough." Lanko leaned back.
"Check the power pattern. Sort of like to know what we're running into before we commit ourselves." He glanced again at the indicators, then poked at switches.
"In fact, I think we'd better wait right here, till we get this boy identified."
Banasel was whistling tunelessly as he set up readings on a computer. Finally, he poked the activator bar, and watched as the machine spat out tape. Above the tape chute, a series of graphs indicated the computations, but Banasel ignored them, feeding the tape into another machine.
"I suppose there are some characters who could make a positive identification from the figures and curves. But I'm just a beginner. That's why they furnish integrator directories, I guess."
Lanko smiled. "I don't know anything, either," he agreed. "But I generally know where I can look up what I need." He set a compact reel of tape into the computer.
They watched the directory as its screens glowed. Figures and descriptions shimmered, and there was a rapid ticking. A sheet flowed out toward them, and Banasel tore it off as the ticks ceased.
"Type seventeen screens," he read. "Probably Ietorian model Nan fifty-seven generators. Strictly a sportster setup. He's got electromagnetics and physical contact screens, but there's nothing else. And, with the type of readings I've got here, I'd say he's running all the power he's got. Do we go in?"
"Sure we do." Lanko nodded confidently as he slapped the drive lever.
"This thing we've got's only an atmosphere flier, but it's made to take care of tougher stuff than luxury sportsters. Set up your can opener, just in case our boy wants to argue with us."
Banasel nodded silently.
The small sportster was parked between two peaks. Before it was a tiny level space, too small for any ship. Above it, towered bare rock, tipped with eternal snow. Lanko examined the scene disgustedly.
"Inhospitable, isn't he?" he grunted. "He could at least have had enough front yard for a visitor to land." He picked up a microphone, touched a stud, and turned a knob. A faint hiss sounded from the speaker before him.
"Philcor resident calling sportster," he snapped. "Come in, Over."
The hiss continued. Lanko punched another stud, and listened. The hiss remained unchanged.
"Open him up, Banasel," he finally ordered. "I'm going in."
He rose from his chair, crossing to the exit port. For an instant, he stood, checking his equipment belt. Then, he reached to a cabinet, to pick up a tool kit. He opened the box, examined its contents, then turned and nodded to Banasel.
The port opened wide, and he stepped through.
He dropped lightly to the space before the sportster, then stepped away, crouching behind a rock out-crop, and turned his body shield to full power.
"Screens down," he ordered.
* * * * *
A faint haze grew about the sportster. At first, it was a barely perceptible fluorescence. Then, it became a fiercely incandescent glow. It flamed for a few seconds, then faded, becoming green, yellow, red, and at last, blinking to invisibility.
"They're damped," Banasel's voice announced. "Shall I give him some more and knock out the generators?"
"Not necessary," Lanko told him. "Just hold complete neutralization. I'll cut them from inside."
He rose from his position behind the rock, idly kicking at the face of it as he walked past. A shower of dust crumbled to the ground.
"Good thing there aren't any trees around here," he laughed. "We'd have to put out a forest fire."
He pulled his hand weapon from his belt, made a careful adjustment, then walked over to the ship. After a quick examination, he directed the weapon toward a spot in the hull.
"Lot of credits here," he commented laconically. "Shame to hurt the finish too much."
A few minutes later, he stepped back, examining his work. Then, he nodded and removed another instrument from his tool kit. He focused it on the ship's port, flicked a switch on his belt, then snapped the instrument on.
For a few seconds, nothing happened, then there was a grinding screech of tortured metal, and the port swung open.
As Lanko stepped inside, he examined the control room with care. At last, satisfied that no booby traps were set, he crossed to the control panel. He located the communicator controls, and picked up the microphone.
"All's well, Ban," he reported. "Ease off."
He watched as the overloaded generator recovered. When the needles were at normal readings, he flicked the screen controls off, then picked up the microphone again.
"Haul out, Banasel," he ordered. "I'm going to fix this can up again, close the port, run up the screens, and wait for our boy to come home. Like to talk to him."
* * * * *
The sportster had a well stocked galley. Lanko ate with enjoyment, studying the tapes he had found interestedly. Finally, he pushed the last reel aside, then sat back to gaze at the wall.
A low tone sounded, and the viewscreen activated. Lanko nodded to himself, then went to the control room aperture, turning off the alarm as he went through. A few strides took him to the entry port, where he waited, weapon in hand.
The door swung open and Lanko touched his trigger. The newcomer's screen flared briefly, then collapsed. Lanko stepped forward, examining his prisoner.
He was humanoid. There were some differences from the usual type encountered on the planet, but they were not serious. He could have passed in most of the Galankar, if not anywhere. Some might even be attracted by his slightly unusual appearance. Lanko drew him into the ship, and closed the port.
He took his time, making a complete search of the captive's clothing, and removing equipment and weapons. At last, he drew back, satisfied that the being was harmless. He waited. It wouldn't be too long before the business could begin.
As the paralysis effect wore off, the man on the floor flexed his muscles, then got to his feet. Lanko watched him, his weapon resting on his knees. As the man tensed to spring, Lanko raised the weapon a little.
"You are Genro Kir?"
"Who are you? What's the idea?" Kir reached for his belt, then dropped his hand again as he found nothing there.
"Resident Guardsman. Name's Lanko. You seem to be a little out of place on this planet."
"I'm not responsible to some native patrolman." Kir's face became stubborn. "I'm a Galactic Citizen."
"Possibly. We'll leave that to the Sector authorities." Lanko shrugged, his face expressionless. "Meantime, you'll have to accept things as they are. Or would you rather be paralyzed again?"
Genro Kir tensed again, making an obvious mental effort.
Lanko grinned at him in real amusement. "I took it. Wouldn't do you much good anyway. They gave me heavy-duty equipment, you know." He waved toward a chair with his weapon. "Might as well sit down and talk about it. I've been through your tapes, of course."
Kir looked around unhappily, then sank into a chair. "What's there to talk about, then? You know what we were doing."
"In general, yes, we do. A good deal was on your tapes. But we need more detail, and we've got to pick up your companions, you know. It would be a lot better if we knew where they were."
"I don't know where they are myself. They're building up their forces, and working for position. This is just the opening, you see. The real game won't start for quite a while."
Lanko laughed shortly. "Frankly, I don't think it will start. But it would make it simpler for all concerned if you'd help us find the players."
"I told you. I don't know where they are. They don't have to tell the referee every move they make, unless they want a consultation as to legality. I was just keeping watch on the general picture, to see that neither of them broke a rule, or took an unfair advantage."
"You may not know where they are," Lanko admitted, "but you can certainly contact them."
Genro Kir smiled tightly. "But I won't."
"They'll be hunted down, you know. We'll have them eventually. Be a lot easier for all concerned if you'd coöperate."
"Coöperate with a bunch of half savage natives, against my own friends? Don't be more stupid than you have to be!"
"I see." Lanko glanced away. "All very ethical, of course. Well, in that case, we'll have to go to work." He pulled a fine chain from a case at his belt, and walked over to his captive, weapon ready.
"Just hold still," he ordered. He slipped the delicate looking necklace over the man's head, squeezed the pendant, and jumped back.
"I don't know whether you're familiar with this device," he said, "so I'll explain it to you. It's a type ninety-two gravitic manacle, and is designed to hold any known being. You can move about freely, so long as you don't make any sudden or violent motion. The device is keyed to my shield, and you'll suffer temporary paralysis if you get within my near zone. You're safe enough a couple of meters from me." He walked back to the control console.
"Oh, yes," he added, "don't try to take it off. It's designed to prevent that action by positive means. It won't do you any permanent damage, but it can make you pretty uncomfortable. And, remember, if it becomes necessary, I can activate the manacle. It'll put you into full paralysis and send out a strong homing signal."
Genro Kir looked at him sourly. "I won't try to escape," he promised.
"That's immaterial to me." Lanko flicked switches and the ship rose from the ground, swung, and started westward. "I was merely describing the capabilities of the manacle."
* * * * *
On the way over the sea, Lanko noted the positions of a few of the trading ships, and approached them closely, examining them. As he approached a small archipelago, his communicator screen brightened.
"Resident Guardsman to Sportster. Identity yourself. Over."
Lanko picked up the microphone. "It's all right, Ban. Got one. Two more to go."
"Fair enough. Come on in. I've got a beam on you."
Lanko checked the approach scope. The small circle was a trifle out of center. He touched the control bar, and as the circle centered, he snapped a switch and sat back.
The sportster dipped over an island, crossed a narrow lagoon, and settled to the ground beside the guard flier. Lanko started pulling tools from his kit. Working carefully, he removed the cover from the control console, examined the terminal blocks, then attached a small cylinder between two terminals.
He closed the console again and walked over to the exit port, where he pressed the emergency release. The port swung wide. For an instant, the control console was blurred. Lanko waited, then as the panel returned to focus, he walked back to it. He snapped the drive switch on and pushed the drive to maximum. Nothing happened. He punched the emergency power button, and waited an instant. There was no result. He nodded to his prisoner.
"Come on, Genro Kir. We may want you to talk to someone." He pointed to the port. Kir hesitated, then went through. He managed a sneer as he did so.
The port of the flier opened, and Banasel looked out. "Need any help?"
"No. This spaceship won't fly till someone from Sector comes out to pull the block." Lanko pointed. "This is Genro Kir. He was refereeing a sort of battle game between a couple of his companions."
Lanko herded Kir in front of him, and entered his own flier. He placed the equipment kit on a shelf, and sat down. Banasel perched on his workbench.
"What kind of a setup did these jokers have?"
"Well, you can review the tapes later and get a few of the details, but here's the general idea:
"Genro Kir and his two companions made planetfall some years back. They didn't know it was a discovered planet, and failed to note any evidence of our presence. Somehow, we missed them, too, for which we should hang our heads.
"Anyway, they checked the planet, found it was suitable to their purpose, and decided that Koree Buron and Sira Nal could use it as a playing board. Seems they had a bet on, and their last game was inconclusive. Both of the involved civilizations collapsed.
"Each of them selected a portion of the habitable part of the eastern continent as a primary base. Buron took the east, and that left the west to Nal. It so happens that the central portion of the continent is difficult to pass, and that fitted in with their plans. You remember the desert and mountain ranges, of course? Well, so far as I can discover, there was virtually no contact before the arrival of these three prizes of ours. And after their arrival, they made sure that there would be no contact--not until they wanted it.
"Of course, deserts can be crossed, and mountains can be climbed, but our three boys fixed it so it would be fatal for any native to try it. Then, each of the two contestants set to work to build up the war potential of his part of the continent.
"In the meantime, Genro was acting as referee. He's been checking the progress of the two contestants, and making sure that neither of them sneaks into the territory of the other to upset something, or commits any other breach of rules."
Banasel slid off his bench. "Atmosphere of mutual trust, I see."
"Precisely."
"Where do the Kondaran priests come in?"
"Oh, those two aren't going to confine the final stage of their game to the one continent. That's just the starting point--the home base. And what they're doing now is just the opening of the game. The end game will decide control of the entire planet. Sira Nal's just getting off to an early start, that's all."
"This is legitimate, according to their rules?"
"I guess so. According to Kir's tapes, he thinks it's a clever maneuver. 'Sound move' is the way he expressed it." Lanko stood and walked over to the reproducer set. "That all came from the tapes, of course."
"How much more has Kir told you?"
"As little as possible."
* * * * *
Banasel looked toward the prisoner. "Why not coöperate? You're due for Aldebaran anyway. And a little help now would make it easier for you and your partners later."
Genro Kir's lip curled. "As I told your friend, I don't have to lower myself to work with a bunch of low-grade primitives."
"See what I mean?" Lanko slanted an eyebrow at Banasel. "But I think our friend here will help us some, anyway. That 'sound move' he recorded is almost sure to catch us one of the players."
"Oh?"
"Sure. What's the whole foundation of this cult of Kondaro?"
"Why, they navigate ships. They keep strict security on their methods. They enforce that security by terrorism. They claim that no one else can successfully cross the Great Sea, and it seems to be a proven fact that they're right. So, they collect from seamen, traders, and shipowners."
"That's right. And they claim that only they can overcome the spells and actions of the sea demons, which try to destroy any ship that sails the sea. First, though, they navigate ships. They guarantee to get 'em across the sea and back. Right?"
Banasel nodded.
"Suppose they start losing ships? Suppose that from now on, no ship returns to port?" Lanko walked over to the control console.
"Hey, wait a minute. I know these priests are a bunch of pirates--or some of them are, at any rate. But we can't--"
"Who said anything about destroying life?" Lanko spread his hands. "We have here a fairly nice group of islands," he pointed out. "Not too spacious, of course, and not possessed of any luxurious cities. But there's water, and fresh fruits are available in plenty. The ships are provisioned fairly well, but they generally put in here for those very fruits. So, all we need do is give a little unwanted help."
"Shipwreck?"
"Something like that."
Banasel shook his head doubtfully. "It'll take a long time to undermine their reputation that way," he objected. "And we'd have a lot of people on these islands before we were through."
"I don't think so. Kondaro's a god, remember? And gods are infallible. Sira Nal can explain a few disappearances by accusations of irreverence, but he'll know better than to try explaining too many that way. I should imagine that the normal losses due to unexpected storms just about use up his allotment along that line."
Lanko shook his head. "No, Sira Nal's going to have to do something to prevent any rumor to the effect that the sea god is losing his grip." He paused. "And what ship do you think I spotted standing this way?"
"Oh, no! That's too much of a coincidence."
"No, not really. We took considerable time gathering in our boy here." Lanko inclined his head toward Genro Kir. "And the Bordeklu's home port is Tanagor, so Musa's old ship wouldn't spend too much of a layover in Kneuros. They're on schedule all right. You'd like to see your old friend, Dontor, again, wouldn't you, Musa? Sort of watch him try to save his ship in a real emergency?"
Musa grinned wolfishly. "Might be fun, at that," he agreed.
* * * * *
Dontor strode firmly toward the ladder leading to the observation deck. The slaves had rigged the screen, and the priest looked proudly about this ship of which he was the actual and absolute master. Slowly, in majestic silence, he mounted the ladder and passed through the opening in the curtain.
He went to the middle of the forecastle, and stopped, waiting until the two junior priests had taken their positions near him and the slaves had set down the equipment chests. The slaves straightened, and stood, arms folded, waiting. Dontor inspected the area, then moved his head imperiously.
"Very good," he said. "Take your posts."
As the slaves left, the three priests opened their instrument chests, removing navigational tools. Alnar went to the folding table, spread the chart over it, then took his watch out of the chest and stood back, holding it.
"Just about time, sir."
"Very well." Dontor glanced at the juniors, saw that Kuero had his sextant ready, and raised his own.
"Now," he instructed, when the readings were complete, "you will each calculate our position independently. I'll check your work when you have finished." He replaced his sextant in its case, then headed the small procession back to the cabins.
The ship's routine continued its uneventful course. The junior priests reported to Dontor with their calculations. Their work was examined, criticized, and finally approved. They were given further instructions. All was well aboard the Bordeklu.
The chief priest examined the charts and decided on the course for the next watch. The ship, he thought, would have to put in for water. And some of the island fruits would go well on the table. He set a course accordingly, and went topside to give instructions to the pilot.
* * * * *
"Are you going to help them on their way?"
"It's not necessary, unless they start to by-pass the island. They'll have plenty to worry about when they try to anchor."
* * * * *
Ahead of the ship, the sea was calm. No cloud marred the bright blue overhead. Slowly, a vague shape formed on the horizon, then it grew, to become a small, wooded island.
The ship continued on its course, approaching the bit of land, and neared the breaker line. Orders sounded sharply, and the sails collapsed, spilling their wind. A crew forward cut the snubbing line, and the bow anchor splashed into the water.
The ship continued, and the anchor cable became taut. In defiance of the helmsman's efforts, the ship continued on a straight course. The bow line stretched, then loosened a little, as the anchor dragged. Still, the ship refused to swing. Hurriedly, the crew aft dropped the stern anchor. But the ship persisted on its course. All hands forward took shelter as the bow cable snapped and whipped viciously across the deck. The ship maintained its slow progress.
Frantically, the crew backed the sails, hoisting them to take all the wind possible. The helmsman spun the wheel in a final effort to turn the ship back to sea, then cast a glance astern at the taut cable, and ducked for shelter.
Sea anchors were hastily thrown overside, but still the ship approached the beach. The keel grated on sand, and the ship continued to move forward, as though, tired of the sea, it had decided to return to the forest. At last, wedged among the trees, the vessel stopped, far above the sands of the beach.
It was obviously there to stay.
Dontor stood, looking seaward. He shook his head, looked forward, then down at the ground beneath the ship. This was outside his experience. It was also outside the teaching so carefully instilled in his mind in the classrooms back at Tanagor, and later during those long days and nights when he was a junior priest. He had been taught to speak of sea demons, and to explain their actions, but he had not been told to believe in them.
He wondered if the great Kondaro really existed, and if he did, just what he might think of Dontor and of the ship he had so recently controlled. The thought crossed his mind that a real god might be somewhat critical of the priesthood of the sea.
"Something," he mused aloud, "will have to be done to prevent loss of faith."
* * * * *
"Well," remarked Lanko as he snapped the tractor off. "That's the first handful of sand for the cook pot."
* * * * *
Sira Nal drummed impatiently on the table before him.
"I thought you could handle routine operations," he said bitingly. "Now, you tell me you've been missing ship after ship. What happened to them?"
The high priest shook his head. "We haven't been able to find out, sir."
"Do you mean to tell me you haven't anything to report on them?"
"We have sent out investigating ships, sir."
"And?"
"They haven't reported back, sir."
Sira Nal's checks paled slightly with rage as he stared at his underling.
"Miron," he snapped, "I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do, or how. You're supposed to know how to treat emergencies, not to call me any time something outside of routine happens. I want a report on those ships tomorrow morning." He glanced out of the window. "I don't care how you do it, but find out what happened, and I don't ever want to hear you admit again that you can't account for any ship I ask about. Is that clear?"
Miron nodded unhappily. "Yes, sir." He bowed and backed out of the room.
He forced himself to suppress his anger as he gently closed the door. Then, he stood for a moment, fists clenched, as he directed a furious gaze at the panels.
"How?" he thought. "How does he expect me to know what's going on at sea unless ships come in to give me information, or I am able to go out personally. And how does he expect me to make a personal check in one night?"
He started walking along the corridor. "I have no supernatural powers, and he knows it. He's the prophet. Wish I'd never--"
He looked at the walls around him, then shook his head. No use thinking of that. None had ever successfully left the service of Kondaro. He continued to a stair, mounted it, then climbed ladders, to finally come out at the observation platform atop the temple. The observer bowed as his superior entered the little room just below the torch.
"Have there been any arrivals?"
"None, sir. I've seen no sails."
"I am going to send you an acolyte. If you see anything, send him to me immediately." Miron turned to go back to his quarters.
* * * * *
After Miron's departure, Sira Nal sat for a time, still staring at the closed door. He had caught the wave of frustrated rage, and had almost responded for a second. But, he was forced to admit, the priest had justification. He had organized his forces adequately--had been a useful piece, within his limitations.
"I wonder," mused Sira Nal, "if Buron's pulling a sneak punch." He tilted his head. "It would be a little foul, but he might try something like that." He reviewed the rules they had agreed upon.
After all, this phase of his operation was outside of the home zone, and he was actually vulnerable to attack, even this early. He had assumed that Buron would be too busy developing his own pieces to spend any time on an offensive move at this stage. Of course, direct intervention was a little unethical, but Buron might try it.
He had thought his opponent would be too occupied to notice a move at this remote part of the board. And he had established this advance base by direct intervention, too. If Buron had noticed, and if he had checked Nal's methods, he might have felt justified, and have taken time for a quick, disruptive move. And Sira Nal was forced to admit that such a move might be allowed by Kir. It might be even approved, and hailed as a brilliant counter.
He rose to his feet, pacing about the room. If this were a move by Buron, the priesthood would be powerless to counter. It would take direct action by the player, of course. He grumbled to himself.
"Can't let this development be wasted. I'd lose too much time. I'll have to check personally."
He crossed to the window, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony.
Outside, the sun glinted on the harbor. A ship was standing out to sea, sails set to pick up the breeze from the headland. Sira Nal looked over toward the shipyards. It was a well organized secondary base, and it would probably develop into a highly valuable position. Somehow, he doubted that Buron would have been able to do as well, considering the time factor. He shook his head. This must be retained.
He threw the robe back, checked his equipment belt, adjusted his body shield, and stepped off the balcony, activating his levitation modulator. He swung around the outgoing ship, noting the activity aboard with approval, then headed seaward, to follow the route he had prescribed for his navigators. Somewhere out there, he would undoubtedly find Buron, poised to strike at any ship which bore the red and gold of Kondaro.
And when he did find him, he knew, he would have to outline a counter move which would force immunity to his sea lanes. He considered the possibilities as he sped over the sea.
* * * * *
Musa sat before the detector, idly watching the vague patterns that grew and collapsed on the viewscreen. The scanner, Lanko had explained, picked up ghost images from heated air masses, or from clouds, but it discriminated against them, refusing to form a definite image unless a material body came within range. Then, it indicated range and azimuth, checked the body against the predetermined data, and the selective magnification circuits cut in.
As Musa watched, a sea bird appeared on the screen, outlined sharply against the darkness of the sea. The viewscreen tracked it for an instant, then continued its scan. Another body showed, seeming to come from under the sea. Musa looked at it curiously, then noticed that the range marks had tripped on. The screen was holding the object at center. A slight glow appeared, obscuring visual detail, and more marks showed in the legend. Musa turned around.
"Banasel," he called, "what's this?"
Banasel was engaged in his usual pastime of tinkering with the equipment. He looked around, then walked quickly over to the screen, to make adjustments. The object came into sharp focus, revealing itself as a man in the robes of Kondaro. Range and azimuth lines became clearly defined, and a graph showed in the legend space. Banasel glanced down at the dials.
"Hey, Lanko," he called, "we've got a customer."
"Where?" Lanko came out of the mess compartment.
"About seventy-one, true, and coming in fast. Range, about a hundred K's." Banasel twisted dials, watching the result on the screen. "Looks as though our friend's coming in for a conference."
"Screens?"
"Personal body shield. Probably a Morei twelve. Nothing special."
Lanko got into the gunner's chair and punched a button. The sight screen lit, showing the approaching body clearly. He turned a knob, increasing magnification.
"All dressed up in his ceremonial robes, too," he laughed. "This kid could have done well as a clothing designer."
He adjusted a few knobs, examining a meter. Then, he reached for the weapon's grip.
"No point in discussing matters with him now. He can talk after we get him in, and he's just about in range now." He brought the hair-lines on the viewscreen to center on the approaching figure, and squeezed the grip.
* * * * *
Sira Nal felt the sudden pressure. Annoyed, he reached to his belt, to turn his shield to full power. This was highly unethical. Buron should certainly know better than to resort to personal attack. Such action could be protested, and Sira Nal could demand concessions.
He looked ahead, searchingly. The horizon ahead was broken by a faint cloud, which indicated the islands, but there was no evidence of his opponent. He shook his head, and started to rise, but his shield was failing. Suddenly, he became aware of the overheating generator pack. Something was decidedly wrong. He reached for his own hand weapon, still searching for his attacker. At last, he noticed a slight shimmer, dead ahead. He pointed the weapon.
"Now, now," cautioned a voice, "you could get hurt that way. Close down your shield and relax. This is a guard flier. You're in arrest tractor."
Sira Nal recognized that the tractor was pulling him ahead. His generator pack was heating up dangerously.
He was being captured!
Furiously, he thought of the attacks he had made in similar manner, in this same area. He still could remember the horrified expression on one shipowner's face just before his ship broke to bits under him.
They wouldn't get him, though.
They couldn't.
He would blast them out of his path. Just as he had blasted the presumptuous natives who opposed him.
Thumbing the hand weapon to full blast, he centered it on the faint shimmer ahead, and squeezed the trigger.
Let the meddlers look out for themselves.
* * * * *
Banasel winced a little as the fireball spread, then rose skyward, to form a large cloud.
"You could have relaxed," he protested. "The blast wouldn't have jolted our screen too much, and you could have gotten him again."
"I know." Lanko flicked off the gunnery switches and leaned back, rubbing his head. "There was a possibility, and I fully intended to relax. But the decision time was short, and frankly, those thoughts of his overrode me for just too long. That boy was dangerous!"
He turned to Genro Kir, who was looking with horrified fascination at the still growing cloud in the screen.
"It's unfortunate. We'll try to get your other partner alive."
"You destroyed him!" Kir looked a little sick.
"No. We didn't destroy him. He should have known better than to fire into a tractor. I'll have to admit, I did slip a little. I assumed he was the usual type of drone. I didn't recognize the full extent of his aberration."
Lanko got out of his chair, and crossed the room, to confront the prisoner.
"Look, Kir. I don't know whether your other partner's like that one or not. But I think it's about time you helped a little. If you had given us clues to Sira Nal's personality and probable location, we might have been able to take precautions. He might be with us now. Or, do you enjoy seeing your friends turn themselves into flaming clouds of smoke?"
"You mean I ... I'm responsible ... for that?"
"Partially. You helped them. You refused any assistance in their capture. And you knew they were going to be captured, one way or another."
Kir directed a horrified look at the screen.
"What can I do?"
"Get in contact with Koree Buron. Tell him what happened here. Tell him, too, that we're looking for him, and that there is a Sector Guardsman due to join us within a few hours. Explain to him that there will be direction-finders on him very soon, and that any effort he may make to use his body shield, his weapons, or even his thought-radiations, will be noted, and will lead to him.
"Once you establish contact, we will ride in, if you wish. And we can assure him that he'll be either hunted down promptly, or he will have to assume and accept the role of a native--and a very inconspicuous, uninfluential native, at that.
"Tell him that he is free to come to us and surrender at any time within the next twenty hours, planetary. After that, he will be taken by the most expedient means. After the surrender deadline, you can assure him that his life will be of less importance to us, and to the Sector Guardsman, than that of the most humble native.
"Here's your mental amplifier, if you need it."
Genro Kir looked at the proffered circlet, then slowly extended a hand. He took the device, turned it around in his hands for a few moments, then put it on.
Suddenly, his face set in decision, and he sat quietly for a while, grim faced. At last, he looked up.
"I got him. He argued a little, but he had a poor argument, and he knew it. He'll be here within an hour, screens down."
THE END
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
BY BARBARA CONSTANT
Most people, when asked to define the ultimate in loneliness, say it's being alone in a crowd. And it takes only one slight difference to make one forever alone in the crowd....
Nobody at Hoskins, Haskell & Chapman, Incorporated, knew jut why Lucilla Brown, G.G. Hoskins' secretary, came to work half an hour early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Even G.G. himself, had he been asked, would have had trouble explaining how his occasional exasperated wish that just once somebody would reach the office ahead of him could have caused his attractive young secretary to start doing so three times a week ... or kept her at it all the months since that first gloomy March day. Nobody asked G.G. however--not even Paul Chapman, the very junior partner in the advertising firm, who had displayed more than a little interest in Lucilla all fall and winter, but very little interest in anything all spring and summer. Nobody asked Lucilla why she left early on the days she arrived early--after all, eight hours is long enough. And certainly nobody knew where Lucilla went at 4:30 on those three days--nor would anybody in the office have believed it, had he known.
"Lucky Brown? seeing a psychiatrist?" The typist would have giggled, the office boy would have snorted, and every salesman on the force would have guffawed. Even Paul Chapman might have managed a wry smile. A real laugh had been beyond him for several months--ever since he asked Lucilla confidently, "Will you marry me?" and she answered, "I'm sorry, Paul--thanks, but no thanks."
Not that seeing a psychiatrist was anything to laugh at, in itself. After all, the year was 1962, and there were almost as many serious articles about mental health as there were cartoons about psychoanalysts, even in the magazines that specialized in poking fun. In certain cities--including Los Angeles--and certain industries--especially advertising--"I have an appointment with my psychiatrist" was a perfectly acceptable excuse for leaving work early. The idea of a secretary employed by almost the largest advertising firm in one of the best-known suburbs in the sprawling City of the Angels doing so should not, therefore, have seemed particularly odd. Not would it have, if the person involved had been anyone at all except Lucilla Brown.
The idea that she might need aid of any kind, particularly psychiatric, was ridiculous. She had been born twenty-two years earlier in undisputed possession of a sizable silver spoon--and she was, in addition, bright, beautiful, and charming, with 20/20 vision, perfect teeth, a father and mother who adored her, friends who did likewise ... and the kind of luck you'd have to see to believe. Other people entered contests--Lucilla won them. Other people drove five miles over the legal speed limit and got caught doing it--Lucilla out-distanced them, but fortuitously slowed down just before the highway patrol appeared from nowhere. Other people waited in the wrong line at the bank while the woman ahead of them learned how to roll pennies--Lucilla was always in the line that moved right up to the teller's window.
"Lucky" was not, in other words, just a happenstance abbreviation of "Lucilla"--it was an exceedingly apt nickname. And Lucky Brown's co-workers would have been quite justified in laughing at the very idea of her being unhappy enough about anything to spend three precious hours a week stretched out on a brown leather couch staring miserably at a pale blue ceiling and fumbling for words that refused to come. There were a good many days when Lucilla felt like laughing at the idea herself. And there were other days when she didn't even feel like smiling.
Wednesday, the 25th of July, was one of the days when she didn't feel like smiling. Or talking. Or moving. It had started out badly when she opened her eyes and found herself staring at a familiar blue ceiling. "I don't know," she said irritably. "I tell you, I simply don't know what happens. I'll start to answer someone and the words will be right on the tip of my tongue, ready to be spoken, then I'll say something altogether different. Or I'll start to cross the street and, for no reason at all, be unable to even step off the curb...."
"For no reason at all?" Dr. Andrews asked. "Are you sure you aren't withholding something you ought to tell me?"
She shifted a little, suddenly uncomfortable ... and then she was fully awake and the ceiling was ivory, not blue. She stared at it for a long moment, completely disoriented, before she realized that she was in her own bed, not on Dr. Andrews' brown leather couch, and that the conversation had been another of the interminable imaginary dialogues she found herself carrying on with the psychiatrist, day and night, awake and asleep.
"Get out of my dreams," she ordered crossly, summoning up a quick mental picture of Dr. Andrews' expressive face, level gray eyes, and silvering temples, the better to banish him from her thoughts. She was immediately sorry she had done so, for the image remained fixed in her mind; she could almost feel his eyes as she heard his voice ask again, "For no reason at all, Lucilla?"
* * * * *
The weatherman had promised a scorcher, and the heat that already lay like a blanket over the room made it seem probable the promise would be fulfilled. She moved listlessly, showering patting herself dry, lingering over the choice of a dress until her mother called urgently from the kitchen.
She was long minutes behind schedule when she left the house. Usually she rather enjoyed easing her small car into the stream of automobiles pouring down Sepulveda toward the San Diego Freeway, jockeying for position, shifting expertly from one lane to another to take advantage of every break in the traffic. This morning she felt only angry impatience; she choked back on the irritated impulse to drive directly into the side of a car that cut across in front of her, held her horn button down furiously when a slow-starting truck hesitated fractionally after the light turned green.
When she finally edged her Renault up on the "on" ramp and the freeway stretched straight and unobstructed ahead, she stepped down on the accelerator and watched the needle climb up and past the legal 65-mile limit. The sound of her tires on the smooth concrete was soothing and the rush of wind outside gave the morning an illusion of coolness. She edged away from the tangle of cars that had pulled onto the freeway with her and momentarily was alone on the road, with her rear-view mirror blank, the oncoming lanes bare, and a small rise shutting off the world ahead.
That was when it happened. "Get out of the way!" a voice shrieked "out of the way, out of the way, OUT OF THE WAY!" Her heart lurched, her stomach twisted convulsively, and there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Instinctively, she stamped down on the brake pedal, swerved sharply into the outer lane. By the time she had topped the rise, she was going a cautious 50 miles an hour and hugging the far edge of the freeway. Then, and only then, she heard the squeal of agonized tires and saw the cumbersome semitrailer coming from the opposite direction rock dangerously, jackknife into the dividing posts that separated north and south-bound traffic, crunch ponderously through them, and crash to a stop, several hundred feet ahead of her and squarely athwart the lane down which she had been speeding only seconds earlier.
The highway patrol materialized within minutes. Even so, it was after eight by the time Lucilla gave them her statement, agreed for the umpteenth time with the shaken but uninjured truck driver that it was indeed fortunate she hadn't been in the center lane, and drove slowly the remaining miles to the office. The gray mood of early morning had changed to black. Now there were two voices in her mind, competing for attention. "I knew it was going to happen," the truck driver said, "I couldn't see over the top of that hill. All I could do was fight the wheel and pray that if anybody was coming, he'd get out of the way." She could almost hear him repeating the words, "Get out of the way, out of the way...." And right on the heel of his cry came Dr. Andrews' soft query, "For no reason at all, Lucilla?"
She pulled into the company parking lot, jerked the wheel savagely to the left, jammed on the brakes. "Shut up!" she said. "Shut up, both of you!" She started into the building, then hesitated. She was already late, but there was something.... (Get out of the way, the way.... For no reason at all, at all....) She yielded to impulse and walked hurriedly downstairs to the basement library.
"That stuff I asked you to get together for me by tomorrow, Ruthie," she said to the gray-haired librarian. "You wouldn't by any chance have already done it, would you?"
"Funny you should ask." The elderly woman bobbed down behind the counter and popped back up with an armload of magazines and newspapers. "Just happened to have some free time last thing yesterday. It's already charged out to you, so you just go right ahead and take it, dearie."
* * * * *
It was 8:30 when Lucilla reached the office.
"When I need you, where are you?" G.G. asked sourly. "Learned last night that the top dog at Karry Karton Korporation is in town today, so they've pushed that conference up from Friday to ten this morning. If you'd been here early--or even on time--we might at least have gotten some of the information together."
Lucilla laid the stack of material on his desk. "I haven't had time to flag the pages yet," she said, "but they're listed on the library request on top. We did nineteen ads for KK last year and three of premium offers. I stopped by Sales on my way in--Susie's digging out figures for you now."
"Hm-m-m," said G.G. "Well. So that's where you've been. You could at least have let me know." There was grudging approval beneath his gruffness. "Say, how'd you know I needed this today, anyhow?"
"Didn't," said Lucilla, putting her purse away and whisking the cover off her typewriter. "Happenstance, that's all." (Just happened to go down to the library ... for no reason at all ... withholding something ... get out of the way....) The telephone's demand for attention overrode her thoughts. She reached for it almost gratefully. "Mr. Hoskins' office," she said. "Yes. Yes, he knows about the ten o'clock meeting this morning. Thanks for calling, anyway." She hung up and glanced at G.G., but he was so immersed in one of the magazines that the ringing telephone hadn't even disturbed him. Ringing? The last thing she did before she left the office each night was set the lever in the instrument's base to "off," so that the bell would not disturb G.G. if he worked late. So far today, nobody had set it back to "on."
* * * * *
"It's getting worse," she said miserably to the pale blue ceiling. "The phone didn't ring this morning--it couldn't have--but I answered it." Dr. Andrews said nothing at all. She let her eyes flicker sidewise, but he was outside her range of vision. "I don't LIKE having you sit where I can't see you," she said crossly. "Freud may have thought it was a good idea, but I think it's a lousy one." She clenched her hands and stared at nothing. The silence stretched thinner and thinner, like a balloon blown big, until the temptation to rupture it was too great to resist. "I didn't see the truck this morning. Nor hear it. There was no reason at all for me to slow down and pull over."
"You might be dead if you hadn't. Would you like that better?"
The matter-of-fact question was like a hand laid across Lucilla's mouth. "I don't want to be dead," she admitted finally. "Neither do I want to go on like this, hearing words that aren't spoken and bells that don't ring. When it gets to the point that I pick up a phone just because somebody's thinking...." She stopped abruptly.
"I didn't quite catch the end of that sentence," Dr. Andrews said.
"I didn't quite finish it. I can't."
"Can't? Or won't? Don't hold anything back, Lucilla. You were saying that you picked up the phone just because somebody was thinking...." He paused expectantly. Lucilla reread the ornate letters on the framed diploma on the wall, looked critically at the picture of Mrs. Andrews--whom she'd met--and her impish daughter--whom she hadn't--counted the number of pleats in the billowing drapes, ran a tentative finger over the face of her wristwatch, straightened a fold of her skirt ... and could stand the silence no longer.
"All right," she said wearily. "The girl at Karry Karton thought about talking to me, and I heard my phone ring, even though the bell was disconnected. G.G. thought about needing backup material for the conference and I went to the library. The truck driver thought about warning people and I got out of his way. So I can read people's minds--some people's minds, some of the time, anyway ... only there's no such thing as telepathy. And if I'm not telepathic, then...." She caught herself in the brink of time and bit back the final word, fighting for self-control.
"Then what?" The peremptory question toppled Lucilla's defenses.
"I'm crazy," she said. Speaking the word released all the others dammed up behind it. "Ever since I can remember, things like this have happened--all at once, in the middle of doing something or saying something, I'd find myself thinking about what somebody else was doing or saying. Not thinking--knowing. I'd be playing hide-and-seek, and I could see the places where the other kids were hiding just as plainly as I could see my own surroundings. Or I'd be worrying over the answers to an exam question, and I'd know what somebody in the back of the room had decided to write down, or what the teacher was expecting us to write. Not always--but it happened often enough so that it bothered me, just the way it does now when I answer a question before it's been asked, or know what the driver ahead of me is going to do a split second before he does it, or win a bridge game because I can see everybody else's hand through his own eyes, almost."
"Has it always ... bothered you, Lucilla?"
"No-o-o-o." She drew the word out, considering, trying to think when it was that she hadn't felt uneasy about the unexpected moments of perceptiveness. When she was very little, perhaps. She thought of the tiny, laughing girl in the faded snaps of the old album--and suddenly, inexplicably, she was that self, moving through remembered rooms, pausing to collect a word from a boyish father, a thought from a pretty young mother. Reluctantly, she closed her eyes against that distant time. "Way back," she said, "when I didn't know any better, I just took it for granted that sometimes people talked to each other and that sometimes they passed thoughts along without putting them into words. I was about six, I guess, when I found out it wasn't so." She slipped into her six-year-old self as easily as she had donned the younger Lucilla. This time she wasn't in a house, but high on a hillside, walking on springy pine needles instead of prosaic carpet.
"Talk," Dr. Andrews reminded her, his voice so soft that it could almost have come from inside her own mind.
"We were picnicking," she said. "A whole lot of us. Somehow, I wandered away from the others...." One minute the hill was bright with sun, and the next it was deep in shadows and the wind that had been merely cool was downright cold. She shivered and glanced around expecting her mother to be somewhere near, holding out a sweater or jacket. There was no one at all in sight. Even then, she never thought of being frightened. She turned to retrace her steps. There was a big tree that looked familiar, and a funny rock behind it, half buried in the hillside. She was trudging toward it, humming under her breath, when the worry thoughts began to reach her. (... only a little creek so I don't think she could have fallen in ... not really any bears around here ... but she never gets hurt ... creek ... bear ... twisted ankle ... dark ... cold....) She had veered from her course and started in the direction of the first thought, but now they were coming from all sides and she had no idea at all which way to go. She ran wildly then, first one way, then the other, sobbing and calling.
"Lucilla!" The voice sliced into the night, and the dark mountainside and the frightened child were gone. She shuddered a little, reminiscently, and put her hand over her eyes.
"Somebody found me, of course. And then Mother was holding me and crying and I was crying, too, and telling her how all the different thought at once frightened me and mixed me up. She ... she scolded me for ... for telling fibs ... and said that nobody except crazy people thought they could read each other's minds."
"I see," said Dr. Andrews, "So you tried not to, of course. And anytime you did it again, or thought you did, you blamed it on coincidence. Or luck."
"And had that nightmare again."
"Yes, that, too. Tell me about it."
"I already have. Over and over."
"Tell me again, then."
"I feel like a fool, repeating myself," she complained. Dr. Andrew's made no comment. "Oh, all right. It always starts with me walking down a crowded street, surrounded by honking cars and yelling newsboys and talking people. The noise bothers me and I'm tempted to cover my ears to shut it out, but I try to ignore it, instead, and walk faster and faster. Bit by bit, the buildings I pass are smaller, the people fewer, the noise less. All at once, I discover there's nothing around at all but a spreading carpet of gray-green moss, years deep, and a silence that feels as old as time itself. There's nothing to frighten me, but I am frightened ... and lonesome, not so much for people, but for a sound ... any sound. I turn to run back toward town, but there's nothing behind me now but the same gray moss and gray sky and dead silence."
* * * * *
By the time she reached the last word, her throat had tightened until speaking was difficult. She reached out blindly for something to cling to. Her groping hand met Dr. Andrews' and his warm fingers closed reassuringly around hers. Gradually the panic drained away, but she could think of nothing to say at all, although she longed to have the silence broken. As if he sensed her longing, Dr. Andrews said, "You started having the dream more often just after you told Paul you wouldn't marry him, is that right?"
"No. It was the other way around. I hadn't had it for months, not since I fell in love with him, then he got assigned to that "Which Tomorrow?" show and he started calling me "Lucky," the way everybody does, and the dream came back...." She stopped short, and turned on the couch to stare at the psychiatrist with startled eyes. "But that can't be how it was," she said. "The lonesomeness must have started after I decided not to marry him, not before."
"I wonder why the dream stopped when you fell in love with him."
"That's easy," Lucilla said promptly, grasping at the chance to evade her own more disturbing question. "I felt close to him, whether he was with me or not, the way I used to feel close to people back when I was a little girl, before ... well, before that day in the mountains ... when Mother said...."
"That was when you started having the dream, wasn't it?"
"How'd you know? I didn't--not until just now. But, yes, that's when it started. I'd never minded the dark or being alone, but I was frightened when Mother shut the door that night, because the walls seemed so ... so solid, now that I knew all the thoughts I used to think were with me there were just pretend. When I finally went to sleep, I dreamed, and I went on having the same dream, night after night after night, until finally they called a doctor and he gave me something to make me sleep."
"I wish they'd called me," Dr. Andrews said.
"What could you have done? The sleeping pills worked, anyway, and after a while I didn't need them any more, because I'd heard other kids talking about having hunches and lucky streaks and I stopped feeling different from the rest of them, except once in a while, when I was so lucky it ... bothered me."
"And after you met Paul, you stopped being ... too lucky ... and the dream stopped?"
"No!" Lucilla was startled at her own vehemence. "No, it wasn't like that at all, and you'd know it, if you'd been listening. With Paul, I felt close to him all the time, no matter how many miles or walls or anything else there were between us. We hardly had to talk at all, because we seemed to know just what the other one was thinking all the time, listening to music, or watching the waves pound in or just working together at the office. Instead of feeling ... odd ... when I knew what he was thinking or what he was going to say, I felt good about it, because I was so sure it was the same way with him and what I was thinking. We didn't talk about it. There just wasn't any need to." She lapsed into silence again. Dr. Andrews straightened her clenched hand out and stroked the fingers gently. After a moment, she went on.
"He hadn't asked me to marry him, but I knew he would, and there wasn't any hurry, because everything was so perfect, anyway. Then one of the company's clients decided to sponsor a series of fantasy shows on TV and wanted us to tie in the ads for next year with the fantasy theme. Paul was assigned to the account, and G.G. let him borrow me to work on it, because it was such a rush project. I'd always liked fairy stories when I was little and when I discovered there were grown-up ones, too, like those in Unknown Worlds and the old Weird Tales, I read them, too. But I hadn't any idea how much there was, until we started buying copies of everything there was on the news-stands, and then ransacking musty little stores for back issues and ones that had gone out of publication, until Paul's office was just full of teetery piles of gaudy magazines and everywhere you looked there were pictures of strange stars and eight-legged monsters and men in space suits."
"So what do the magazines have to do with you and Paul?"
"The way he felt about them changed everything. He just laughed at the ones about space ships and other planets and robots and things, but he didn't laugh when came across stories about ... well, mutants, and people with talents...."
"Talents? Like reading minds, you mean?"
She nodded, not looking at him. "He didn't laugh at those. He acted as if they were ... well, indecent. The sort of thing you wouldn't be caught dead reading in public. And he thought that way, too, especially about the stories that even mentioned telepathy. At first, when he brought them to my attention in that disapproving way, I thought he was just pretending to sneer, to tease me, because he--we--knew they could be true. Only his thoughts matched his remarks. He hated the stories, Dr. Andrews, and was just determined to have me hate them, too. All at once I began to feel as if I didn't know him at all and I began to wonder if I'd just imagined everything all those months I felt so close to him. And then I began to dream again, and to think about that lonesome silent world even when I was wide awake."
"Go on, Lucilla," Dr. Andrews said, as she hesitated.
"That's all, just about. We finished the job and got rid of the magazines and for a little while it was almost as if those two weeks had never been, except I couldn't forget that he didn't know what I was thinking at all, even when everything he did, almost, made it seem as if he did. It began to seem wrong for me to know what he was thinking. Crazy, like Mother had said, and worse, somehow. Not well, not even nice, if you know what I mean."
"Then he asked you to marry him."
"And I said no, even when I wanted, oh, so terribly, to say yes and yes and yes." She squeezed her eyes tight shut to hold back a rush of tears.
* * * * *
Time folded back on itself. Once again, the hands of her wristwatch pointed to 4:30 and the white-clad receptionist said briskly, "Doctor will see you now." Once again, from some remote vantage point, Lucilla watched herself brush past Dr. Andrews and cross to the familiar couch, heard herself say, "It's getting worse," watched herself move through a flickering montage of scenes from childhood to womanhood, from past to present.
She opened he eyes to meet those of the man who sat patiently beside her. "You see," he said, "telling me wasn't so difficult, after all." And then, before she had decided on a response, "What do you know about Darwin's theory of evolution, Lucilla?"
His habit of ending a tense moment by making an irrelevant query no longer even startled her. Obediently, she fumbled for an answer. "Not much. Just that he thought all the different kinds of life on earth today evolved from a few blobs of protoplasm that sprouted wings or grew fur or developed teeth, depending on when they lived, and where." She paused hopefully, but met with only silence. "Sometimes what seemed like a step forward wasn't," she said, ransacking her brain for scattered bits of information. "Then the species died out, like the saber-tooth tiger, with those tusks that kept right on growing until they locked his jaws shut, so he starved to death." As she spoke, she remembered the huge beast as he had been pictured in one of her college textbooks. The recollection grew more and more vivid, until she could see both the picture and the facing page of text. There was an irregularly shaped inkblot in the upper corner and several heavily underlined sentences that stood out so distinctly she could actually read the words. "According to Darwin, variations in general are not infinitesimal, but in the nature of specific mutations. Thousands of these occur, but only the fittest survive the climate, the times, natural enemies, and their own kind, who strive to perpetuate themselves unchanged." Taken one by one, the words were all familiar--taken as a whole, they made no sense at all. She let the book slip unheeded from her mind and stared at Dr. Andrews in bewilderment.
"Try saying it in a different way."
"You sound like a school teacher humoring a stupid child." And then, because of the habit of obedience was strong, "I guess he meant that tails didn't grow an inch at a time, the way the dog's got cut off, but all at once ... like a fish being born with legs as well as fins, or a baby saber-tooth showing up among tigers with regular teeth, or one ape in a tribe discovering he could swing down out of the treetops and stand erect and walk alone."
He echoed her last words. "And walk alone...." A premonitory chill traced its icy way down Lucilla's backbone. For a second she stood on gray moss, under a gray sky, in the midst of a gray silence. "He not only could walk alone, he had to. Do you remember what your book said?"
"Only the fittest survive," Lucilla said numbly. "Because they have to fight the climate ... and their natural enemies ... and their own kind." She swung her feet to the floor and pushed herself into a sitting position. "I'm not a ... a mutation. I'm not, I'm not, I'm NOT, and you can't say I am, because I won't listen!"
"I didn't say you were." There was the barest hint of emphasis on the first word. Lucilla was almost certain she heard a whisper of laughter, but he met her gaze blandly, his expression completely serious.
"Don't you dare laugh!" she said, nonetheless. "There's nothing funny about ... about...."
"About being able to read people's minds," Dr Andrews said helpfully. "You'd much rather have me offer some other explanation for the occurrences that bother you so--is that it?"
"I guess so. Yes, it is. A brain tumor. Or schizophrenia. Or anything at all that could maybe be cured, so I could marry Paul and have children and be like everybody else. Like you." She looked past him to the picture on his desk. "It's easy for you to talk."
He ignored the last statement. "Why can't you get married, anyway?"
"You've already said why. Because Paul would hate me--everybody would hate me--if they knew I was different."
"How would they know? It doesn't show. Now if you had three legs, or a long bushy tail, or outsized teeth...."
Lucilla smiled involuntarily, and then was furious at herself for doing so and at Dr Andrews for provoking her into it. "This whole thing is utterly asinine, anyhow. Here we are, talking as if I might really be a mutant, and you know perfectly well that I'm not."
"Do I? You made the diagnosis, Lucilla, and you've given me some mighty potent reasons for believing it ... can you give me equally good reasons for doubting that you're a telepath?"
* * * * *
The peremptory demand left Lucilla speechless for a moment. She groped blindly for an answer, then almost laughed aloud as she found it.
"But of course. I almost missed it, even after you practically drew me a diagram. If I could read minds, just as soon as anybody found it out, he'd be afraid of me, or hate me, like the book said, and you said, too. If you believed it, you'd do something like having me locked up in a hospital, maybe, instead of...."
"Instead of what, Lucilla?"
"Instead of being patient, and nice, and helping me see how silly I've been." She reached out impulsively to touch his hand, then withdrew her own, feeling somewhat foolish when he made no move to respond. Her relief was too great, however, to be contained in silence. "Way back the first time I came in, almost, you said that before we finished therapy, you'd know me better than I knew myself. I didn't believe you--maybe I didn't want to--but I begin to think you were right. Lot of times, lately, you've answered a question before I even asked it. Sometimes you haven't even bothered to answer--you've just sat there in your big brown chair and I've lain here on the couch, and we've gone through something together without using words at all...." She had started out almost gaily, the words spilling over each other in their rush to be said, but bit by bit she slowed down, then faltered to a stop. After she had stopped talking altogether, she could still hear her last few phrases, repeated over and over, like an echo that refused to die. (Answered ... before I even asked ... without using words at all ... without using words....)
She could almost taste the terror that clogged her throat and dried her lips. "You do believe it. And you could have me locked up. Only ... only...." Fragments of thought, splinters of words, and droplets of silence spun into a kaleidoscopic jumble, shifted infinitesimally, and fell into an incredible new pattern. Understanding displaced terror and was, in turn, displaced by indignation. She stared accusingly at her interrogator. "But you look just like ... just like anybody."
"You expected perhaps three legs or a long bushy tail or teeth like that textbook tiger?"
"And you're a psychiatrist!"
"What else? Would you have talked to me like this across a grocery counter, Lucilla? Or listened to me, if I'd been driving a bus or filling a prescription? Would I have found the others in a bowling alley or a business office?"
"Then there are ... others?" She let out her breath on a long sigh involuntarily glancing again at the framed picture. "Only I love Paul, and he isn't ... he can't...."
"Nor can Carol." His eyes were steady on hers, yet she felt as if he were looking through and beyond her. For no reason at all, she strained her ears for the sound of footsteps or the summons of a voice. "Where do you suppose the second little blob of protoplasm with legs came from?" Dr. Andrews asked. "And the third? If that ape who found he could stand erect had walked lonesomely off into the sunset like a second-rate actor on a late, late show, where do you suppose you'd be today?"
He broke off abruptly and watched with Lucilla as the office door edged open. The small girl who inched her way around it wore blue jeans and a pony tail rather than an organdy frock and curls, but her pixie smile matched that of the girl in the photograph Lucilla had glanced at again and again.
"You wanted me, Daddy?" she asked, but she looked toward Lucilla.
"I thought you'd like to meet someone with the same nickname as yours," Dr. Andrews said, rising to greet her. "Lucky, meet Lucky."
"Hello," the child said, then her smile widened. "Hello!" (But I don't have to say it, do I? I can talk to you just the way I talk to Daddy and Uncle Whitney and Big Bill).
"Hello yourself," said Lucilla. This time when the corners of her mouth began to tick upward, she made no attempt to stop them. (Of course you can, darling. And I can answer you the same way, and you'll hear me.)
Dr. Andrews reached for the open pack of cigarettes on his deck. (Is this strictly a private conversation, girls, or can I get in on it, too?)
(It's unpolite to interrupt, Daddy.)
(He's not exactly interrupting--it was his conversation to begin with!)
Dr. Andrews' receptionist paused briefly beside the still-open office door. None of them heard either her gentle rap or the soft click of the latch slipping into place when she pushed the door shut.
Nor did she hear them.
EGOCENTRIC ORBIT
By JOHN CORY
It took a long time for human beings to accept that our little piece of meteoric rubble wasn't the exact and absolute center of the Universe. It does appear that way, doesn't it? It may not take so long for a spaceman to learn ...
Near the end of his fifteenth orbit as Greenland slipped by noiselessly below, he made the routine measurements that tested the operation of his space capsule and checked the automatic instruments which would transmit their stored data to Earth on his next pass over Control. Everything normal; all mechanical devices were operating perfectly.
This information didn't surprise him, in fact, he really didn't even think about it. The previous orbits and the long simulated flights on Earth during training had made such checks routine and perfect results expected. The capsules were developed by exhaustive testing both on the ground and as empty satellites before entrusting them to carry animals and then the first human.
He returned to contemplation of the panorama passing below and above, although as he noted idly, above and below had lost some of their usual meaning. Since his capsule, like all heavenly bodies, was stable in position with respect to the entire universe and, thanks to Sir Isaac Newton and his laws, never changed, the Earth and the stars alternated over his head during each orbit. "Up" now meant whatever was in the direction of his head. He remembered that even during his initial orbit when the Earth first appeared overhead he accepted the fact as normal. He wondered if the other two had accepted it as easily.
For there had been two men hurled into orbit before he ventured into space. Two others who had also passed the rigorous three-year training period and were selected on the basis of over-all performance to precede him. He had known them both well and wondered again what had happened on their flights. Of course, they had both returned, depending upon what your definition of return was. The capsules in which they had ventured beyond Earth had returned them living. But this was to be expected, for even the considerable hazards of descent through the atmosphere and the terrible heating which occurred were successfully surmounted by the capsule.
Naturally, it had not been expected that the satellites would have to be brought down by command from the ground. But this, too, was part of the careful planning--radio control of the retro-rockets that move the satellite out of orbit by reducing its velocity. Of course, ground control was to be used only if the astronaut failed to ignite the retro-rockets himself. He remembered everyone's surprise and relief when the first capsule was recovered and its occupant found to be alive. They had assumed that in spite of all precautions he was dead because he had not fired the rockets on the fiftieth orbit and it was necessary to bring him down on the sixty-fifth.
Recovery alive only partially solved the mystery, for the rescuers and all others were met by a haughty, stony silence from the occupant. Batteries of tests confirmed an early diagnosis: complete and utter withdrawal; absolute refusal to communicate. Therapy was unsuccessful.
* * * * *
The second attempt was similar in most respects, except that command return was made on the thirty-first orbit after the astronaut's failure to de-orbit at the end of the thirtieth. His incoherent babble of moons, stars, and worlds was no more helpful than the first.
Test after test confirmed that no obvious organic damage had been incurred by exposure outside of the Earth's protective atmosphere. Biopsy of even selected brain tissues seemed to show that microscopic cellular changes due to prolonged weightlessness or primary cosmic-ray bombardment, which had been suggested by some authorities, were unimportant. Somewhat reluctantly, it was decided to repeat the experiment a third time.
The launching was uneventful. He was sent into space with the precision he expected. The experience was exhilarating and, although he had anticipated each event in advance, he could not possibly have foreseen the overpowering feeling that came over him. Weightlessness he had experienced for brief periods during training, but nothing could match the heady impression of continuous freedom from gravity.
Earth passing overhead was also to be expected from the simple laws of celestial mechanics but his feeling as he watched it now was inexpressible. It occurred to him that perhaps this was indeed why he was here, because he could appreciate such experiences best. He had been told the stars would be bright, unblinking, and an infinitude in extent, but could mere descriptions or photographs convey the true seeing?
On his twenty-first orbit he completed his overseeing the entire surface of the planet in daylight. He had seen more of Earth than anyone able to tell about it, but only he had the true feeling of it. The continents were clearly visible, as were the oceans and both polar ice caps. The shapes were familiar but in only a remote way. A vague indistinctness borne of distance served to modify the outlines and he alone was seeing and understanding. On the dark side of the planet large cities were marked by indistinct light areas which paled to insignificance compared to the stars and his sun.
He speculated about the others who had only briefly experienced these sights. Undoubtedly they weren't as capable of fully grasping or appreciating any of these things as he was. It was quite clear that no one else but he could encompass the towering feeling of power and importance generated by being alone in the Universe.
At the end of the twenty-fifth orbit he disabled the radio control of the retro-rockets and sat back with satisfaction to await the next circuit of his Earth around Him.
THE END
A CHOICE OF MIRACLES
By JAMES A. COX
You're down in the jungle with death staring you in the face. There is nothing left but prayer. So you ask for your life. But wait! Are you sure that's really what you want above all else?
Andy Larson was a hard-headed Swede. He had to be, to be still alive. He hadn't been able to move anything but that hard head for what he estimated to be about three hours since he regained consciousness. And in that time he hadn't heard anything that led him to believe anyone else had survived the crash.
The only thing Andy Larson had heard was the water and the far-away whine of the patrol ship on its grid track search pattern. It had not reached his area yet, and he wasn't at all excited about his chances of being spotted when it did get nearer. He could turn his head, and he could see the tangled interlacing of tree branches and vines above and around him. He remembered, at the first moment of impact, just before the ship began to break apart, a tremendous geyser of mud and water. The picture was indelibly imprinted on his mind. He couldn't see the water now, but he could hear it. The litter he could see by twisting his head as far to the left as it would go told him they had crash-landed on the water--a river by the sound of it--and had skipped drunkenly, in something approximating flat stone fashion, into the forest lining the river's bank. There had been no explosion and no fire, there was no wide swath cut through the trees--and therefore no reason why he should assume the patrol would spot him. There might be pieces of the ship lying where the patrol could see them. But he doubted that, for the river was deep and the vegetation was thick.
* * * * *
He strained his ears, not to hear if the patrol was approaching closer, but listening for the sound of life around him. This was his one hope--another survivor, and of necessity a mobile one. Someone to shout and wave, to climb a tree, to find an open space and build a fire, to light a flare, to do something--anything--that would attract the patrol's attention. Andy Larson wasn't afraid of dying. He felt no panic, no agonies of conscience, remorse or bitterness at the apparent inevitability of the prospect before him. But if he was not destined to die he needed a miracle or the assistance of that almost impossible--but only almost--survivor. And instead of praying for the miracle, he listened with all the hearing power at his command for the sound of human life. That would be miracle enough, and he didn't intend to stop listening until he couldn't any more.
Not that he didn't pray at all; back home in New Jersey, while not considered a pillar of the church, Andy Larson was known as a good, practicing Lutheran. But it was doubtful if the Lutherans, or any other sect for that matter, had sent missionaries this high into the heavens yet; the misbegotten flight he had been on had been only the fourth to reach this strange little planet of Abernathy since its discovery by the good professor back in '92. So Andy was no longer a practicing Lutheran, if practicing meant going to church. But he had prayed more than once during the long outward journey. And he was praying now, while his ears strained for sounds and his eyes strained for movement; praying for himself, yes, but even more for his wife, and for someone he had never seen.
He couldn't help being afraid for Elsie; he had been gone from home almost seven months, and she had been rocked with morning sickness for the last three weeks before he left, moaning over her saltines and begging him not to go even though she knew he couldn't and would not back out. She was afraid of the unknown he was going into, and he was afraid of the unknown that awaited her--it was the first time for both unknowns for both of them.
In a little while he could stop straining his eyes. Greenish dusk was slipping into night. Soon his ears would have to do all the work. The thought of night-prowling creatures disturbed him somewhat; no-one knew for sure yet what, if anything, lived in these thick, isolated jungles. Paralyzed as he was, he was fair game--his choice of words in the thought brought a grimacing smile to his face. He tried once again--was it the thousandth time yet?--to move his arms, his legs, his hands, a finger, a toe. Earlier, he had thought he was moving the big toe on his left foot, but he couldn't raise his head to see past the twisted bulk of metal that lay across him, the toe had nothing to rub upon to give it feeling, and there was absolutely no feeling between it and his head to give it any meaning anyhow. But it would have been a nice feeling just to know it was still there.
He gave up the attempt when sweat beaded out on his forehead and went back to listening and praying. He was tempted to pray for the miracle now, for blackness blotted out even the pitiful remains of the ship, and the whine of the patrol had muted to a singing hum in the distance.
* * * * *
The night turned cold and damp, but Andy Larson, in his sheathing of paralysis, didn't feel it. The loneliness was on him, the awesome loneliness of having to wait for death alone, with no warm hand to hold on to until the parting. He still felt no great fear or bitterness. Only the loneliness, and sadness. He would never know his son, or daughter, would never know that it loved him, that he was the biggest thing in its life. And it--that was ugly; he would call it "he"; if he had a choice a son it would be--he, his son, would never know his father, or how much his father wanted to love him. And Elsie--how lonely it would be for her. Her time must be getting close now, and she would be frightened. The doctor hadn't told her what he had told him--that she was too slight, definitely not built for child-bearing. But she knew. And she would be brave, but frightened and alone.
The hours of night trudged by. The few stars that peeped through the trees were no help in telling the time, and Andy had lost interest in it anyhow. It was night, it had been night for what seemed like years, the blackness around him proclaimed it would be night still for many more years. He dozed off and on, at times waking with a start, thinking he had heard something. For a few minutes he would listen intently, feverishly. But when nothing reached his ears but the little night sounds he had become accustomed to, he would sink back into the lethargy that weighed upon his eyelids.
He wondered if he could be dying. He thought he was getting weaker--but how could he tell for sure? He could feel nothing, there was no pain, no muscular failure, no falling weakly to the ground. There were no muscles left and he was on the ground already. It was a Herculean effort to keep his eyes open, to listen as he had vowed he would. But that might be only fatigue, the need for sleep. And shock! Of course. He had to be suffering from shock, and from exposure, too. So if he didn't die of starvation, and if some beast didn't devour him, and if whatever wounds and injuries he had didn't do him in, he would probably die anyhow from pneumonia.
The thought was almost a comforting one. It took him off the hook, unburdened him of the need to worry about whether or not he lived. The thing was out of his hands, and no stubbornness on his part was going to do any good. He had prayed himself out before, prayed until the words of the prayers were nothing but imbecilic mutterings and mumblings, meaningless monosyllables swirling pointlessly and endlessly through his tired brain. The thing was out of his hands. He--Andy Larson--he gave up. He quit. He was nothing but a head that was hard and a body that was dead. What right did he have thinking he had any control over what happened to him? He was incapable of doing anything himself--he had to wait until something happened to him. And he knew what was going to happen. So that's what he'd do. He'd just wait.
* * * * *
He closed his eyes and saw Elsie, and before he realized he was going to do it he was praying again, talking to God about Elsie, and then talking to Elsie about God, and then back to God again and to Elsie again, and he knew he was crying because he could taste the tears, and he knew he was going to die because there wasn't anything else that could happen, and he knew suddenly that he was mortally afraid. He could not lay rigidly, tensely--there were no muscles to tighten. But the tension had to go somewhere. He felt a numbness creeping up the back of his neck, felt his eyes bulging as if they would burst, heard a roaring in his ears. He opened his mouth, gasping, trying to breathe deeply, the roaring in his ears reaching a crescendo and then breaking into a cold sighing wind that loudened and softened with the regularity of a pulse beat. He didn't know if he was awake or sleeping, dozing or dreaming, dying or dead. But he heard Elsie.
She was calling him. Over the cold black nothingness that separated them she was calling his name, her voice riding on the mournful wind sighing in his ears. He could hear her--it was as simple as that. He still didn't know if he was dreaming or dead. He didn't care. She was calling to him and he could hear, and although it wasn't the miracle he had wanted to pray for, still it was a miracle. He didn't question it; the comfort of hearing her voice after the terrible loneliness was enough. He didn't wonder how it could happen, didn't doubt that she could hear him answering her, as he was doing now. At first, so overcome with joy and relief, so thankful for the miracle, he didn't even recognize the tones of pain in her voice.
"Elsie, Elsie, Elsie," he cried out with his mind, reaching for her, wanting to seize her and hold her and never let her slip away again. "I hear you, my darling. I hear you!"
"Thank God!" Her voice broke, and the sound of sobbing carried on the wind reached his ears. For a moment it puzzled him. He had been crying, but her sobs were something different. The night suddenly seemed to turn much colder. "What is it, Elsie?" he called in fright.
* * * * *
The sobbing became a choking cough. He heard her grunt and gasp, and then a small scream turned his blood into ice. After a long moment she spoke again, panting, her voice strained and scratchy. "Thank God you can hear me, Andy. I've called and called. I prayed that I didn't care what happened, just so long as you could be with me. And you are, you are. It's a miracle and I don't know how. But you're with me and I won't be afraid any more. I won't ... oh ... oh ..."
* * * * *
Andy suddenly understood. "Elsie," he cried frantically. "Where are you? Are you in the hospital? Is everything all right? Is the doctor there? Elsie!" He shouted her name aloud, angrily, trying to force it through the immense absorbent space between them, cursing and screaming at his own helplessness.
"Be quiet, Andy," she said at last. "Stop carrying on so. I'm all right now--it's just that the pain comes and sometimes I don't know what to do."
"But are you all right? Did the doctor--?"
"Shhh, Andy. Of course I'm all right. I'm in the labor room and there are lots of nice people to take care of me. Dr. Bell says it's like this often with first babies. And since I'm smaller than I should be--that doesn't help any. But I'm going to be all right."
"You called me, though. You said you were afraid of something, and prayed that--"
"You know how big a sissy I can be sometimes, Andy. Remember the time the wasp got in the bathroom while I was taking a shower, and how we got tangled up in the shower curtain where I was trying to hide from him and you were trying to catch him? And remember what happened right after that? Right there in the bathroom?" She laughed lightly.
To hear her laugh again! Andy smiled to himself, remembering. She had been so soft and cool and pretty, snarled in the shower curtain, her hair damp and curly, her cheeks flushed, uttering little squeals and yelps and giggles that were exciting music, and suddenly he wasn't chasing the wasp any more and she wasn't giggling because the wasp was tickling her. She had pulled his head under the shower, and he had got soaked anyway, so he climbed into the tub and she helped pull off his clothes and they soaped each other into a lather and they rinsed and they climbed out together, but they never got dried off and they never got out of the bathroom--at least not for a long time. And oh, how her laugh had tinkled then, and how he loved her when she laughed.
He thought of her laughing now, and a pain shot through his head. He tried to visualize her now, as she laughed--the swollen, hurt-looking belly, the heavy breasts dragging her frail shoulders forward, the drawn, pinched look he knew must be between her eyes as it was always when she felt unwell. He could visualize her this way, but not laughing. Then he heard her, and she wasn't laughing any more, and her moans were needles and her screams were knives.
It lasted longer this time. It lasted so long he could taste the blood where his teeth had ground through his lip, although he couldn't remember the pain of doing it. She came back to him at last, groaning weakly, and they talked, he cheerfully for her sake, she bravely for his. They remembered things they had done together, good times, happy times. They talked of what they would do when he came home, and what would they call the baby? Andy Junior if a boy? Elsie if a girl? Or Karen, or Mary, or Kirsten, or maybe Hermione? They laughed at that, and they laughed again at the thought of twins. But the laughs turned into gasps and cries of pain. And Elsie lay thrashing in the labor room of a hospital in New Jersey, and Andy lay rigidly under a rigidity not of his own making in a jungle far away.
* * * * *
She came back to him and told him the doctors had had a consultation, and had agreed to wait a little longer. She came back and told him they had decided they could not wait much longer, and would have to undertake a Caesarean. She came back and told him she had begged them to give her a little more time to try and do it herself, but she was afraid they were going to give her something to knock her out. She came and she went, but even when she was gone she was never so far away that Andy could not hear her. He wanted to stop his ears to the hysterical outpourings, but he was helpless, and he hated himself for wanting to.
When she came back the next time, with weakness turning her voice into a hoarse whisper, he begged her to take the drugs. But she wasn't listening to him. "Andy, Andy," she said, "listen to me please. It's important. They've decided on the Caesarean, and I haven't got much time. I've been thinking of the way we've been talking, and I think it happened because I needed you so much. That's how I got all the way to where you are. I needed you with me with every part of me, and somehow part of me found you. But Andy, you must have needed me, too. You must have needed me, Andy, or how did you get back to me?"
* * * * *
Despite the weakness of her voice, the fear in it rang out loudly. He tried to laugh and told her he was perfectly fine, except for worry about her. He made up a story about lying on his bunk, sipping a cool lemonade and listening to soft music, trying to calm his nerves over the prospect of becoming a new father and wondering where he would get the cigars to distribute to the boys.
But she wouldn't believe him. She insisted that he tell her the truth, pleading with him, crying out her love and her fear and her need. At last he told her of the crash, speaking lightly, pointing out that the patrol ship would be back with daylight and all would be well. He didn't mention the fact that he had no body below the neck, but he knew she knew it was worse than he described.
Then she was gone again, for so long a time he thought the operation had started. But the wind still blew raggedly in his ears, and she came back, slowly, but with new vibrancy in her voice. "Andy, you dope," she whispered with a brave attempt at sprightliness. "Why didn't you--tell--me--sooner?" She was gasping, but hurried on. "I can tell the doctor, and he can telephone somebody and they can use the radio and tell the patrol where you are. Oh! Andy--where are you--? Hurry--"
She was going again, and as quickly as he could he told her of the river and the jungle, and where approximately the ship had been just before the crash. Then she was gone and he closed his eyes and let the waves of near-hysterical relief wash over him. He was exhausted, the strain of long concentration had drained his strength, but he could almost feel the nerve ends in his dead body tingling with the exhilaration that sang in his mind. It was the miracle he hadn't dared pray for. It would be the greatest miracle ever performed, and he had almost lost it, almost killed it, almost thrown it away. But Elsie-- He prayed feverishly now, thanking, thanking, and praying for the miracle to really happen and for Elsie and his son to be all right.
* * * * *
Then the wind was roaring blackly in his ears and the wind was turning into a shrieking demon and above it he could hear her wild scream: "They don't believe me! They say I'm delirious. Andy! They're coming with something to put me to sleep. They don't believe me, Andy ..."
It ended. The wind stopped abruptly with her voice. The only things Andy Larson could hear were the blood pounding in his head and the grating of insects singing their last to the approaching dawn. It was all over, and he closed his eyes to the lightening sky. It was all over, the miracle was dead, the miracle never was, he was dead, he never was. Elsie-- He rocked his head back and forth, wanting to cry, to curse and shout out his hatred of life. But nothing would come out, nothing was left.
It was all over. He lay under his memorial, a junk pile of twisted metal, inching his way toward death, the abortion of an abortive miracle, alone, tearless, wifeless, sonless, helpless.
A faint hum drifted to his ears. He looked up, wondering that the dawn had come so soon. The sky was brilliant with light, but still he could not see the patrol ship, knew that it couldn't see him, no matter how close the hum got.
The hum came closer and closer, grew louder, and then he heard her soft laugh and the hum faded away.
"Andy? Aren't you coming?"
He stared at the sky, his eyes bulging, his tongue swollen in his throat. He couldn't see anything, the light was so bright. He thought he must be dreaming--he had heard that people had strange visions when they were dying. But her voice sounded so real.
"Don't worry, honey," she said softly. "Everything is all right now. Come on, we're waiting."
He strained his eyes to see, and the phrase we're waiting struck him just as the other voice let out a cry.
"What--?" he mumbled, stupidly, happily, afraid to believe.
She laughed again, and little pieces of glittering silver tinkled through the gold of the sky. "I guess we'll have to call him Andy, after his father. He was a slow-poke too."
She was there beside him now--or he was beside her--he didn't know which, for he was suddenly free of the great weight that held him down, he had the sensation of floating lightly through the air. But they were together and she was radiant, and he was happier than he had ever thought he could be, even though she couldn't put her arms around him as he wanted her to because her arms were full of his son. His arms weren't full--only his eyes and his throat and his heart--and he put them around her, holding her tightly.
The baby howled a protest, and Elsie, laughed her wonderful laugh again. "He has a good voice, Andy, don't you think?"
"A lovely voice," Andy agreed, and his own voice sounded to him as if he were singing.
THE END
TRADER’S RISK
by Roger Dee
Keeping this cargo meant death--to jettison it meant to make flotsam and jetsam of a world!
The Ciriimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic three-body system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise balance, when the Canthorian Zid broke out of its cage in the specimen hold.
Of the ship's social quartet, Chafis One and Two were asleep at the moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up to a soft and plum-colored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to teleport to safety.
Chafis Three and Four, on psi shift in the forward control cubicle, might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows had not warned them in time. As it was, they had barely time to teleport themselves to the after hold, as far as possible from immediate danger, and to consider the issue while the Zid lunged about the ship in search of them with malignant cries and a great shrieking of claws on metal.
Their case was the more desperate because the Chafis were professional freighters with little experience of emergency. Hauling a Zid from Canthorian jungles to a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment so long as the cage held, but with the raging brute swiftly smelling them out, they were helpless to catch and restrain it.
When the Zid found them, they had no other course but to teleport back to the control cubicle and wait until the beast should snuff them down again. The Zid learned quickly, so quickly that it was soon clear that its physical strength would far outlast their considerable but limited telekinetic ability.
Still they possessed their share of owlish Ciriimian logic and hit soon enough upon the one practical course--to jettison the Zid on the nearest world demonstrably free of intelligent life.
* * * * *
They worked hurriedly, between jumps fore and aft. Chafi Three, while they were still in the control cubicle, threw the ship out of hyperdrive within scant miles of the neighboring sun's single planet. Chafi Four, on the next jump, scanned the ship's charts and identified the system through which they traveled.
Luck was with them. The system had been catalogued some four Ciriimian generations before and tagged: Planet undeveloped. Tranquil marine intelligences only.
The discovery relieved them greatly for the reason that no Ciriimian, even to save his own feathered skin, would have set down such a monster as the Zid among rational but vulnerable entities.
The planet was a water world, bare of continents and only sparsely sprinkled with minor archipelagoes. The islands suited the Chafis' purpose admirably.
"The Zid does not swim," Chafi Four radiated. "Marooned, it can do no harm to marine intelligences."
"Also," Chafi Three pointed out as they dodged to the control cubicle again just ahead of the slavering Zid, "we may return later with a Canthorian hunting party and recover our investment."
Closing their perception against the Zid's distracting ragings, they set to work with perfect coordination.
Chafi Three set down the ship on an island that was only one of a freckling chain of similar islands. Chafi Four projected himself first to the opened port; then, when the Zid charged after him, to the herbivore-cropped sward of tropical setting outside.
The Zid lunged out. Chafi Four teleported inside again. Chafi Three closed the port. Together they relaxed their perception shields in relief--
Unaware in their consternation that they committed the barbarous lapse of vocalizing, they twittered aloud when they realized the extent of their error.
Above the far, murmurous whisper of expected marine cerebration there rose an uncoordinated mishmash of thought from at least two strong and relatively complex intelligences.
"Gas-breathing!" Chafi Four said unbelievingly. "Warm-blooded, land-dwelling, mammalian!"
"A Class Five culture," Chafi agreed shakenly. His aura quivered with the shock of betrayal. "The catalogue was wrong."
Ironically, their problem was more pressing now than before. Unless checked, the Zid would rapidly depopulate the island--and, to check it, they must break a prime rule of Galactic protocol in asking the help of a new and untested species.
But they had no choice. They teleported at once into the presence of the two nearby natives--and met with frustration beyond Ciriimian experience.
* * * * *
Jeff Aubray glimpsed the Ciriimian ship's landing because the morning was a Oneday, and on Onedays his mission to the island demanded that he be up and about at sunrise.
For two reasons: On Onedays, through some unfailing miracle of Calaxian seamanship, old Charlie Mack sailed down in his ancient Island Queen from the township that represented colonial Terran civilization in Procynian Archipelago 147, bringing supplies and gossip to last Jeff through the following Tenday. The Queen would dock at Jeff's little pier at dawn; she was never late.
Also on Onedays, necessarily before Charlie Mack's visit, Jeff must assemble his smuggled communicator--kept dismantled and hidden from suspicious local eyes--and report to Earth Interests Consulate his progress during the cycle just ended. The ungodly hour of transmission, naturally, was set to coincide with the closing of the Consul's field office halfway around the planet.
So the nacreous glory of Procyon's rising was just tinting the windows of Jeff's cottage when he aligned and activated his little communicator on his breakfast table. Its three-inch screen lighted to signal and a dour and disappointed Consul Satterfield looked at him. Behind Satterfield, foreshortened to gnomishness by the pickup, lurked Dr. Hermann, Earth Interests' resident zoologist.
"No progress," Jeff reported, "except that the few islanders I've met seem to be accepting me at last. A little more time and they might let me into the Township, where I can learn something. If Homeside--"
"You've had seven Tendays," Satterfield said. "Homeside won't wait longer, Aubray. They need those calm-crystals too badly."
"They'll use force?" Jeff had considered the possibility, but its immediacy appalled him. "Sir, these colonists had been autonomous for over two hundred years, ever since the Fourth War cut them off from us. Will Homeside deny their independence?"
His sense of loss at Satterfield's grim nod stemmed from something deeper than sympathy for the islanders. It found roots in his daily rambles over the little island granted him by the Township for the painting he had begun as a blind to his assignment, and in the gossip of old Charlie Mack and the few others he had met. He had learned to appreciate the easy life of the islands well enough to be dismayed now by what must happen under EI pressure to old Charlie and his handful of sun-browned fisherfolk.
* * * * *
Unexpectedly, because Jeff had not considered that it might matter, he was disturbed by the realization that he wouldn't be seeing Jennifer, old Charlie Mack's red-haired niece, once occupation began. Jennifer, who sailed with her uncle and did a crewman's work as a matter of course, would despise the sight of him.
The Consul's pessimism jolted Jeff back to the moment at hand.
"Homeside will deny their autonomy, Aubray. I've had a warp-beam message today ordering me to move in."
The situation was desperate enough at home, Jeff had to admit. Calaxian calm-crystals did what no refinement of Terran therapeutics had been able to manage. They erased the fears of the neurotic and calmed the quiverings of the hypertensive--both in alarming majority in the shattering aftermath of the Fourth War--with no adverse effects at all. Permanent benefit was slow but cumulative, offering for the first time a real step toward ultimate stability. The medical, psychiatric and political fields cried out for crystals and more crystals.
"If the islanders would tell us their source and let us help develop it," Satterfield said peevishly, "instead of doling out a handful of crystals every Tenday, there wouldn't be any need of action. Homeside feels they're just letting us have some of the surplus."
"Not likely," Jeff said. "They don't use the crystals themselves."
Old Dr. Hermann put his chin almost on the Consul's shoulder to present his wizened face to the scanner.
"Of course they don't," he said. "On an uncomplicated, even simple-minded world like this, who would need crystals? But maybe they fear glutting the market or the domination of outside capital coming in to develop the source. When people backslide, there's no telling what's on their minds and we have no time to waste negotiating or convincing them. In any case, how could they stop us from moving in?" Abruptly he switched to his own interest. "Aubray, have you learned anything new about the Scoops?"
"Nothing beyond the fact that the islanders don't talk about them," Jeff said. "I've seen perhaps a dozen offshore during the seven cycles I've been here. One usually surfaces outside my harbor at about the time old Charlie Mack's supply boat comes in."
Thinking of Charlie Mack brought a forced end to his report. "Charlie's due now. I'll call back later."
He cut the circuit, hurrying to have his communicator stowed away before old Charlie's arrival--not, he thought bitterly, that being found out now would make any great difference.
* * * * *
Stepping out into the brief Calaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the Ciriimian ship's landing before the island forest of palm-ferns cut it off from sight. Homeside hadn't been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been ordered to send.
"They didn't waste any time," Jeff growled. "Damn them."
He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded Procyon's rising and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the Island Queen hove into view.
She was a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of anxieties made calm-crystals so desperately necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people without need of the calm-crystals they traded.
Something odd in the set of the Queen's sails puzzled him until he identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not with the wind, but against.
They fell slack, however, when the Queen reached his channel and flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind and nose her cautiously into the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently--a change of wind or some crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack's to take advantage of the current.
Jeff had just set foot on his dock when it happened. Solid as the planking itself, and all but blocking off his view of the nearing Island Queen, stood a six-foot owl.
It was wingless and covered smoothly with pastel-blue feathers. It stood solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet and stared at him out of square violet eyes.
Involuntarily he took a backward step, caught his heel on a sun-warped board and sat down heavily.
"Well, what the devil!" he said inanely.
The owl winced and disappeared without a sound.
* * * * *
Jeff got up shakily and stumbled to the dock's edge. A chill conviction of insanity gripped him when he looked down on water lapping smooth and undisturbed below.
"I've gone mad," he said aloud.
Out on the bay, another catastrophe just as improbable was in progress.
Old Charlie Mack's Island Queen had veered sharply off course, left the darker-green stripe of safe channel and plunged into water too shallow for her draft. The boat heeled on shoal sand, listed and hung aground with wind-filled sails holding her fast.
The Scoop that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented. It floated like a glistening plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers undulating gently on the water and its great filmy eyes all but closed against the slanting glare of morning sun.
It was more than vast. The thing must weigh, Jeff thought dizzily, thousands or maybe millions of tons.
He thought he understood the Queen's grounding when he saw the swimmer stroking urgently toward his dock. Old Charlie had abandoned his boat and was swimming in to escape the Scoop.
But it wasn't Charlie. It was Jennifer, Charlie's niece.
Jeff took the brown hand she put up and drew her to the dock beside her, steadying her while she shook out her dripping red hair and regained her breath. Sea water had plastered Jennifer's white blouse and knee-length dungarees to her body like a second skin, and the effect bordered on the spectacular.
"Did you see it?" she demanded.
Jeff wrestled his eyes away to the Scoop that floated like a purple island in the bay.
"A proper monster," he said. "You got out just in time."
She looked at once startled and impatient. "Not the Scoop, you idiot. The owl."
It was Jeff's turn to stare. "Owl? There was one on the dock, but I thought--"
"So did I." She sounded relieved. "But if you saw one, too.... All of a sudden, it was standing there on deck beside me, right out of nowhere. I lost my head and grounded the Queen, and it vanished. The owl, I mean."
"So did mine," Jeff said.
While they stood marveling, the owls came back.
* * * * *
Chafis Three and Four were horribly shaken by the initial attempt at communication with the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian experience had prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually perceptive yet isolated from each other.
"Communication by audible symbol," Chafi Three said. He ruffled his feathers in a shudder. "Barbarous!"
"Atavistic," agreed Chafi Four. "They could even lie to each other."
But their dilemma remained. They must warn the natives before the prowling Zid found them, else there would be no natives.
"We must try again," Three concluded, "searching out and using the proper symbols for explanation."
"Vocally," said Chafi Four.
They shuddered and teleported.
* * *
The sudden reappearance of his hallucination--doubled--startled Jeff no more than the fact that he seemed to be holding Jennifer Mack tightly. Amazingly, his immediate problem was not the possibility of harm from the owls, but whether he should reassure Jennifer before or after releasing her.
He compromised by leaving the choice to her. "They can't be dangerous," he said. "There are no land-dwelling predators on Calaxia. I read that in--"
"Nothing like that ever hatched out on Calaxia," said Jennifer. She pulled free of him. "If they're real, they came from somewhere else."
The implication drew a cold finger down Jeff's spine. "That would mean other cultures out here. And in all our years of planet-hunting, we haven't found one."
Memory chilled him further.
"A ship landed inland a few minutes ago," he said. "I took it for an EI consulate craft, but it could have been--"
The Ciriimians caught his mental image of the landing and intervened while common ground offered.
"The ship was ours," said Chafi Three. He had not vocalized since fledgling days and his voice had a jarring croak of disuse. "Our Zid escaped its cage and destroyed two of us, forcing us to maroon it here for our own safety. Unfortunately, we trusted our star manual's statement that the planet is unpopulated."
The Terrans drew together again.
"Zid?" Jeff echoed.
Chafi Four relieved his fellow of the strain by trying his own rusty croak. "A vicious Canthorian predator, combing the island at this moment for prey. You must help us to recapture it."
"So that you may identify it," Chafi Three finished helpfully, "the Zid has this appearance."
His psi projection of the Zid appeared on the dock before them with demoniac abruptness--crouched to leap, twin tails lashing and its ten-foot length bristling with glassy magenta bristles. It had a lethal pair of extra limbs that sprang from the shoulders to end in taloned seizing-hands, and its slanted red eyes burned malevolently from a snouted, razor-fanged face.
It was too real to bear. Jeff stepped back on suddenly unreliable legs. Jennifer fainted against him and the unexpected weight of her sent them both sprawling to the dock.
"We lean on weak reeds," Chafi Three said. "Creatures who collapse with terror at the mere projection of a Zid can be of little assistance in recapturing one."
Chafi Four agreed reluctantly. "Then we must seek aid elsewhere."
* * * * *
When Jeff Aubray pulled himself up from the planking, the apparitions were gone. His knees shook and perspiration crawled cold on his face, but he managed to haul Jennifer up with him.
"Come out of it, will you?" he yelled ungallantly in her ear. "If a thing like that is loose on the island, we've got to get help!"
* * * * *
Jennifer did not respond and he slapped her, until her eyes fluttered angrily.
"There's an EI communicator in my cabin," Jeff said. "Let's go."
Memory lent Jennifer a sudden vitality that nearly left Jeff behind in their dash for the cottage up the beach.
"The door," Jeff panted, inside. "Fasten the hurricane bolt. Hurry."
While she secured the flimsy door, he ripped through his belongings, aligning his EI communicator again on his breakfast table. Finding out where the islanders got their calm-crystals had become suddenly unimportant; just then, he wanted nothing so much as to see a well-armed patrol ship nosing down out of the Calaxian sunrise.
He was activating the screen when Jennifer, in a magnificent rage in spite of soaked blouse and dungarees, advanced on him.
"You're an Earth Interests spy after all," she accused. "They said in the Township you are no artist, but Uncle Charlie and I--"
Jeff made a pushing motion. "Keep away from me. Do you want that devil tearing the cabin down around us?"
She fell quiet, remembering the Zid, and he made his call. "Aubray, Chain 147. Come in, Consulate!"
There was a sound of stealthy movement outside the cabin and he flicked sweat out of his eyes with a hand that shook.
"EI, for God's sake, come in! I'm in trouble here!"
The image on his three-inch screen was not Consul Satterfield's but the startled consulate operator's. "Trouble?"
Jeff forced stumbling words into line. The EI operator shook his head doubtfully.
"Consul's gone for the day, Aubray. I'll see if I can reach him."
"He was about to send out an EI patrol ship to take over here in the islands," Jeff said. "Tell him to hurry it!"
He knew when he put down the microphone that the ship would be too late. EI might still drag the secret of the calm-crystal source out of the islanders, but Jeff Aubray and Jennifer Mack wouldn't be on hand to witness their sorry triumph. The flimsy cabin could not stand for long against the sort of brute the owls had shown him, and there was no sort of weapon at hand. They couldn't even run.
"There's something outside," Jennifer said in a small voice.
Her voice seemed to trigger the attack.
* * * * *
The Zid lunged against the door with a force that cracked the wooden hurricane bolt across and opened a three-inch slit between leading edge and lintel. Jeff had a glimpse of slanted red eyes and white-fanged snout before reflex sent him headlong to shoulder the door shut again.
"The bunk," he panted at Jennifer. "Shove it over."
Between them, they wedged the bunk against the door and held it in place. Then they stood looking palely at each other and waiting for the next attack.
It came from a different quarter--the wide double windows that overlooked the bay. The Zid, rearing upright, smashed away the flimsy rattan blinds with a taloned seizing-hand and looked redly in at them.
Like a man in a dream, Jeff caught up his communicator from the table and hurled it. The Zid caught it deftly, sank glistening teeth into the unit and demolished it with a single snap.
Crushed, the rig's powerful little battery discharged with a muffled sputtering and flashing of sparks. The Zid howled piercingly and dropped away from the window.
That gave Jeff time enough to reach the storm shutters and secure them--only to rush again with Jennifer to their bunk barricade as the Zid promptly renewed its ferocious attack on the door.
He flinched when Jennifer, to be heard above the Zid's ragings, shouted in his ear: "My Scoop should have the Queen afloat by now. Can we reach her?"
"Scoop?" The Zid's avid cries discouraged curiosity before it was well born. "We'd never make it. We couldn't possibly outrun that beast."
The Zid crashed against the door and drove it inches ajar, driving back their barricade. One taloned paw slid in and slashed viciously at random. Jeff ducked and strained his weight against the bunk, momentarily pinning the Zid's threshing forelimb.
Chafi Three chose that moment to reappear, nearly causing Jeff to let go the bunk and admit the Zid.
"Your female's suggestion is right," the Ciriimian croaked. "The Zid does not swim. Four and I are arranging escape on that premise."
The Zid's talons ripped through the door, leaving parallel rows of splintered breaks. Both slanted red eyes glared in briefly.
"Then you'd damn well better hurry," Jeff panted. The door, he estimated, might--or might not--hold for two minutes more.
The Ciriimian vanished. There was a slithering sound in the distance that sounded like a mountain in motion, and with it a stertorous grunting that all but drowned out the Zid's cries. Something nudged the cottage with a force that all but knocked it flat.
"My Scoop!" Jennifer exclaimed. She let go the barricade and ran to the window to throw open the storm shutters. "Never mind the door. This way, quick!"
* * * * *
She scrambled to the window sill and jumped. Numbly, Jeff saw her suspended there, feet only inches below the sill, apparently on empty air. Then the door sagged again under the Zid's lungings and he left the bunk to follow Jennifer.
He landed on something tough and warm and slippery, a monstrous tail fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat purplish acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and enigmatic tendrils. The Scoop, he saw, and only half believed it, had wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. It had reversed its unbelievable length to keep the head submerged, and at the same time had backed out of the water until its leviathan tail spanned the hundred-odd yards of sloping beach from surf to cabin.
Just ahead of him, Jennifer caught an erect fin-spine and clung with both arms. "Hang on! We're going--"
The Scoop contracted itself with a suddenness that yanked them yards from the cottage and all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the surf, the shallows boiled whitely where the Scoop fought for traction to draw its grounded bulk into the water.
Jeff looked back once to see the Zid close the distance between and spring upward to the tail fluke behind him. He had an instant conviction that the brute's second spring would see him torn to bits, but the Scoop at the moment found water deep enough to move in earnest. The Zid could only sink in all six taloned limbs and hold fast.
The hundred-odd yards from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The Scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow that sent the Island Queen reeling and all but foundered her.
Jeff was dislodged instantly and sank like a stone.
He came up, spouting water and fighting for breath, to find himself a perilous twenty feet from the Zid. The Zid, utterly out of its element, screamed hideously and threshed water to froth, all its earlier ferocity vanished under the imminent and unfamiliar threat of drowning. Jeff sank again and churned desperately to put distance between them.
He came up again, nearly strangled, to find that either he or the Zid had halved the distance between them. They were all but eye to eye when Jennifer caught him and towed him away toward the doubtful safety of the Island Queen.
Chafis Three and Four appeared from nowhere and stood solemnly by while the Zid weakened and sank with a final gout of bubbles.
"We must have your friend's help," Chafi Three said to Jennifer then, "to recover our investment."
Jeff wheeled on him incredulously. "Me go down there after that monster? Not on your--"
"He means the Scoop," Jennifer said. "They brought it ashore to help us out of the cabin. Why shouldn't it help them now?"
* * * * *
The Scoop came up out of the water so smoothly that the Island Queen hardly rocked, dangling the limp form of the Zid from its great rubbery lips like a drowned kitten.
"Here," Jennifer said.
The Scoop touched its vast face to the Queen's rail and dropped the unconscious body to the deck. The Zid twitched weakly and coughed up froth and water.
Jeff backed away warily. "Damn it, are we going through all that again? Once it gets its wind back--"
Chafi Three interrupted him this time. "The crystal now. We must have it to quiet the Zid until it is safely caged again."
Jennifer turned suddenly firm. "No. I won't let this EI informer know about that."
The Ciriimians were firmer.
"It will not matter now. Galactic Adjustment will extend aid to both Calaxia and Terra, furnishing substitutes for the crystals you deal in. There will be no loss to either faction."
"No loss?" Jennifer repeated indignantly. "But then there won't be any demand for our crystals! We'll lose everything we've gained."
"Not so," Chafi Three assured her. "Galactic will offer satisfactory items in exchange, as well as a solution to Terra's problems."
The Scoop, sensing Jennifer's surrender, slid its ponderous bulk nearer and opened its mouth, leaving half an acre of lower jaw resting flush with the Island Queen's deck. Without hesitation, Jennifer stepped over the rail and vanished into the yawning pinkish cavern beyond.
Appalled, Jeff rushed after her. "Jennifer! Have you lost your mind?"
"There is no danger," Chafi Three assured him. "Scoops are benevolent as well as intelligent, and arrived long ago at a working agreement with the islanders. This one has produced a crystal and is ready to be relieved of it, else it would not have attached itself to a convenient human."
Jeff said dizzily, "The Scoops make the crystals?"
"There is a nidus just back of a fleshy process in its throat, corresponding to your own tonsils, which produces a crystal much as your Terran oyster secretes a pearl. The irritation distracts the Scoops from their meditations--they are a philosophical species, though not mechanically progressive--and prompts them to barter their strength for a time to be rid of it."
* * * * *
Jennifer reappeared with a walnut-sized crystal in her hand and vaulted across the rail.
"There goes another Scoop," she said resignedly. "The Queen will have to tack with the wind for a while until another one shows up."
"So that's why your sails bellied backward when you came in to harbor," said Jeff. "The thing was towing you."
A thin, high streak of vapor-trail needling down toward them from the sunrise rainbow turned the channel of his thought.
"That will be Satterfield and his task force," Jeff told the Chafis. "I think you're going to find yourselves in an argument over that matter of squeezing Terra out of the crystal trade."
They reassured him solemnly.
"Terra has no real need of the crystals. We can offer a tested genetics program that will eliminate racial anxiety within a few generations, and supply neural therapy equipment--on a trade basis, of course--that will serve the crystals' purpose during the interim."
There should be a flaw somewhere, Jeff felt, but he failed to see one. He gave up trying when he found Jennifer eying him with uncharacteristic uncertainty.
"You'll be glad to get back to your patrol work," she said. It had an oddly tentative sound.
Somehow the predictable monotony of consulate work had never seemed less inviting. The prospect of ending his Calaxian tour and going back to a half-barren and jittery Earth appealed to Jeff even less.
"No," he said. "I'd like to stay."
"There's nothing to do but fish and sail around looking for Scoops ready to shed their crystals," Jennifer reminded him. "Still, Uncle Charlie has talked about settling in the Township and standing for Council election. Can you fish and sail, Jeff Aubray?"
The consulate rocket landed ashore, but Jeff ignored it.
"I can learn," he said.
DEAD WORLD
By JACK DOUGLAS
Out on the ice-buried planet, Commander Red Stone led his Free Companions to almost certain death. They died for a dangerous dream that had only one chance in a thousand trillion to come true. Is there a better reason for dying?
... although the most recent star to die, RNAC 89778 in the distant Menelaus galaxy (common name, Menelaus XII), had eight inhabited planets, only some one thousand people of the fifth planet escaped and survived as a result of a computer error which miscalculated the exact time by two years. Due to basic psycho-philo maladjustments the refugees of Menelaus XII-5 are classified as anti-social-types-B-6 and must be considered unstable. All anti-social-types-B-6 are barred from responsible positions in United Galaxies by order of the Inter-Galactic Council.
--Short History of The United Galaxies
* * * * *
Yuan Saltario started it. He was serving in my Company and he was one of them. A Menelaus XII-5 "unstable," and don't ever call that damned little planet by its number if you meet one of them. They call it Nova-Maurania. But you won't meet one of them. Or maybe you will, maybe they did make it. I like to think they did.
There were a lot of them in the Companies in 3078. Restless men. The Companies were the logical place for them. We're still classified anti-social-B-6, too. Every year it's harder to get recruits, but we still have to be careful who we take in. We took Yuan Saltario. There was something about him from the very start.
"Why do you want to join a Free Company?" He was a short, humanoid type with deep black eyes and a thin, lipless mouth that never smiled.
"I'm an anti-social. I like to fight. I want to fight."
"A misfit joining the misfits? A grudge against the Council? It's not good enough, mister, we live on the Council. Try again."
Saltario's black eyes stared without a flicker. "You're Red Stone, Commander of the Red Company. You hate the Council and I hate the Council. You're the ..." Saltario stopped.
I said, "The Traitor of the Glorious War of Survival. You can say it, Saltario."
The lipless mouth was rigid. "I don't think of it that way. I think of a man with personal integrity," Saltario said.
I suppose I should have seen it then, the rock he carried deep inside him. It might have saved thirty thousand good men. But I was thinking of myself. Commander Red Stone of the Red Company, Earthmen. Only we're not all Earthmen now, every year there are fewer recruits, and it won't be long before we die out and the Council will have the last laugh. Old Red Stone, the Traitor of the War of Survival, the little finger of my left hand still missing and telling the Universe I was a very old soldier of the outlawed Free Companies hanging onto life on a rocky planet of the distant Salaman galaxy. Back at the old stand because United Galaxies still need us. In a way it's a big joke. Two years after Rajay-Ben and I had a bellyfull of the Glorious War of Survival and they chased us all the way out here, they turned right around and made the peace. A joke on me, but sometimes I like to think that our runout was the thing that made them think and make peace. When you've been a soldier for thirty-five years you like to win battles, but you like to feel you helped bring peace, too.
* * * * *
I said, "Personal integrity. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? So you like personal integrity? All right, Saltario, are you sure you know what you're getting into? We're 60 million light years from Galaxy Center, 10 million from the nearest United Galaxy city. We've got no comforts, no future, nothing to do but fight. A woman in her right mind won't look at us, if they see you in uniform they'll spit on you, if they catch you out of uniform they'll kill you."
Saltario shrugged. "I like to eat. I've got nowhere to go. All I've got is myself and a big piece of ice I called home."
I nodded. "Okay. We fight small wars for good profits. It's not Earth out here, but we've got four nice suns, plenty of Lukanian whisky Rajay-Ben taught the locals to make, and we're our own masters. The United Galaxies leaves us pretty much alone unless they need us. You do your job, and your job is what I tell you to do, period. You got that straight?"
Saltario very nearly smiled. "It sounds good to me, sir."
"I hope it'll sound good in a year, Saltario, because once you're in you don't get out except feet first. Is that clear? I have life and death rights over you. You owe allegiance to the Red Company and me and to no one else. Got that? Today your best friends are the men of Rajay-Ben's Lukanian Fourth Free Patrol, and your worst enemies are the men of Mandasiva's Sirian O Company. Tomorrow Rajay-Ben's boys may be your worst enemies, and Mandasiva's troops your best friends. It all depends on the contract. A Company on the same contract is a friend, a Company against the contract is an enemy. You'll drink with a man today, and kill him tomorrow. Got it? If you kill a Free Companion without a contract you go to court-martial. If you kill a citizen of the United Galaxies except in a battle under contract I throw you to the wolves and that means you're finished. That's the way it is."
"Yes, sir." Saltario never moved a muscle. He was rigid.
"Right," I said, "get your gear, see the Adjutant and sign the agreement. I think you'll do."
Saltario left. I sat back in my chair and thought about how many non-Earthmen I was taking into the Company. Maybe I should have been thinking about this one single non-Earthman and the something he was carrying inside him, but I didn't, and it cost the Companies thirty thousand men we couldn't afford to lose. We can't afford to lose one man. There are only a hundred Companies now, twenty thousand men each, give or take a few thousand depending on how the last contract went. Life is good in the United Galaxies now that they've disarmed and outlawed all war again, and our breed is dying out faster than it did in the 500 years of peace before the War of Survival. Too many of the old Companions like me went west in the War of Survival. The Galactic Council know they need us, know that you can't change all living creatures into good Galactic citizens overnight, so they let us go on fighting for anyone in the Universe who wants to take something from someone else, or who thinks someone else wants to take something from him. And even the mighty United Galaxies needs guards for expeditions to the unexplored galaxies. But they don't like us and they don't want us. They don't cut off our little fingers anymore, but we have to wear our special black uniforms when we go into United territory under penalty of a quick death. Humane, of course, they just put us to sleep gently and for keeps. And they've got a stockpile of ionic bombs ready at all times in case we get out of hand. We don't have ionic weapons, that's part of the agreement and they watch us. They came close to using them down there in the frozen waste of Menelaus XII, but thirty thousand of us died without ionics. We killed each other. They liked that, even if they didn't like what happened.
* * * * *
Do you know what it means to be lost? Really lost? I'm lost, if that means I know I'll never go back to live on Earth. But I know that Earth is still there to go back to, and I can dream of going home. Yuan Saltario and the other refugees have no home to go back to. They can't even dream. They sat in that one ship that escaped and watched their planet turn into a lifeless ball of ice that would circle dead and frozen forever around its burned-out star. A giant tomb that carried under its thick ice their homes and their fields and their loves. And they could not even hope and dream. Or I did not think they could.
Saltario had been with us a year when we got the contract to escort the survey mission to Nova-Maurania. A private Earth commercial mining firm looking for minerals under the frozen wastes of the dead planet. Rajay-Ben was in on the contract. We took two battalions, one from my Red Company, and one from Rajay-Ben's Lukanian Patrol. My Sub-Commander was Pete Colenso, old Mike Colenso's boy. It all went fine for a week or so, routine guard and patrol. The survey team wouldn't associate with us, of course, but we were used to that. We kept our eyes open and our mouths shut. That's our job, and we give value for money received. So we were alert and ready. But it wasn't the attack that nearly got us this time. It was the cold of the dead planet lost in absolute zero and absolute darkness.
Nova-Maurania was nearly 40 percent uranium, and who could resist that? A Centaurian trading unit did not resist the lure. The attack was quick and hard. A typical Lukanian Patrol attack. My Company was pinned down at the first volley from those damned smoky blasters of the Lukanians. All I could see was the same shimmering lights I had learned to know so well in the War of Survival against Lukania. Someday maybe I'll find out how to see a Lukan, Rajay-Ben has worked with me a long time to help, but when the attack came this time all I could do was eat ice and beam a help call to Rajay-Ben. That Centaurian trading unit was a cheap outfit, they had hired only one battalion of Arjay-Ben's Ninth Lukanian Free Patrol, and Rajay-Ben flanked them right off that planet. I got my boys on their feet and we chased Arjay's men half way back to Salaman with Rajay-Ben laughing like a hyena the whole way.
"Dip me in mud, Red boy, I'd give a prime contract for one gander at old Arjay-Ben's face. He's blowing a gasket!"
I said, "Nice flank job."
Rajay-Ben laughed so hard I could see his pattern of colored light shaking like a dancing rainbow. "I took two Sub-Commanders, wait'll I hit that bullet-head for ransom!"
* * * * *
Then we stopped laughing. We had won the battle, but Arjay-Ben was a crafty old soldier and his sabotage squad had wrecked our engines and our heating units. We were stuck on a frozen planet without heat.
Young Colenso turned white. "What do we do?"
I said, "Beam for help and pray we don't freeze first."
They had missed our small communications reactor unit. We sent out our call, and we all huddled around the small reactor. There might be enough heat out of it to let us live five hours. If we were lucky. It was the third hour when Yuan Saltario began to talk. Maybe it was the nearness of death.
"I was twenty-two. Portario was the leader on our planet. He found the error when we had one ship ready. We had three days. No time to get the other ships ready. He said we were lucky, the other planets didn't have even one ship ready. Not even time for United Galaxies to help. Portario chose a thousand of us to go. I was one. At first I felt very good, you know? I was really happy. Until I found out that my wife couldn't go. Not fit enough. United Galaxies had beamed the standards to us. Funny how you don't think about other people until something hurts you. I'd been married a year. I told them it was both of us or neither of us. I told Portario to tell United Galaxies they couldn't break up a family and to hell with their standards. They laughed at me. Not Portario, the Council. What did they care, they would just take another man. My wife begged me to go. She cried so much I had to agree to go. I loved her too much to be able to stay and see the look on her face as we both died when she knew I could have gone. On the ship before we took off I stood at a port and looked down at her. A small girl trying to smile at me. She waved once before they led her away from the rocket. All hell was shaking the planet already, had been for months, but all I saw was a small girl waving once, just once. She's still here, somewhere down there under the ice."
The cold was slowly creeping into us. It was hard to move my mouth, but I said, "She loved you, she wanted you to live."
"Without her, without my home, I'm as dead as the planet. I feel frozen. She's like that dead sun out there, and I'll circle around her until someone gets me and ends it." Saltario seemed to be seeing something. "I'm beginning to forget what she looked like. I don't want to forget! I can't forget her on this planet. The way it was! It was a beautiful place, perfect! I don't want to forget her!"
Colenso said, "You won't have long to remember."
* * * * *
But Colenso was wrong. My Third Battalion showed up when we had just less than an hour to live. They took us off. The Earth mining outfit haggled over the contract because the job had not been finished and I had to settle for two-third contract price. Rajay-Ben did better when he ransomed Arjay-Ben's two Sub-Commanders. It wasn't a bad deal and I would have been satisfied, except that something had happened to Yuan Saltario.
Maybe it made him realize that he did not want to die after all. Or maybe it turned him space-happy and he began to dream. A dream of his own born up there in the cold of his dead planet. A dream that nearly cost me my Company.
I did not know what that dream was until Saltario came into my office a year later. He had a job for the Company.
"How many men?" I asked.
"Our Company and Rajay-Ben's Patrol," Saltario said.
"Full strength?"
"Yes, sir."
"Price?"
"Standard, sir," Saltario said. "The party will pay."
"Just a trip to your old planet?"
"That's all," Saltario said. "A guard contract. The hiring party just don't want any interference with their project."
"Two full Companies? Forty thousand men? They must expect to need a lot of protecting."
"United Galaxies opposes the project. Or they will if they get wind of it."
I said, "United opposes a lot of things, what's special about this scheme?"
Saltario hesitated, then looked at me with those flat black eyes. "Ionics."
It's not a word you say, or hear, without a chill somewhere deep inside. Not even me and I know a man can survive ionic weapons. I know because I did once. Weapons so powerful I'm one of the last men alive who saw them in action. Mathematically the big ones could wipe out a Galaxy. I saw a small one destroy a star in ten seconds. I watched Saltario for a long time. It seemed a long time, anyway. It was probably twenty seconds. I was wondering if he had gone space-crazy for keeps. And I was thinking of how I could find out what it was all about in time to stop it.
I said, "A hundred Companies won't be enough. Saltario, have you ever seen or heard what an ionic bomb can ..."
Saltario said, "Not weapons, peaceful power."
"Even that's out and you know it," I said. "United Galaxies won't even touch peaceful ionics, too dangerous to even use."
"You can take a look first."
"A good look," I said.
I alerted Rajay-Ben and we took two squads and a small ship and Saltario directed us to a tall mountain that jutted a hundred feet above the ice of Nova-Maurania. I was not surprised. In a way I think I knew from the moment Saltario walked into my office. Whatever it was Saltario was part of it. And I had a pretty good idea what it was. The only question was how. But I didn't have time to think it out any farther. In the Companies you learn to feel danger.
The first fire caught four of my men. Then I was down on the ice. They were easy to see. Black uniforms with white wedges. Pete O'Hara's White Wedge Company, Earthmen. I don't like fighting other Earthmen, but a job's a job and you don't ask questions in the Companies. It looked like a full battalion against our two squads. On the smooth ice surface there was no cover except the jutting mountain top off to the right. And no light in the absolute darkness of a dead star. But we could see through our viewers, and so could they. They outnumbered us ten to one. Rajay-Ben's voice came through the closed circuit.
"Bad show, Red, they got our pants down!"
"You call it," I answered.
"Break silence!"
Surrender. When a Company breaks silence in a battle it means surrender. There was no other way. And I had a pretty good idea that the Council itself was behind O'Hara on this job. If it was ionics involved, they wouldn't ransom us. The Council had waited a long time to catch Red Stone in an execution offense. They wouldn't miss.
But forty of our men were down already.
"Okay," I beamed over the circuit, "break silence. We've had it Rajay."
"Council offense, Red."
"Yeah."
* * * * *
Well, I'd had a lot of good years. Maybe I'd been a soldier too long. I was thinking just like that when the sudden flank attack started. From the right. Heavy fire from the cover of the solitary mountain top. O'Hara's men were dropping. I stared through my viewer. On that mountain I counted the uniforms of twenty-two different Companies. That was very wrong. Whoever Saltario was fronting for could not have the power or the gold to hire twenty-four Companies including mine and Rajay-Ben's. And the fire was heavy but not that heavy. But whoever they were they were very welcome. We had a chance now. And I was making my plans when the tall old man stood up on the small, jutting top of that mountain. The tall old man stood up and a translating machine boomed out.
"All of you! O'Hara's men! Look at this!"
I saw it. In a beam of light on the top of that mountain it looked like a small neutron-source machine. But it wasn't. It was an ionic beam projector.
The old man said, "Go home."
They went. They went fast and silent. And I knew where they were going. Not to Salaman. O'Hara would have taken one look at that machine and be half way to United Galaxy Center before he had stopped seeing it. I felt like taking that trip myself. But I had agreed to look and I would look. If we were lucky we would have forty-eight hours to look and run.
I fell in what was left of my Company behind the men that had saved us. More Company uniforms than I had ever seen in one place. They said nothing. Just walked into a hole in that mountain. Into a cave. And in the cave, at the far end, a door opened. An elevator. We followed the tall old man into the elevator and it began to descend. The elevator car went down for a long time. At last I could see a faint glow far below. The glow grew brighter and the car stopped. Far below the glow was still brighter. We all stepped out into a long corridor cut from solid rock. I estimated that we were at least two hundred miles down and the glow was hundreds of miles deeper. We went through three sealed doors and emerged into a vast room. A room bright with light and filled with more men in Company uniforms, civilians, even women. At least a thousand. And I saw it. The thousand refugees, all of them. Gathered from all the Companies, from wherever they had been in the Galaxies. Gathered here in a room two hundred miles into the heart of their dead planet. A room filled with giant machines. Ionic machines. Highly advanced ionic power reactors.
The old man stood in front of his people and spoke. "I am Jason Portario, I thank you for coming."
I broke in, "Ionic power is an execution offense. You know that. How the hell did you get all this ..."
"I know the offense, Commander," Portario said, "and I know you. You're a fair man. You're a brave man. It doesn't matter where we got the power, many men are dead to get it, but we have it, and we will keep it. We have a job to do."
I said, "After that stunt out there you've about as much chance as a snowball in hell. O'Hara's half way to Galaxy Center. Look, with a little luck we get you out to Salaman. If you leave all this equipment I might be able to hide you until it blows over."
* * * * *
The old man shrugged. "I would have preferred not to show our hand, but we had to save you. I was aware that the Council would find us out sooner or later, they missed the ionic material a month ago. But that is unimportant. The important matter is will you take our job? All we need is another two days, perhaps three. Can you hold off an attack for that long?"
"Why?" I asked.
Portario smiled. "All right, Commander, you should know all we plan. Sit down, and let me finish before you speak."
I sat. Rajay-Ben sat. The agitation of his colored lights showed that he was as disturbed as I was. The thousand Nova-Mauranians stood there in the room and watched us. Yuan Saltario stood with his friends. I could feel his eyes on me. Hot eyes. As if something inside that lost man was burning again. Portario lighted a pipe. I had not seen a pipe since I was a child. The habit was classified as ancient usage in the United Galaxies. Portario saw me staring. He held his pipe and looked at it.
"In a way, Commander," the old man said, "this pipe is my story. On Nova-Maurania we liked a pipe. We liked a lot of the old habits. Maybe we should have died with all the others. You know, I was the one who found the error. Sometimes I'm not at all sure my friends here thank me for it. Our planet is dead, Commander, and so are we. We're dead inside. But we have a dream. We want to live again. And to live again our planet must live again." The old man paused as if trying to be sure of telling it right. "We mean no harm to anyone. All we want is our life back. We don't want to live forever like lumps of ice circling around a dead heart. What we plan may kill us all, but we feel it is worth the risk. We have thousands of ionic power reactors. We have blasted out Venturi tubes. We found life still deep in the center of this planet. It is all ready now. With all the power we have we will break the hold of our dead sun and send this planet off into space! We ..."
I said, "You're insane! It can't ..."
"But it can, Commander. It's a great risk, yes, but it can be done, my calculations are perfect! We want to leave this dead system, go off into space and find a new star that will bring life back to our planet! A green, live, warm Nova-Maurania once again!"
Rajay-Ben was laughing. "That's the craziest damned dream I ever sat still for. You know what your chances of being picked up by another star are? Picked up just right? Why ..."
Portario said, "We have calculated the exact initial thrust, the exact tangential velocity, the precise orbital path we need. If all goes exactly, I emphasize, exactly, to the last detail as we have planned it we can do it! Our chances of being caught by the correct star in the absolutely correct position are one in a thousand trillion, but we can do it!"
It was so impossible I began to believe he was right. "If you aren't caught just right?"
Portario's black eyes watched me. "We could burn up or stay frozen and lifeless. We could drift in space forever as cold and dead as we are now and our ionic power won't last forever. The forces we will use could blow the planet apart. But we are going to try. We would rather die than live as walking dead men in this perfect United Galaxies we do not want."
The silence in the room was like a Salaman fog. Thick silence broken only by the steady hum of the machines deep beneath us in the dead planet. A wild, impossible dream of one thousand lost souls. A dream that would destroy them, and they did not care. There was something about it all that I liked.
I said, "Why not get Council approval?"
Portario smiled. "Council has little liking for wild dreams, Commander. It would not be considered as advancing the future of United Galaxies' destiny. Then there are the ionics." And Portario hesitated. "And there is the danger of imbalance, Galactic imbalance. I have calculated carefully, the danger is remote, but Council is not going to take even a remote chance."
Yuan Saltario broke in. "All they care about is their damned sterile destiny! They don't care about people. Well we do! We care about something to live for. The hell with the destiny of the Galaxies! They don't know, and we'll be gone before they do know."
"They know plenty now. O'Hara's beamed them in."
"So we must hurry," Portario said. "Three days, Commander, will you protect us for three days?"
A Council offense punishable by instant destruction with United Galaxies reserve ionic weapons in the hands of the super-secret police and disaster teams. And three days is a long time. I would be risking my whole Company. I heard Rajay-Ben laugh.
"Blast me, Red, it's so damned crazy I'm for it. Let's give it a shot."
I did not know then how much it would really cost us. If I had I might not have agreed. Or maybe I would have, it was good to know people could still have such dreams in our computer age.
"Okay," I said, "beam the full Companies and try to get one more. Mandasiva's Sirian boys would be good. We'll split the fee three ways."
Yuan Saltario said, "Thanks, Red."
I said, "Thank me later, if we're still around."
We beamed the Companies and in twenty minutes they were on their way. Straight into the biggest trouble we had had since the War of Survival. I expected trouble, but I didn't know how much. Pete Colenso tipped me off.
Pete spoke across the light years on our beam. "Mandasiva says okay if we guarantee the payment. I've deposited the bond with him and we're on our way. But, Red, something's funny."
"What?"
"This place is empty. The whole damned galaxy out here is like a desert. Every Company has moved out somewhere."
"Okay," I beamed, "get rolling fast."
There was only one client who could hire all the Companies at one time. United Galaxies itself. We were in for it. I had expected perhaps ten Companies, not three against 97, give or take a few out on other jobs. It gave me a chill. Not the odds, but if Council was that worried maybe there was bad danger. But I'd given my word and a Companion keeps his word. We had one ace in the hole, a small one. If the other Companies were not here in Menelaus yet, they must have rendezvoused at Galaxy Center. It was the kind of "follow-the-book" mistake United would make. It gave us a day and a half. We would need it.
They came at dawn on the second day. We were deployed across five of the dead planets of Menelaus XII in a ring around Nova-Maurania. They came fast and hard, and Portario and his men had at least ten hours work left before they could fire their reactors and pray. Until then we did the praying. It didn't help.
Mandasiva's command ship went at the third hour. A Lukan blaster got it. By the fourth hour I had watched three of my sub-command ships go. A Sirian force beam got one, an Earth fusion gun got another, and the third went out of action and rammed O'Hara's command ship that had been leading their attack against us. That third ship of mine was Pete Colenso's. Old Mike would have been proud of his boy. I was sick. Pete had been a good boy. So had O'Hara. Not a boy, O'Hara, but the next to the last of old Free Companion from Earth. I'm the last, and I said a silent good-bye to O'Hara. By the sixth hour Rajay-Ben had only ten ships left. I had twelve. Five thousand of my men were gone. Eight thousand of Rajay-Ben's Lukans. The Sirians of Mandasiva's O Company were getting the worst of it, and in the eighth hour Mandasiva's second in command surrendered. It would be over soon, too soon. And the dream would be over with the battle. I broke silence.
"Red Stone calling. Do you read me? Commander Stone calling. Request conference. Repeat, request conference."
A face appeared on the inter-Company beam screen. The cold, blank, hard-bitten face of the only Free Company Commander senior to me now that O'Hara was gone, Jake Campesino of the Cygne Black Company. "Are you surrendering, Stone?"
"No. I want to speak to my fellow Companions."
Campesino's voice was like ice. "Violation! You know the rules, Stone. Silence cannot be broken in battle. I will bring charges. You're through, Stone."
I said, "Okay, crucify me later. But hear me now."
Campesino said, "Close silence or surrender."
It was no good. We'd had it. And across the distance of battle Rajay-Ben's face appeared on the screen. The colored lights that were a Lukan's face and I knew enough to know that the shimmering lights were mad. "The hell with them, Red, let's go all the damned way!"
And a new face appeared on the screen. A face I knew too well. First Councillor Roark. "Stone! You've done a lot in your day but this is the end, you hear me? You're defending a madman in a Council crime. Do you realize the risk? Universal imbalance! The whole pattern of galaxies could be destroyed! We'll destroy you for this, Stone. An ionic project without Council authorization."
I said to Campesino, "Five minutes, Commander. That's all."
* * * * *
There was a long blank on the screen, then Campesino's cold face appeared. "Okay, Red, talk. I don't like civilian threats. You've got your five minutes, make it good."
I made it good. I told them of a handful of people who had a dream. A handful of people who wanted their home back. A few lost souls who would rather die trying to live the way they wanted to live than go on living in a world they did not want. And I told them of the great United Galaxies, that had been created to protect the dreams of everyone in it and had forgotten why it had been created. I told them that it did not matter who was right or wrong, because when a man can no longer dream something has gone wrong in the Universe. When I finished, Campesino's face was impassive.
Campesino said, "You heard Commander Stone, men. Close off, Stone, give me a minute to get the vote."
I waited. It was the longest minute of my life.
"You win, Red," Campesino said. He was smiling at me. "Go home, Councillor, battle's over."
The Councillor went. He said there would be hell to pay, and maybe there will be, but I don't think so, they still need us. We lost thirty thousand good men in all the Companies. But when the next dawn came Nova-Maurania was gone. I don't know where they went, or what happened to them. Here in my stronghold I sometimes imagine them safe and rebuilding a green world where they can smoke pipes and live their own lives. And sometimes I imagine them all dead and drifting out there in the infinity of space. I don't think they would mind too much, either way.
THE END
SHOW BUSINESS
by Boyd Ellanby
Here's the behind-the-scenes lowdown on Luna City life and a promoter of Martian dancing girls, vaudeville, and--other things. But remember: stop us if you've heard this one!
Except for old Dworken, Kotha's bar was deserted when I dropped in shortly after midnight. The ship from Earth was still two days away, and the Martian flagship would get in next morning, with seven hundred passengers for Earth on it. Dworken must have been waiting in Luna City a whole week--at six thousand credits a day. That's as steep to me as it is to you, but money never seemed to worry Dworken.
He raised the heavy green lids from his protruding brown eyes as I came in. He waved his tail.
"Sit down and join me," he invited, in his guttural voice. "It is not good for a man to drink alone. But I haf no combany in dis by-de-gods-deserted hole. A man must somet'ing be doing, what?"
I sat down in the booth across from my Venusian friend, and stared at him while he punched a new order into the drinkboard.
"For me, another shchikh," he announced. "And for you? De same?"
Against my better judgment, for I knew I'd have plenty to do handling that mob of tourists--the first crowd of the season is always the roughest--tomorrow, I consented. Dworken had already consumed six of the explosive things, as the empty glasses on the table showed, but he exhibited no effects. I made a mental note, as I'd so often done before, that this time I would not exceed the safe terrestrial limit of two.
"You must be in the money again, drinking imported shchikh," I remarked. "What are you doing in Luna City this time?"
He merely lifted his heavy eyelids and stared at me without expression.
"Na, in de money I am not. Dere are too many chiselers in business. Just when I t'ink I haf a goot t'ing, I am shwindeled. It is too bad." He snorted through his ugly snout, making the Venusian equivalent of a sigh. I knew there was a story waiting behind that warty skin, but I was not sure I wanted to hear it. For the next round of drinks would be on me, and shchikh was a hundred and fifty credits a shot. Still, a man on a Moon assignment has to amuse himself somehow.
So I said, "What's the latest episode in the Dworken soap opera? What is the merchandise this time? Gems? Pet Mercurian fire-insects? A new supply of danghaana?"
"I do not smuggle drugs, dat is a base lie," replied my friend stolidly. He knew, of course, that I still suspected him to be the source of the last load of that potent narcotic, although I had no more proof than did the Planetary Bureau of Investigation.
He took a long pull at his drink before he spoke again. "But Dworken is never down for long. Dis time it is show business. You remember, how I haf always been by de t'eater so fascinated? Well, I decided to open a show here in Luna City. T'ink of all the travelers, bored stiff by space and de emptiness thereof, who pass through here during the season. Even if only half of them go to my show, it cannot fail."
I waited for some mention of free tickets, but none was made. I was about as anxious to see Dworken's show as I was to walk barefoot across the Mare Imbrium, but I asked with what enthusiasm I could force,
"What sort of act are you putting on? Girls?" I shuddered as I recalled the pathetic shop-worn chorus girls that Sam Low had tried to pass off last year on the gullible tourists of the spaceways. That show had lasted ten nights--nine more than it deserved to. There are limits, even to the gullibility of Earth-lubbers.
"Yes, girls," replied Dworken. "But not what you are perhaps t'inking. Martian girls."
* * * * *
This was more interesting. Even if the girls were now a little too old for the stage in the Martian capital, they would still get loud cheers on the Moon. I knew. I started to say so, but Dworken interrupted.
"And not de miserable girls dey buy from de slave traders in Behastin. Dese girls I collected myself, from de country along de Upper Canal."
I repressed my impulse to show my curiosity. It could all be perfectly true--and if it were not the opening night would tell. But it sounded a lot like one of Dworken's taller tales. I had never been able to disprove any one of them, but I found it a little hard to believe that so many improbable things had ever happened to one man. However, I like being entertained, if it doesn't cost me too much, so finally I said,
"I suppose you are going to tell me you ventured out into the interior of Mars, carrying a six weeks' supply of water and oxygen on your back, and visited the Xo theaters on the spot?"
"How did you know? Dat is just what I did," solemnly affirmed my companion. He snorted again, and looked at his glass. It was empty, but he tilted it into his face again in an eloquent gesture. No words were needed: I punched the symbols for shchikh into the drinkboard on my side of the table. Then, after hesitating, I punched the "two in" signal. I must remember, though, that this was my second and last.
His eighth shchikh seemed to instill some animation into Dworken. "I know you feel skepticality--I mean skepticism--after my exploits. You will see tomorrow night dat I speak true."
"Amazing!" I said. "Especially as I just happen to remember that three different expeditions from Earth tried to penetrate more than a hundred kilometers from Behastin, but either they couldn't carry the water and oxygen that far, or they resorted to breathing Mars air, and never came back. And they were Earthmen, not Venusians who are accustomed to two atmospheres of carbon dioxide."
"My vriend, you must not reason: it was so, it always will be so. The brinciple of induction is long exbloded. I did indeed breathe Mars air. Vait! I tell you how."
He took another long swig of shchikh. "Vat your Eart'men did not realize was dat dey cannot acclimate themselves as do we Venusians. You know de character of our planet made adaptability a condition of survival. It is true dat our atmosphere is heavy, but on top of our so-high mountains de air is t'in. We must live everywhere, de space is so few. I first adapted myself on Eart' to live. I was dere a whole year, you vill recollect. Den I go further. Your engineers construct air tanks dat make like de air of mountains, t'in. So, I learn to live in dose tanks. Each day I haf spent one, two, three hours in dem. I get so I can breathe air at one-third the pressure of your already t'in atmosphere. And at one-sixt' the tension of oxygen. No, my vriend, you could not do this. Your lungs burst. But old Dworken, he has done it.
"I take wit' me only some water, for I know de Martians dey not give water. To trade, some miniature kerosene lamps. You know dey got no fuel oil now, only atomics, but dese little lamps dey like for antiques, for sentiment, because their great-grandfathers used dem.
"Well, I walk through Vlahas, and not stop. Too close by the capital. Too much contact with men of odder planets. I walk also through Bhur and Zamat. I come to a small place where dey never see foreigner. Name Tasaaha. Oh, I tell you, ze men of ze odder planets do not know Mars. How delightful, how unsboiled, are ze Martians, once you get away from de people by tourists so sboiled! How wonderful, across the sands to go, free as birds! The so friendly greetings of de Martian men. And de Martian women! Ah!
"Well, in Tasaaha I go to t'eater. Such lovely girls! You shall see. But I saw somet'ing else. That, my friend, you hardly believe!"
Dworken looked down at his empty glass and snorted gently. I took the hint, although for myself I ordered the less lethal Martian azdzani. I was already having difficulty believing parts of his narrative; it would be interesting to see if the rest were any harder.
My companion continued. "They not only have de chorus, which you haf seen on Earth, imported from Mars--and such a chorus! Such girls! But they had somet'ing else."
"You recall your terrestrial history? Once your ancestors had performers on the stage who did funny motions and said amusing remarks, de spectators to make laugh. I t'ink you called it 'vaudeville.' Well, on Mars they have also vaudeville!" He paused, and looked at me from under half-shut eyelids, and grinned widely to show his reptilian teeth.
I wondered if he'd really found something new. I would even be willing to pay for a glimpse of Martian vaudeville. I wondered if my Martian was too rusty for me to understand jokes in the spoken lingo.
"They haf not only men and women telling jokes. They haf trained animals acting funny!" Dworken went on.
This was too much. "I suppose the animals talked, too?" I said sarcastically. "Do they speak Earth or Martian?"
He regarded me approvingly. "My friend, you catch on quick." He raised a paw. "Now, don't at conclusions jump. Let me exblain. At first, I did not believe it either.
"Dey sprang it with no warning. Onto de stage came a tllooll (you know him, I t'ink), and a shiyooch'iid. The shiyooch'iid was riding a bicycle--I mean a monocle. One wheel. The tllooll moved just as awkward as he always does, and tried to ride a tandem four-wheeled vehicle which had been especially for him made."
In spite of my resolve, I chuckled. The picture of a tllooll trying to ride a four-wheeled bicycle, pumping each of his eight three-jointed legs up and down in turn, while maintaining his usual supercilious and indifferent facial expression, was irresistibly funny.
"Wait!" said my friend, and again raised a paw. "You have as yet not'ing heard. They make jokes at same time. De shiyooch'iid asks de tllooll, 'Who was dat tlloolla I saw you wit' up the Canal?' and the tllooll replies, 'Dat was no tlloolla, dat was my shicai.'"
I doubled up, laughing. Unless you have visited Mars this may not strike you as funny, but I collapsed into a heap. I put my head on the table and wept with mirth.
It seemed like five minutes before I was able to speak. "Oh, no!"
"Yes, yes, I tell you. Yes!" insisted my friend. He even smiled himself.
* * * * *
If you don't know the social system of the Martians there is no point in my trying to explain why the idea of a tllooll's being out with that neuter of neuters, a shicai, is so devastatingly funny. But that, suddenly, was not quite the point.
Did it happen? I had large doubts. Nobody had ever heard a tllooll make any sort of a sound, and it was generally supposed that they had no vocal chords. And no shiyooch'iid (they somewhat resemble a big groundhog, and live in burrows along the canals of Mars) had ever been heard to make any noise except a high-pitched whistle when frightened.
"Now, just a minute, Dworken," I said.
"I know, my vriend. I know. You t'ink it is impossible. You t'ink the talking is faked. So I t'ought too. But vait."
It seems Dworken had inquired among the audience as to who owned the performing animals. The local Martians were not as impressed as he was with the performance, but they guided him to the proprietor of the trained animal act. He was a young Martian, hawk-nosed, with flashing black eyes, dusky skin, and curly hair.
"So I say to him, dis Martian," Dworken continued, "'If your act on the level is, I buy.' I had three small diamonds with," he explained.
"But de Martian was hard to deal wit'. First, he said he vould not sell his so-valuable and so-beloved animals. De only talking animals on Mars, he said--de liar! At long last I get him to make a price. But, on condition dat he bring ze animals around to my inn in the morning, for a private audition."
"I suppose," I interrupted, "you were beginning to have some doubts as to the Martian's good faith? After all, a talking tllooll and a talking shiyooch'iid all at one time is quite a lot to ask. I would have--"
"Blease, vriend, blease!" interrupted my companion. "Do you not t'ink old Dworken knows dese things? Of course he does! I t'ink. De owner, he is pulling a fake, I guess. I know dat animals do not really talk.
"Next morning, I t'ink he no show up. But no, I am mistaken. Bromptly at nine o'clock he come to my inn with a little dogcart, wit' de animals. He puts dem on de stage in de bar of de inn. They act like before."
"But they didn't talk, of course?"
"Oh, my vriend, dat's where you are wrong. Dey talk like nobotty's business. De jokes are funnier than ever. Even dirtier, maybe. But Dworken is not fooled. He t'ink. 'Aha!' I say to de Martian, 'You fake this, what? De animals not talk. Suppose you have them do de act while you outside stay, what?' Then I t'ink I have him.
"Ze Martian tear his curly hair, flash his black eyes. He takes insult that I t'ink he is fake. 'Name of de Martian gods!' he cry. But at last he agree to go away, and tell animals to go ahead."
"Dworken, you were a sap to string along with him even that far," I said wearily. "I hope you hadn't paid the guy any money."
He shook his head. "No, my old and best," he said. "Dworken no fool is, even on Mars. No, no money. But wait! De animals go on without the owner. Same stage business, same talk, same jokes, and even funnier yedt. What?"
I started at Dworken. He did not smile, but finished off the eleventh shchikh--the fifth I had bought him.
"Listen," I said. "Are you sitting there telling me you have a tllooll and a shiyooch'iid that can really talk?"
"You listen, my vriend. Like you, I t'ink something is wrong. I say to Martian owner, 'My vriend, maybe I buy your act, if you tell me how it is done. But you know as well as I do dat it is impossible to dese animals to talk. Tell me what is de trick?'"
Dworken lifted his glass and shook it, as though he could not believe it was empty, then looked at me questioningly. I shook my head. He snorted, looked melancholy, writhed up from his chair and reached for his fur cape.
"Vell, thanks for de drinks," he said.
A dark suspicion crept into my mind, but I could not restrain myself.
"Wait, Dworken!" I shouted. "You can't just leave me up in the air like that! What happened then?"
Dworken snorted into his green handkerchief.
"De Martian admitted it was a fake, after all," he said mournfully. "Can you imachine it? What a chiseler!
"'De shiyooch'iid,' he said, 'can't really talk; de tllooll just t'rows his voice!'"
THE END
DISOWNED
By Victor Endersby
The tragic misadventure of a man to whom the sky became an appalling abyss, drawing him ever upward.
The sky sagged downward, bellying blackly with a sudden summer rain, giving me a vision of catching my train in sodden clothing after the short-cut across the fields, which I was taking in company with my brother Tristan and his fiancée.
The sullen atmosphere ripped apart with an electric glare; our ears quivered to the throbbing sky, while huge drops, jarred loose from the air by the thunder-impact, splattered sluggishly, heavily, about us. Little breezes swept out from the storm center, lifting the undersides of the long grass leaves to view in waves of lighter green. I complained peevishly.
"Ah, mop up!" said Tristan. "You've plenty of time, and there's the big oak! It's as dry under there as a cave!"
"I think that'll be fun!" twittered Alice. "To wait out a thunder-storm under a tree!"
"Under a tree?" I said. "Hardly! I'm not hankering to furnish myself as an exhibit on the physiological effects of a lightning stroke--no, sir!"
"Rats!" said Tristan. "All that's a fairy-tale--trees being dangerous in a thunder-storm!"
* * * * *
The rain now beat through our thin summer clothing, as Tristan seized Alice's hand and towed her toward the spreading shelter. I followed them at first, then began to lag with an odd unwillingness. I had been only half serious in my objection, but all at once that tree exercised an odd repulsion on me; an imaginary picture of the electric fluid coursing through my shriveling nerve-channels grew unpleasantly vivid.
Suddenly I knew I was not going under that tree. I stopped dead, pulling my hat brim down behind to divert the rivulet coursing down the back of my neck, calling to the others in a voice rather cracked from embarrassment. They looked back at me curiously, and Alice began to twit me, standing in the rain, while Tristan desired to know whether we thought we were a pair of goldfish; in his estimation, we might belong to the piscine tribe all right, but not to that decorative branch thereof. To be frank, he used the term "suckers." Feeling exceptionally foolish, I planted myself doggedly in the soaking grass as Alice turned to dash for the tree.
Then the thing happened; the thing which to this hour makes the fabric of space with its unknown forces seem an insecure and eery garment for the body of man. Over the slight rise beyond the tree, as the air crackled, roared and shook under the thunder-blasts, there appeared an object moving in long, leisurely bounds, drifting before the wind, and touching the ground lightly each time. It was about eighteen inches in diameter, globular, glowing with coruscating fires, red, green, and yellow; a thing of unearthly and wholly sinister beauty.
Alice poised with one foot half raised, and shrieked at Tristan, half terrified, half elated at the sight. He wheeled quickly, there under the tree, and slowly backed away as the thing drifted in to keep him company in his shelter. We could not see his face, but there was a stiffness to his figure indicating something like fear. Suddenly things I had read rose into my memory. This was one of those objects variously called "fire-balls," "globe-lightning," "meteors," and the like.
I also recalled the deadly explosive potencies said to be sometimes possessed by such entities, and called out frantically:
"Tristan! Don't touch it! Get away quickly, but don't disturb the air!"
He heard me and, as the object wavered about in the comparative calm under the tree, drifting closer to him, started to obey. But it suddenly approached his face, and seized with a reckless terror, he snatched off his hat and batted at it as one would at a pestilent bee. Instantly there was a blinding glare, a stunning detonation, and a violent air-wave which threw me clear off my feet and to the ground. I sat up blindly with my vision full of opalescent lights and my ears ringing, unable to hear, see, or think.
* * * * *
Slowly my senses came back; I saw Alice struggling upright in the grass before me. She cast a quick glance toward the tree, then, still on her knees, covered her face and shuddered. For a long time, it seemed, I gazed toward the tree without sight conveying any mental effect whatever. Quite aside from my dazed state, the thing was too bizarre; it gave no foothold to experience for the erection of understanding.
My brother's body lay, or hung, or rested--what term could describe it?--with his stomach across the under side of a large limb a few feet above where he had stood. He was doubled up like a hairpin, his abdomen pressed tightly up against this bough, and his arms, legs and head extended stiffly, straightly, skyward.
Getting my scattered faculties and discoordinate limbs together, I made my way to the tree, the gruesome thought entering my mind that Tristan's body had been transfixed by some downward-pointing snag as it was blown up against the limb, and that the strange stiffness of his limbs was due to some ghastly sudden rigor mortis brought on by electric shock. Dazed with horror and grief, I reached up to his clothing and pulled gently, braced for the shock of the falling body. It remained immovable against the bough. A harder tug brought no results either. Gathering up all my courage against the vision of the supposed snag tearing its rough length out of the poor flesh, I leaped up, grasping the body about chest and hips, and hung. It came loose at once, without any tearing resistance such as I had expected, but manifesting a strong elastic pull upward, as though some one were pulling it with a rope; as I dropped back to the ground with it, the upward resistance remained unchanged. Nearly disorganized entirely by this phenomenon, it occurred to me that his belt or some of his clothing was still caught, and I jerked sidewise to pull it loose. It did not loosen, but I found myself suddenly out from under the tree, my brother dragging upward from my arms until my toes almost left the ground. And there was obviously no connection between him and the tree--or between him and anything else but myself, for that matter. At this I went weak; my arms relaxed despite my will, and an incredible fact happened: I found the body sliding skyward through my futile grasp. Desperately I got my hands clasped together about his wrist, this last grip almost lifting me from the earth; his legs and remaining arm streamed fantastically skyward. Through the haze which seemed to be finally drowning my amazed and tortured soul, I knew that my fingers were slipping through one another, and that in another instant my brother would be gone. Gone--where? Why and how?
* * * * *
There was a sudden shriek, and the impact of a frantic body against mine, as Alice, whom I had quite forgotten, made a skyward running jump and clasped the arm frantically to her bosom with both her own. With vast relief, I loosed my cramped fingers--only to feel her silken garments begin to slide skyward against my cheek. It was more instinct than sense which made me clutch at her legs. God, had I not done that! As it was, I held both forms anchored with only a slight pull, waiting dumbly for the next move--quite non compos by this time, I think.
"Quick, Jim!" she shrieked. "Quick, under the tree! I can't hold him long!"
Very glad indeed to be told what to do, I obeyed. Under her direction we got the body under a low limb and wedged up against it, where with our feet both now on the ground, we balanced it with little effort. Feverishly, once more at her initiative, we took off our belts and strapped it firmly; whereupon we collapsed in one another's arms, shuddering, beneath it.
The blasé reader may consider that we here manifested the characters of sensitive weaklings. But let him undergo the like! The supernatural, or seemingly so, has always had power to chill the hottest blood. And here was an invisible horror reaching out of the sky for its prey, without any of the ameliorating trite features which would temper an encounter with the alleged phenomena of ghostland.
For a time we sat under that fatal tree listening to the dreary drench of rain pouring off the leaves, quivering nerve-shaken to the thunderclaps. Lacking one another, we had gone mad; it was the beginning of a mutual dependence in the face of the unprecedented, which was to grow to something greater during the bizarre days to follow.
There was no need of words for each of us to know that the other was struggling frantically for a little rational light on the outre catastrophe in which we were entangled.
It never once occurred to us that my brother might still be alive--until a long shuddering groan sounded above us. In combined horror and joy we sprang up. He was twisting weakly in the belts, muttering deliriously. We unfastened him and pulled him to the ground, where I sat on his knees while she pressed down on his shoulders, and so kept him recumbent, both horrified at the insistent lift of his body under us.
She kissed him frantically and stroked his cheeks, I feeling utterly without resource. He grew stronger, muttered wildly, and his eyes opened, staring upward through the tree limbs. He became silent, and stiffened, gazing fixedly upward with a horror in his wild blue gaze which chilled our blood. What did he see there--what dire other-world thing dragging him into the depths of space? Shortly his eyes closed, and he ceased to mutter.
* * * * *
I took his legs under my arms--the storm was clearing now--and we set out for home with gruesomely buoyant steps, the insistent pull remaining steady. Would it increase? We gazed upward with terrified eyes, becoming calmer by degree as conditions remained unchanged.
When the country house loomed near across the last field, Alice faltered:
"Jim, we can't take him right in like this!"
I stopped.
"Why not?"
"Oh, because--because--it's too ridiculously awful. I don't know just how to say it--oh, can't you see it yourself?"
In a dim way, I saw it. No cultured person cares to be made a center of public interest, unless on grounds of respect. To come walking in in this fashion, buoyed balloon-like by the body of this loved one, and before the members of a frivolous, gaping house party--ah, even I could imagine the mingled horror and derision, the hysterics among the women, perhaps. Nor would it stop there. Rumors--and heaven only knows what distortions such rumors might undergo, having their source in the incredible--would range our social circle like wildfire. And the newspapers, for our families are established and known--no, it wouldn't go.
I tied Tristan to a stile and called up Jack Briggs, our host, from a neighboring house, explained briefly that Tristan had met with an accident, asked him to say nothing, and explained where to bring the machine. In ten minutes he had maneuvered the heavy sedan across the rough wet fields. And then we had another problem on our hands: to let Jack into what had happened without shocking him into uselessness. It was not until we got him to test Tristan's eery buoyancy with his own hands that we were able to make him understand the real nature of our problem. And after that, his comments remained largely gibberish for some time. However, he was even quicker than we were to see the need for secrecy--he had vivid visions of the political capital which opposing newspapers would make of any such occurrence at his party--and so we arranged a plan. According to which we drove to the back of the house, explained to the curious who rushed out that Tristan had been injured by a stroke of lightning, and rushed the closely wrapped form up to his room, feeling a great relief at having something solid between us and the sky. While Jack went downstairs to dismiss the party as courteously as possible, Alice and I tied my brother to the bed with trunk straps. Whereupon the bed and patient plumped lightly but decisively against the ceiling as soon as we removed our weight. While we gazed upward open mouthed, Jack returned. His faculties were recovering better than ours, probably because his affections were not so involved, and he gave the answer at once.
"Ah, hell!" said he. "Pull the damn bed down and spike it to the floor!" This we did. Then we held a short but intense consultation. Whatever else might be the matter, obviously Tristan was suffering severely from shock and, for all we knew, maybe from partial electrocution. So we called up Dr. Grosnoff in the nearest town.
* * * * *
Grosnoff after our brief but disingenuous explanation, threw off the bed covers in a business-like way, then straightened up grimly.
"And may I ask," he said with sarcastic politeness, "since when a strait-jacket has become first-aid for a case of lightning stroke?"
"He was delirious," I stammered.
"Delirious my eye! He's as quiet as a lamb. And you've tied him down so tightly that the straps are cutting right into him! Of all the--the--" He stopped, evidently feeling words futile, and before we could make an effective attempt to stop him, whipped out a knife and cut the straps. Tristan's unfortunate body instantly crashed against the ceiling, smashing the lathing and plaster, and remaining half embedded in the ruins. A low cry of pain rose from Alice. Dr. Grosnoff staggered to a chair and sat down, his eyes fixed on the ceiling with a steady stare--the odd caricature of a man coolly studying an interesting phenomenon.
My brother appeared to be aroused by the shock, struggling about in his embedment, and finally sat up. Up? Down, I mean. Then he stood, on the ceiling, and began to walk! His nose had been bruised by the impact, and I noticed with uncomprehending wonder that the blood moved slowly upward over his lip. He saw the window, and walked across the ceiling to it upside down. There he pushed the top of the window down and leaned out, gazing up into the sky with some sort of fascination. Instantly he crouched on the ceiling, hiding his eyes, while the house rang with shriek after shriek of mortal terror, speeding the packing of the parting guests. Alice seized my arm, her fingers cutting painfully into the flesh.
"Jim," she screamed. "I see it now--don't you? His gravity's all changed around--he weighs up! He thinks the sky's under him!"
The human mind is so constructed that merely to name a thing oddly smooths its unwonted outlines to the grasp of the mind; the conception of a simple reversal of my brother's weight, I think, saved us all from the padded cell. That made it so commonplace, such an everyday sort of thing, likely to happen to anybody. The ordinary phenomenon of gravitation is no whit more mysterious, in all truth, than that which we were now witnessing--but we are born to it!
* * * * *
Dr. Grosnoff recovered in a manner which showed considerable caliber.
"Well," he grunted, "that being the case, we'd best be looking after him. Nervous shock, possible electric shock and electric burns, psychasthenia--that's going to be a long-drawn affair--bruises, maybe a little concussion, and possibly internal injury--that was equivalent to a ten-foot unbroken fall flat on his stomach, and I'll never forgive myself if.... Get me a chair!"
With infinite care and reassuring words, the big doctor with our help pulled my brother down, the latter frantically begging us not to let him "fall" again. Holding him securely on the bed and trying to reassure him, Grosnoff said:
"Straps and ropes won't do. His whole weight hangs in them--they'll cut him unmercifully. Take a sheet, tie the corners with ropes, and let him lie in that like a hammock!"
It took many reassurances as to the strength of this arrangement before Tristan was at comparative peace. Dr. Grosnoff effected an examination by slacking off the ropes until Tristan lay a couple of feet clear of the bed, then himself lay on the mattress face up, prodding the patient over.
The examination concluded, he informed us that Tristan's symptoms were simply those of a general physical shock such as would be expected in the case of a man standing close to the center of an explosion, though from our description of the affair he could not understand how my brother had survived at all. The glimmering of an explanation of this did not come until a long time afterward. So far as physical condition was concerned, Tristan might expect to recover fully in a matter of weeks. Mentally--the doctor was not so sure. The boy had gone through a terrible experience, and one which was still continuing--might continue no one knew how long. We were, said the doctor, up against a trick played by the great Sphinx, Nature, and one which, so far as he knew, had never before taken place in the history of all mankind.
"There is faintly taking shape in my mind," he said, "the beginning of a theory as to how it came about. But it is a theory having many ramifications and involving much in several lines of science, with most of which I am but little acquainted. For the present I have no more to say than that if a theory of causation can be worked out, it will be the first step toward cure. But--it may be the only step. Don't build hopes!"
Looking Alice and me over carefully, he gave us a each a nerve sedative and departed, leaving us with the feeling that here was a man of considerably wider learning than might be expected of a small-town doctor. In point of fact, we learned that this was the case. The specialist has been described as a "man who knows more and more about less and less." In Dr. Grosnoff's mind, the "less and less" outweighed the "more and more."
* * * * *
Tristan grew stronger physically; mentally, he was intelligent enough to help us and himself by keeping his mind as much as possible off his condition, sometimes by sheer force of will. Meantime, Dr. Grosnoff, realizing that his patient could not be kept forever tied in bed, had assisted me in preparing for his permanent care at home. The device was simple; we had just taken his room, remodeled the ceiling as a floor, and fitted it with furniture upside down. Most of the problems involved in this were fairly simple. The matter of a bath rather stumped us for a while, until we hit upon a shower. The jets came up from under Tristan's feet, from the point of view of his perceptions; he told us that one of the strangest of all his experiences was to see the waste water swirl about in the pan over his head, and being sucked up the drain as though drawn by some mysterious magnet.
My brother and I shared a flat alone, so there was no servant problem to deal with. But he was going to need care as well as companionship, and I had to earn my living. For Alice, it was a case where the voice of the heart chimed with that of necessity; and I was best man at perhaps the weirdest marriage ceremony which ever took place on this earth. Held down in bed with the roped sheet, all betraying signs carefully concealed, Tristan was married to Alice by an unsuspecting dominie who took it all for one of those ordinary, though romantic sick-bed affairs.
From the first, Tristan felt better and more secure in his special quarters, and was now able to move about quite freely within his limits; though such were his mental reactions that for his comfort we had to refinish the floor to look like a plaster ceiling, to eliminate as far as possible the upside-down suggestions left in the room, and to keep the windows closely shaded. I soon found that the sight of me, or any one else, walking upside down--to him--was very painful; only in the case of Alice did other considerations remove the unpleasantness.
Little by little the accumulation of experience brought to my mind the full and vivid horror of what the poor lad had suffered and was suffering. Why, when he had looked out of that window into the sky, he was looking down into a bottomless abyss, from which he was sustained only by the frail plaster and planking under his feet! The whole earth, with its trees and buildings, was suspended over his head, seemingly about to fall at any moment with him into the depths; the sun at noon glared upward from the depths of an inferno, lighting from below the somber earth suspended overhead! Thus the warm comfort of the sun, which has cheered the heart of man from time immemorial, now took on an unearthly, unnatural semblance. I learned that he could never quite shake off the feeling that the houses were anchored into the earth, suspended only by the embedment of their foundations in the soil; that trees were suspended from their roots, which groaned with the strain; that soil was held to the bedrock only by its cohesion. He even dreaded lest, during storms, the grip of the muddy soil be loosened, and the fields fall into the blue! It was only when clasped tight in Alice's arms that the horrors wholly left him.
All the reasoning we might use on his mind, or that he himself could bring to bear on it, was useless. We found that the sense of up and down is ineradicably fixed by the balancing apparatus of the body.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, his psychology was undergoing strange alterations; the more I came to appreciate the actual conditions he was living under, the more apparent it seemed to me that he must have a cast-iron mental stamina to maintain sanity at all. But he not only did that; he began to recover normal strength, and to be irked unbearably by his constant confinement. So it came about that he began to venture a little at a time from his room, wandering about on the ceiling of the rest of the house. However, he could not yet look out of windows, but sidled up to them with averted face to draw any blinds that were up.
As he grew increasingly restless, we all felt more and more that the thing could not continue as it was; some way out must be found. We had many a talk with Grosnoff, at last inducing him to speak about the still half-formed theory which he had dimly conceived at the first.
"For a good many decades," he said, "there have been a few who regarded the close analogies between magnetism and gravitational action as symptomatic of a concealed identity between them. Einstein's 'Field Theory' practically proves it on the mathematical side. Now it is obvious that if gravitation is a form of magnetism--and if so it belongs to another plane of magnetic forces than that which we know and use--then the objects on a planet must have the opposite polarity from that of the planet itself. Since the globe is itself a magnet, with a positive and negative pole, its attraction power is not that of a magnet on any plane, because then the human race would be divided into two species, each polarized in the sign opposite to its own pole; when an individual of either race reached the equator, he would become weightless, and when he crossed it, would be repelled into space."
"Lord!" I said. "There would be a plot for one of your scientific fiction writers!"
* * * * *
"I can present you with another," said Dr. Grosnoff. "How do we know whether another planet would have the opposite sign to our own bodies?"
"Well," I chuckled, "they'll find that out soon enough when the first interplanetary expedition tries to land on on of 'em!"
"Hmf!" grunted the medico. "That'll be the least of their troubles!"
"But you said the polarity couldn't be that of a magnet; then what?"
"Don't you remember the common pith ball of your high school physics days? An accumulation of positive electricity repels an accumulation of negative--if indeed we can correctly use 'accumulation' for a negativity--and it is my idea that the earth is the container of a gigantic accumulation of this meta--or hyper-electricity which we are postulating; and our bodies contain a charge of the opposite sign."
"But, Doctor, the retention of a charge of static electricity by a body in the presence of one of the opposite sign requires insulation of the containing bodies; for instance, lightning is a breaking down of the air insulation between the ground and a cloud. In our case we are constantly in contact with the earth, and the charges would equalize."
"Please bear in mind, Jim, that we are not talking about electricity as now handled by man, but about some form of it as yet hypothetical. We don't know what kind of insulation it would require. We may be constitutionally insulated."
"And you think the fire-ball broke down that insulation by the shock to Tristan's system?" I asked. The logic of the thing was shaping up hazily, but unmistakably. "But, then, why don't we frequently see people kiting off the earth as the result of explosions?"
"How do you know they haven't? Don't we have plenty of mysterious disappearances as the result of explosions, and particularly, strangely large numbers of missing in a major war?"
My blood chilled. The world was beginning to seem a pretty awful place.
Grosnoff saw my disturbance, and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
"I'm afraid," he said, smiling, "that I rather yielded to the temptation to get a rise out of you. That suggestion might be unpleasantly true under special circumstances. But I particularly have an eye out for the special capacities of that weird and rare phenomenon, the fire-ball. It isn't impossible that the energy of the fire-ball went into the re-polarization rather than into a destructive concussion--hence Tristan's escape."
"You mean its effect is qualitatively different from that of any other explosion?"
"It may be so. It is known to be an electric conglomeration of some kind--but that's all."
* * * * *
Meantime circumstances were not going well with us; the financial burden of Tristan's support, added to the strain of the situation, was becoming overwhelming. Tristan knew this and felt it keenly; this brought him to a momentous decision. He looked down at us from the ceiling one day with an expression of unusual tenseness, and announced that he was going out permanently, and to take part in the world again.
"I've gotten now so that I can bear to look out of the windows quite well. It's only a matter of time and practise until I can stand the open. After all, it isn't any worse than being a steel worker or steeplejack. Even if the worst came to the worst, I'd rather be burst open by the frozen vacuum of interstellar space than to splash upon a sidewalk before an admiring populace--and people do that every day!"
Dr. Grosnoff, who was present, expressed great delight. His patient was coming along well mentally, at least. Alice sat down, trembling.
"But, good Lord, Tristan," I said, "what possible occupation could you follow?"
"Oh, I've brooded over that for weeks, and I've crossed the Rubicon. I think we're a long way past such petty things as personal pride. Did it ever occur to you that what from one point of view is a monstrous catastrophe, from another is an asset?"
"What in the dickens are you talking about?" I asked.
"I'm talking about the--the--" he gulped painfully--"the stage."
Alice wrung her hands, crying bitterly:
"Wonderful! Splendid! Tristan LeHuber, The World's Unparalleled Upside-Down Man! He Doesn't Know Whether He's On His Head Or His Heels. He's Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can't Upset Him! Vaudeville To-night--The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese Balancers--Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan LeHuber, The Balloon Man--He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!" At last indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in the public eye!
"There are," Alice raved, "two billion people on the earth to-day. Counting three generations per century, there have been about twelve billion of us in the last two hundred years. And out of all those, and all the millions and billions before that, we had to be picked for this loathsome cosmic joke--just little us for all that distinction! Why, oh, why? If our romance had to be spoiled by a tragedy smeared across the billboards of notoriety, why couldn't it have been in some decent, human sort of way? Why this ghastly absurdity?"
"From time immemorial," said Grosnoff, "there have been men who sought to excite the admiration of their fellows, to get themselves worshiped, to dominate, to collect perquisites, by developing some wonderful personal power or another. From Icarus on down, levitation or its equivalent has been a favorite. The ecstatics of medieval times, the Hindu Yogis, even the day-dreaming schoolboy, have had visions of floating in air before the astounding multitudes by a mere act of will. The frequency of 'flying dreams' may indicate such a thing as a possibility in nature. Tradition says many have accomplished it. If so, it was by a reversal of polarity through an act of will. Those who did it--Yogis--believed in successive lives on earth. If they were right about the one, why not the other? Suppose one who had developed that power of will, carried it to another birth, where it lay dormant in the subconscious until set off uncontrolled by some special shock?"
Alice paled.
"Then Tristan might have been--"
"He might. Then again, maybe my brain is addled by this thing. In any case, the moral is: don't monkey with Nature! She's particular."
* * * * *
Tristan's vaudeville scheme was not as easily realized as said. The first manager to whom we applied was stubbornly skeptical in spite of Tristan's appearance standing upside down in stilts heavily weighted at the ground ends; and even after his resistance was broken down in a manner which left him gasping and a little woozy, began to reason unfavorably in a hard-headed way. Audiences, he explained, were off levitation acts. Too old. No matter what you did, they'd lay it to concealed wires, and yawn. Even if you called a committee from the audience, the committee itself would merely be sore at not being able to solve the trick; the audience would consider the committee a fake or merely dumb. And all that would take too much time for an act of that kind.
"Oh, yeh, I know! It's got me goin', all right. But I can't think like me about this sorta thing. I got to think like the audience does--or go outa business!"
After which solid but unprofitable lesson in psychology, we dropped the last vestige of pride and tried a circus sideshow. But the results were similar.
"Nah, the rubes don't wear celluloid collars any more. Ya can't slip any wire tricks over on 'em!"
"But he can do this in a big topless tent, or even out in an open field, if you like."
"Nope--steel rods run up the middle of a rope has been done before."
"Steel rods in a rope which the people see uncoil from the ground in front of their eyes?"
"Well, they'd think of somethin' else, then. I'm tellin' ya, it won't go! Sure, people like to be fooled, but they want it to be done right!"
"Yes!" I sneered. "And a hell of a lot of people have fooled themselves right about this matter, too!"
He looked at me curiously.
"Say, have ya really got somethin' up y'r sleeve?"
"You'd be surprised!"
Thus he grudgingly gave us a chance for a tryout; and he was surprised indeed. But on thinking it over, he decided like the vaudeville man.
"Listen!" said Tristan suddenly, in a voice of desperation. "I'll do a parachute jump into the sky, and land on an airplane!"
"Tristan!" shrieked Alice, in horror.
The circus man nearly lost his cigar, then bit it in two.
"Sa-ay--what the--I'll call that right now! I'll get ya the plane and chute if y'll put up a deposit to cover the cost. If ya do it, we'll have the best money in the tents; if ya don't, I keep the money!"
"If I don't," said Tristan distinctly, "I'll have not the slightest need for the money."
But the airplane idea was out; we could think of no way for him to make the landing on such a swiftly-moving vehicle.
Again Alice solved it.
"If you absolutely must break my heart and put me in a sanitarium," she sobbed, "get a blimp!"
Of course! And that is what we did--on the first attempt coming unpleasantly close to doing just that to Alice.
* * * * *
The blimp captain was obviously skeptical, and betrayed signs of a peeve at having his machine hired for a hoax; but money was money and he agreed to obey our instructions meticulously. His tone was perfunctory, however, despite my desperate attempts to impress him with the seriousness of the matter; and that nonchalance of his came near to having dire consequences.
The captain was supplied with a sort of boat-hook with instructions to steer his course to reach the parachute ropes as it passed him on its upward flight. And he was seriously warned of the fact that, after the chute reached two or three thousand feet, its speed would increase because of the rarefaction of the air; and in case of a miss, it would become constantly harder to overtake. These directions he received with a scornful half smile; obviously he never expected to see the chute open.
We got all set, the blimp circling overhead, Tristan upside down in his seat suspended skyward, a desperately grim look on his face; and Alice almost in collapse. We were all spared the agony of several hundred feet of unbroken fall; the parachute was open on the ground, and rose at a leisurely speed, but too fast at that for the comfort of any of us. I don't think the wondering crowd and the dumbfounded circus people ever saw a stranger sight than that chute drifting upward into the blue. We heard nothing of "hidden wires," then or ever after! The white circle grew pitifully small and forlorn against the fathomless azure; and suddenly we noticed that the blimp seemed to be merely drifting with the wind, making no attempt to get under--or over--Tristan. Our hearts labored painfully. Had the engines broken down? Alice buried her face against my sleeve with a moan.
"I can't look ... tell me!"
I tried to--in a voice which I vainly tried to make steady.
All at once the blimp went into frenzied activity--we learned afterwards that its crew of three, captain included, had been so completely paralyzed by the reality of the event that they had forgotten what they were there for until almost too late. Now we heard the high note of its overdriven engines as it rolled and rocked toward the rising chute. For a moment the white spot showed against its gray side, then tossed and pitched wildly in the wake of the propellers as, driven too hastily and frenziedly, the ship overshot its mark and the captain missed his grab.
* * * * *
I could only squeeze Alice tightly and choke as the aerial objects parted company and the blue gap between them widened. Instantly, avid to retrieve his mistake, the captain swung his craft in a wild careen around and a spiral upward. But he tried to do too many things at a time--make too much altitude and headway both at once. The blimp pitched steeply upward to a standstill, barely moving toward the parachute. Quickly it sloped downward again and gathered speed, nearing the chute, and then making a desperate zoom upward on its momentum. Mistake number three! He had waited too long before using his elevator; and the chute fled hopelessly away just ahead of the uptilted nose of the blimp. I could only moan, and Alice made no sound or movement.
Next we saw the blimp's water ballast streaming earthward in the sun, and it was put into a long, steady spiral in pursuit of the parachute, whose speed--or so it seemed to my agonized gaze--was now noticeably on the increase. The altitude seemed appallingly great; the blimp's ceiling, I knew, was only about twenty thousand; and my brother, even if not frozen to death by that time, would be traveling far faster then than any climbing speed the blimp could make; as his fall increased in speed, the climb of the bag decreased.
At last, with a quiver of renewed hope, I saw the blimp narrowing down its spirals--it was overtaking! Smaller and smaller grew both objects--but so did the gap between them! At last they merged, the tiny white dot and the little gray minnow. In one long agony I waited to see whether the gap would open out again. Lord of Hosts--the blimp was slanting steeply downward; the parachute had vanished!
Then at last I paid some attention to the totally limp form in my arms; and a few minutes later, amid an insane crowd, a pitifully embarrassed and nerve-shaken dirigible navigator was helping me lift my heavily-wrapped, shivering brother from the gondola, while the mechanics turned their attention to the overdriven engines and wracked framing. Did I say "helping me lift?" Such is the force of habit--but verily, a new nomenclature would have to come into being to deal adequately with such a life as my poor brother's!
Tristan seized my hand.
"Jim!" he said through chattering teeth, "I'm cured--cured of the awful fear! That second time he missed, I just gave up entirely; I didn't care any longer. And then somehow I felt such a sense of peace and freedom--there weren't any upside-down things around to torture me, no sense of insecurity. I just was, in a great blue quiet; it wasn't like falling at all; no awful shock to meet, no sickness or pain--just quietly floating along from Here to There, with no particular dividing line between, anywhere. The cold hurt, of course, but somehow it didn't seem to matter, and was getting better when they caught me. But now--I can do things you never even imagined!"
* * * * *
Thus began my brother's real public career--he had arrived. After that he was able to name his own compensation, and shortly during his tours, began to sport a private dirigible of his own, which he often used for jumps between stands. He told me jokingly that it was very fitting transportation for him, as his hundred and sixty pound lift saved quite a bit of expense for helium!
He developed an astonishing set of tricks. After the jump, he would arrive on the field suspended above the dirigible doing trapeze tricks. After that, in the show tent, he would go through some more of them, with a few hair raisers of his own invention, one of which consisted of apparently letting go the rope by accident and shooting skyward with a wild shriek, only to be caught at the end of a fine, especially woven piano wire cable attached to a spring safety belt, the cable being in turn fastened into the end of the rope.
Needless to say, Alice was unable to wax enthusiastic about any of these feats, though she loyally accompanied him in his travels. She would sit in the tent gazing at him with a horrible fascination, and month by month grew thinner and more strained. Tristan felt her stress deeply; but was making money so fast that we all felt that in a short time, if not able to finance the discovery of a cure, at least he could retire and live a safer life. And he found his ideal haven of rest--in a Pennsylvania coal mine! Thus, the project grew in his mind, of buying an abandoned mine and fitting it with comfortable and spacious inverted quarters, environed with fungus gardens, air ferns and the like, plants which could be trained to grow upside down; he emerging only for necessary sun baths.
As time went on, I really grew accustomed to the situation, though seeing less and less of Tristan and Alice; during summers they were on tour, and in winter were quartered in Tristan's coal mine, which had become a reality.
So one summer day when the circus stopped at a small town where I was taking vacation, I was overjoyed at the opportunity to see them. I timed myself to get there as the afternoon performance was over, but arrived a little early, and went on into the untopped tent.
Tristan waved an inverted greeting at me from his poise on his trapeze, and I watched for a few minutes. There was an odd mood about the crowd that day, largely due to a group of loud-mouthed hill-billies from the back country--the sort which is so ignorant as to live in perpetual fear of getting "something slipped over," and so disbelieves everything it is told, looking for something ulterior behind every exterior. Having duly exposed to their own satisfaction the strong man's "wooden dumbbells," the snake charmer's rubber serpents, the fat woman's pillows, and the bearded lady's false whiskers (I don't know what they did about the living skeleton), these fellows were now gaping before Tristan's platform, and growing hostile as their rather inadequate brains failed to cook up any damaging explanation.
"Yah!" yelled a long-necked, flap-eared youth, suddenly. "He's got an iron bar in that rope!" They had come too late to see the parachute drop. Tristan grinned and pulled himself down the rope, which of course fell limp behind him. At this, the crowd jeered and booed the too-hasty youth, who became so resentfully abusive of Tristan that one of the attendants pushed him out of the tent. As he passed me, I caught fragments of wrathy words:
"Wisht I had a ... Show'm whether it's a fake...."
* * * * *
Tristan closed his act by dropping full-length to the end of his invisible wire, then pulled himself down, got into his stilts, and was unfastening the belt, when the manager rushed in with a request that he repeat, for the benefit of a special party just arrived on a delayed train.
"Go on and look at the animals, old man." Tristan called to me. "I'll be with you in about half an hour!"
I strolled out idly, meeting on the way the flap-eared youth, who seemed bent on making his way back into the tent, wearing a mingled air of furtiveness, of triumph, and anticipation. Wondering casually just what kind of fool the lad was planning to make of himself next, I wandered on toward the main entrance--only to be stopped by an appalling uproar behind me. There was a raucous, gurgling shriek of mortal terror; the loud composite "O-o-o!" of a shocked or astonished crowd; a set of fervent curses directed at some one; loud confused babbling, and then a woman's voice raised in a seemingly endless succession of hysterical shrieks. Thinking that an animal had gotten loose, or something of that kind, I wheeled. Unmistakably the racket came from Tristan's own tent.
Cold dread clutching at my heart, and with lead on my boot soles, I rushed frantically back. At the entrance I was held by a mad onrush of humanity for some moments. When I reached the platform, Tristan was not in sight. Then I noticed the long-necked boy sitting on the platform with his face in his hands, shrieking:
"I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to! Damn it, don't touch me! I thought sure it was a fake!"
I saw a new, glittering jack-knife lying on the platform beside the limp, foot-long stub of Tristan's rope. Slowly, frozenly, I raised my eyes. The blue abyss was traceless of any object....
ONE OUT OF TEN
By J. Anthony Ferlaine
There may be a town called Mars in Montana. But little Mrs. Freda Dunny didn't come from there!
I watched Don Phillips, the commercial announcer, out of the corner of my eye. The camera in front of me swung around and lined up on my set.
"... And now, on with the show," Phillips was saying. "And here, ready to test your wits, is your quizzing quiz master, Smiling Jim Parsons."
I smiled into the camera and waited while the audience applauded. The camera tally light went on and the stage manager brought his arm down and pointed at me.
"Good afternoon," I said into the camera, "here we go again with another half hour of fun and prizes on television's newest, most exciting, game, 'Parlor Quiz.' In a moment I'll introduce you to our first contestant. But first here is a special message to you mothers ..."
The baby powder commercial appeared on the monitor and I walked over to the next set. They had the first contestant lined up for me. I smiled and took her card from the floor man. She was a middle-aged woman with a faded print dress and old-style shoes. I never saw the contestants until we were on the air. They were screened before the show by the staff. They usually tried to pick contestants who would make good show material--an odd name or occupation--or somebody with twenty kids. Something of that nature.
I looked at the card for the tip off. "Mrs. Freda Dunny," the card said. "Ask her where she comes from."
I smiled at the contestant again and took her by the hand. The tally light went on again and I grinned into the camera.
"Well, now, we're all set to go ... and our first contestant today is this charming little lady right here beside me. Mrs. Freda Dunny." I looked at the card. "How are you, Mrs. Dunny?"
"Fine! Just fine."
"All set to answer a lot of questions and win a lot of prizes?"
"Oh, I'll win all right," said Mrs. Dunny, smiling around at the audience.
The audience tittered a bit at the remark. I looked at the card again.
"Where are you from, Mrs. Dunny?"
"Mars!" said Mrs. Dunny.
"Mars!" I laughed, anticipating the answer. "Mars, Montana? Mars, Peru?"
"No, Mars! Up there," she said, pointing up in the air. "The planet Mars. The fourth planet out from the sun."
My assistant looked unhappy.
I smiled again, wondering what the gag was. I decided to play along.
"Well, well," I said, "all the way from Mars, eh? And how long have you been on Earth, Mrs. Dunny?"
"Oh, about thirty or forty years. I've been here nearly all my life. Came here when I was a wee bit of a girl."
"Well," I said, "you're practically an Earthwoman by now, aren't you?" The audience laughed. "Do you plan on going back someday or have you made up your mind to stay here on Earth for the rest of your days?"
"Oh, I'm just here for the invasion," said Mrs. Dunny. "When that's over I'll probably go back home again."
"The invasion?"
"Yes, the invasion of Earth. As soon as enough of us are here we'll get started."
"You mean there are others here, too?"
"Oh, yes, there are several million of us here in the United States already--and more are on the way."
"There are only about a hundred and seventy million people in the United States, Mrs. Dunny," I said. "If there are several million Martians among us, one out of every hundred would have to be a Martian."
"One out of every ten!" said Mrs. Dunny. "That's what the boss said just the other day. 'We're getting pretty close to the number we need to take over Earth.'"
"What do you need?" I asked. "One to one? One Martian for every Earthman?"
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Dunny, "one Martian is worth ten Earthmen. The only reason we're waiting is we don't want any trouble."
"You don't look any different from us Earth people, Mrs. Dunny. How does one tell the difference between a Martian and an Earthman when one sees one?"
"Oh, we don't look any different," said Mrs. Dunny. "Some of the kids don't even know they're Martians. Most mothers don't tell their children until they're grown-up. And there are other children who are never told because they just don't develop their full powers."
"What powers?"
"Oh, telepathy, thought control--that sort of thing."
"You mean that Martians can read people's thoughts?"
"Sure! It's no trouble at all. It's very easy really, once you get the hang of it."
"Can you read my mind?" I asked, smiling.
"Sure!" said Mrs. Dunny, smiling up at me. "That's why I said that I'd know the answers. I'll be able to read the answers from your mind when you look at that sheet of paper."
"Now, that's hardly sporting, is it, Mrs. Dunny?" I said, turning to the camera. The audience laughed. "Everybody else has to do it the hard way and here you are reading it from my mind."
"All's fair in love and war," said Mrs. Dunny.
"Tell me, Mrs. Dunny. Why are you telling me about all this? Isn't it supposed to be a secret?"
"I have my reasons," said Mrs. Dunny. "Nobody believes me anyhow."
"Oh, I believe you, Mrs. Dunny," I said gravely. "And now, let's see how you do on the questions. Are you ready?"
She nodded.
"Name the one and only mammal that has the ability to fly," I asked, reading from the script.
"A bat," she said.
"Right! Did you read that from my mind?"
"Oh, yes, you're coming over very clear!" said Mrs. Dunny.
"Try this one," I said. "A princess is any daughter of a sovereign. What is a princess royal?"
"The eldest daughter of a sovereign," she said.
"Correct! How about this one? Is a Kodiak a kind of simple box camera; a type of double-bowed boat; or a type of Alaskan bear?"
"A bear," said Mrs. Dunny.
"Very good," I said. "That was a hard one." I asked her seven more questions and she got them all right. None of the other contestants even came close to her score, so I wound up giving her the gas range and a lot of other smaller prizes.
After we were off the air I followed the audience out into the hall. Mrs. Dunny was walking towards the lobby with an old paper shopping bag under her arm. An attendant was following her with an armful of prizes.
I caught up with her before she reached the door.
"Mrs. Dunny," I said, and she turned around. "I want to talk to you."
"When do I get the gas stove?" she said.
"Your local dealer will send it to you in a few days. Did you give them your address?"
"Yes, I gave it to them. My Philadelphia address, that is. I don't even remember my address at home any more."
"Come, now, Mrs. Dunny. You don't have to keep up that Mars business now that we're off the air."
"It's the truth and I didn't come here just by accident," said Mrs. Dunny, looking over her shoulder toward the attendant who was still holding the prizes. "I came here to see you."
"Me?"
Mrs. Dunny set the paper bag down on the floor and dug down into her pocketbook. She took out a dog-eared piece of white paper and bent it up in her hand.
"Yes," she said finally. "I came to see you. And you didn't follow me out here because you wanted to. I commanded you to come."
"Commanded me to come!" I spluttered. "What for?"
"To prove something to you. Do you see this piece of paper?" She held out the paper in her hand with the blank side toward me. "My address is on this paper. I am reading the address. Concentrate on what I'm reading."
I looked at her.
I concentrated.
Suddenly, I knew.
"Two fifty-one South Eighth Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," I said aloud.
"You see, it's very easy once you get the hang of it," she said.
I nodded and smiled down at her. Now I understood. I picked up her bag and put my hand on her shoulder.
"Let's go," I said. "We have a lot to talk about."
THE CIRCUIT RIDERS
by R. C. FitzPatrick
On the Board, they were just little lights that glowed. But out there in the night of the city-jungle, they represented human passions-- virulent emotions-- and deadly crimes-to-be ...
He was an old man and very drunk. Very drunk or very sick. It was the middle of the day and the day was hot, but the old man had on a suit, and a sweater under the suit. He stopped walking and stood still, swaying gently on widespread legs, and tried to focus his eyes. He lived here ... around here ... somewhere around here. He continued on, stumbling up the street.
He finally made it home. He lived on the second floor and he dragged himself up the narrow staircase with both hands clutching the railing. But he was still very careful of the paper bag under his arm. The bag was full of beer.
Once in the room, he managed to take off his coat before he sank down on the bed. He just sat there, vacant and lost and empty, and drank his beer.
* * * * *
It was a hot, muggy, August afternoon--Wednesday in Pittsburgh. The broad rivers put moisture in the air, and the high hills kept it there. Light breezes were broken-up and diverted by the hills before they could bring more than a breath of relief.
In the East Liberty precinct station the doors and windows were opened wide to snare the vagrant breezes. There were eight men in the room; the desk sergeant, two beat cops waiting to go on duty, the audio controller, the deAngelis operator, two reporters, and a local book ... businessman. From the back of the building, the jail proper, the voice of a prisoner asking for a match floated out to the men in the room, and a few minutes later they heard the slow, exasperated steps of the turnkey as he walked over to give his prisoner a light.
At 3:32 pm, the deAngelis board came alive as half-a-dozen lights flashed red, and the needles on the dials below them trembled in the seventies and eighties. Every other light on the board showed varying shades of pink, registering in the sixties. The operator glanced at the board, started to note the times and intensities of two of the dials in his log, scratched them out, then went on with his conversation with the audio controller. The younger reporter got up and came over to the board. The controller and the operator looked up at him.
"Nothing," said the operator shaking his head in a negative. "Bad call at the ball game, probably." He nodded his head towards the lights on the deAngelis, "They'll be gone in five, ten minutes."
The controller reached over and turned up the volume on his radio. The radio should not have been there, but as long as everyone did his job and kept the volume low, the Captain looked the other way. The set belonged to the precinct.
The announcer's voice came on, "... ning up, he's fuming. Doak is holding Sterrett back. What a beef! Brutaugh's got his nose not two inches from Frascoli's face, and Brother! is he letting him have it. Oh! Oh! Here comes Gilbert off the mound; he's stalking over. When Gil puts up a holler, you know he thinks it's a good one. Brutaugh keeps pointing at the foul line--you can see from here the chalk's been wiped away--he's insisting the runner slid out of the base path. Frascoli's walking away, but Danny's going right aft ..." The controller turned the volume down again.
The lights on the deAngelis board kept flickering, but by 3:37 all but two had gone out, one by one. These two showed readings in the high sixties; one flared briefly to 78.2 then went out. Brutaugh was no longer in the ball game. By 3:41 only one light still glowed, and it was steadily fading.
Throughout the long, hot, humid afternoon the board held its reddish, irritated overtones, and occasional readings flashed in and out of the seventies. At four o'clock the new duty section came on; the deAngelis operator, whose name was Chuck Matesic, was replaced by an operator named Charlie Blaney.
"Nothing to report," Chuck told Charlie. "Rhubarb down at the point at the Forbes Municipal Field, but that's about all."
The new operator scarcely glanced at the mottled board, it was that kind of a day. He noted an occasional high in his log book, but most signals were ignored. At 5:14 he noted a severe reading of 87 which stayed on the board; at 5:16 another light came on, climbed slowly through the sixties, then soared to 77 where it held steady. Neither light was an honest red, their angry overtones chased each other rapidly.
The deAngelis operator called over to the audio controller, "Got us a case of crinkle fender, I think."
"Where?" the controller asked.
"Can't tell yet," Blaney said. "A hot-head and a citizen with righteous indignation. They're clear enough, but not too sharp." He swiveled in his chair and adjusted knobs before a large circular screen. Pale streaks of light glowed briefly as the sweep passed over them. There were milky dots everywhere. A soft light in the lower left hand corner of the screen cut an uncertain path across the grid, and two indeterminate splotches in the upper half of the scope flared out to the margin.
"Morningside," the operator said.
The splashes of light separated; one moved quickly off the screen, the other held stationary for several minutes, then contracted and began a steady, jagged advance toward the center of the grid. One inch down, half an inch over, two inches down, then four inches on a diagonal line.
"Like I said," said Blaney. "An accident."
Eight minutes later, at 5:32, a slightly pompous and thoroughly outraged young salesman marched through the doors of the station house and over to the desk sergeant.
"Some clown just hit me ..." he began.
"With his fist?" asked the sergeant.
"With his car," said the salesman. "My car ... with his car ... he hit my car with his car."
The sergeant raised his hand. "Simmer down, young feller. Let me see your driver's license." He reached over the desk for the man's cards with one hand, and with the other he sorted out an accident form. "Just give it to me slowly." He started filling out the form.
The deAngelis operator leaned back in his chair and winked at the controller. "I'm a whiz," he said to the young reporter, "I'm a pheenom. I never miss." The reporter smiled and walked back to his colleague who was playing gin with the book ... businessman.
The lights glowed on and off all evening, but only once had they called for action. At 10:34 two sharp readings of 92.2 and 94 even, had sent Blaney back to his dials and screen. He'd narrowed it down to a four-block area when the telephone rang to report a fight at the Red Antler Grill. The controller dispatched a beat cop already in the area.
Twenty minutes later, two very large--and very obedient young toughs stumbled in, followed by an angry officer. In addition to the marks of the fight, both had a lumbering, off-balance walk that showed that the policeman had been prodding them with his riot club. It was called an "electronic persuader"; it also doubled as a carbine. Police no longer carried sidearms.
He pointed to the one on the left, "This one hit me." He pointed to the one on the right, "This one kicked me."
The one on the left was certain he would never hit another cop. The one on the right knew he would never kick another cop.
"Book 'em," the sergeant said. He looked at the two youths. "You're going in the can ... you want to argue." The youths looked down. No one else said anything. The younger reporter came over and took down the information as the cop and the two toughs gave it to the sergeant. Then he went back to his seat at the card table and took a minityper from his pocket. He started sending to the paper.
"You ought to send that stuff direct," the card player said.
"I scribble too bad," the reporter answered.
"Bat crap," said the older man, "that little jewel can transcribe chicken scratches."
The cub scrunched over his minityper. A few minutes later he looked up at his partner, "What's a good word for hoodlum?"
The other reporter was irritated. He was also losing at gin. "What are you, a Steinbeck?" He laid down his cards. "Look kid, just send it, just the way you get it. That's why they pay re-write men. We're reporters. We report. O.K.?" He went back to his cards.
At 11:40 a light at the end of the second row turned pinkish but no reading showed on the dial below. It was only one of a dozen bulbs showing red. It was still pinkish when the watch was changed. Blaney was replaced by King.
"Watch this one," Blaney said to King, indicating an entry in the log. It was numbered 8:20:18:3059:78:4a. "I've had it on four times now, all in the high seventies. I got a feeling." The number indicated date, estimated area and relation to previous alerts in the month, estimated intent, and frequency of report. The "a" meant intermittent. Only the last three digits would change. "If it comes on again I think I'd lock a circuit on it right away." The rules called for any continuous reading over 75 to be contacted and connected after its sixth appearance.
"What about that one?" King said, pointing to a 70.4 that was unblinking in its intensity.
"Some drunk," said Blaney. "Or a baby with a head cold. Been on there for twenty minutes. You can watch for it if you like." His tone suggested that to be a waste of time.
"I'll watch it," said King. His tone suggested that he knew how to read a circuit, and if Blaney had any suggestions he could keep them to himself.
* * * * *
Joe Millsop finally staggered home, exhausted. He was half-drunk, and worn out from being on his feet all day, but the liquor had finally done its work. He could think about the incident without flushing hot all over. He was too tired, and too sorry for himself to be angry at anyone. And with his new-found alcoholic objectivity he could see now where he had been in the wrong. Old Bloomgarten shouldn't have chewed him out in front of a customer like that, but what the hell, he shouldn't have sassed the customer, even if she was just a dumb broad who didn't know what she wanted. He managed to get undressed before he stumbled into bed. His last coherent thought before he fell into a drugged sleep was that he'd better apologize in the morning.
* * * * *
8:20:18:3059:78:4a stayed off the board.
At 1:18 am, the deAngelis flared to a 98.4 then started inching down again. The young reporter sat up, alert, from where he had been dozing. The loud clang of a bell had brought him awake.
The older reporter glanced up from his cards and waved him down. "Forget it," he said, "some wife just opened the door and saw lipstick on her husband's neck."
* * * * *
"Oh Honey, how could you ... fifty dollars ..." She was crying.
"Don't, Mother ... I thought I could make some money ... some real money." The youngster looked sick. "I had four nines ... four nines ... how could I figure him for a straight flush, he didn't have a thing showing."
"... How could you," sobbed the mother. "... Oh how could you."
* * * * *
The book ... businessman dealt the cards. The reporter picked his up and arranged them in his hand, he discarded one; the businessman ignored it and drew from the deck, he discarded; the reporter picked the discard and threw away a card from his hand; the businessman drew from the deck and discarded the same card he'd drawn; the reporter picked it up, tapped it slowly in place with his elbow, placed his discard face down, and spread his hand.
"Gin," he said.
"Arrrgh," said the businessman. "Damn it, you play good. You play real good."
A light on the deAngelis flashed red and showed a reading of 65.4 on the dial.
"Can't beat skill," said the reporter. "Count!"
"Fifty-six," said the businessman. "That's counting gin," he added.
"Game," the reporter announced. "I'll figure the damage."
"You play good," said the businessman in disgust.
"You only say that 'cause it's true," the reporter said. "But it's sweet of you all the same."
"Shut up!" said the businessman.
The reporter looked up, concerned. "You stuck?" he asked solicitously. He seemed sincere.
"Certainly I'm stuck," the businessman snarled.
"Then stay stuck," said the reporter in a kindly tone. He patted the businessman on the cheek.
The same light on the deAngelis flashed red. This time the dial registered eighty-two. The operator chuckled and looked over at the gamblers, where the reporter was still adding up the score.
"How much you down, Bernie?" he asked the businessman.
"Four dollars and ninety-six cents," the reporter answered.
"You play good," Bernie said again.
The deAngelis went back to normal, and the operator went back to his magazine. The bulb at the end of the second row turned from a light pink to a soft rose, the needle on its dial finally flickered on to the scale. There were other lights on the board, but none called for action. It was still just a quiet night in the middle of the week.
* * * * *
The room was filthy. It had a natural filth that clings to a cheap room, and a man-made, careless filth that would disfigure a Taj Mahal. It wasn't so much that things were dirty, it was more that nothing was clean. Pittsburgh was no longer a smokey city. That problem had been solved long before the mills had stopped belching smoke. Now, with atomics and filters on every stack in every home, the city was clean. Clean as the works of man could make it, yet still filthy as only the minds of man could achieve. The city might be clean but there were people who were not, and the room was not. Overhead the ceiling light still burned, casting its harsh glare on the trashy room, and the trashy, huddled figure on the bed.
He was an old man, lying on the bed fully clothed, even to his shoes. He twisted fretfully in his sleep; the body tried to rise, anticipating nature even when the mind could not. The man gagged several times and finally made it up to a sitting position before the vomit came. He was still asleep, but his reaction was automatic; he grabbed the bottom of his sweater and pulled it out before him to form a bucket of sorts. When he finished being sick he sat still, swaying gently back and forth, and tried to open his eyes. He could not make it. Still asleep, he ducked out of the fouled sweater, made an ineffectual dab at his mouth, wadded the sweater in a ball, and threw it over in front of the bathroom door.
He fell back on the bed, exhausted, and went on with his fitful sleep.
* * * * *
At 4:15 in the morning a man walked into the station house. His name was Henry Tilton. He was a reporter for the Evening Press. He waved a greeting to the desk sergeant and went over to kibitz the card game.
Both players looked up, startled. The reporter playing cards said, "Hello, Henry." He looked at his watch. "Whoosh! I didn't realize it was that late." He turned to the businessman. "Hurry up, finish the hand. Got to get my beauty sleep."
"Whaddaya mean, hurry up," said Bernie, "you're into me for fifteen bucks."
"Get it back from Hank here," the reporter said. He nodded at the newcomer, "Want this hand? You're fourteen points down. Lover boy's got sixty-eight on game, but you're a box up."
"Sure," said Tilton. He took the cards.
The morning news reporters left. The businessman dealt a new hand. Tilton waited four rounds, then knocked with ten.
Bernie slammed down his cards. "You lousy reporters are all alike! I'm going home." He got up to put on his coat. "I'll be back about ten, you still be here?"
"Sure," said Tilton, "... with the score." He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
The businessman walked out and Tilton went over to the deAngelis board. "Anything?" he asked.
"Nah," said King. He pointed to the lights, "Just lovers' quarrels tonight; all pale pink and peaceful."
Tilton smiled and ambled back to the cell block. The operator put his feet up on his desk, then frowned and put them down again. He leaned toward the board and studied the light at the end of the second row. The needle registered sixty-six. The operator pursed his lips, then flicked a switch that opened the photo file. Every five minutes an automatic camera photographed the deAngelis board, developed the film, and filed the picture away in its storage vault.
King studied the photographs for quite awhile, then pulled his log book over and made an entry. He wrote: 8:20:19:3142:1x. The last three digits meant that he wasn't sure about the intensity, and the "x" signified a continuous reading.
King turned to the audio controller, "Do me a favor, Gus, but strictly unofficial. Contact everybody around us: Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield ... everybody in this end of town. Find out if they've got one low intensity reading that's been on for hours. If they haven't had it since before midnight, I'm not interested."
"Something up?" the controller asked.
"Probably not," said the operator. "I'd just like to pin this one down as close as I can. On a night like this my screen shows nothing but milk."
* * * * *
"Give you a lift home?" the older reporter asked.
"Thanks," said the cub shaking his head, "but I live out by the Youghiogheny River."
"So?" the older man shrugged. "Half hour flight. Hop in."
"I don't understand," the cub said.
"What? Me offering you a lift."
"No," said the cub. "Back there in the station house. You know."
"You mean the deAngelis?"
"Not that exactly," said the cub. "I understand a deAngelis board; everybody broadcasts emotions, and if they're strong enough they can be received and interpreted. It's the cops I don't understand. I thought any reading over eighty was dangerous and had to be looked into, and anything over ninety was plain murder and had to be picked up. Here they been ignoring eighties and nineties all night long."
"You remember that children's story you wrote last Christmas about an Irish imp named Sean O'Claus?" his companion asked him.
"Certainly," the cub said scowling. "I'll sell it some day."
"You remember the Fashion Editor killed it because she thought 'See-Ann' was a girl's name, and it might be sacrilegious."
"You're right I remember," the cub said, his voice rising.
"Like to bet you didn't register over ninety that day? As a matter of fact, I'll head for the nearest precinct and bet you five you're over eighty right now." He laughed aloud and the young man calmed down. "I had that same idea myself at first. About ninety being against the law. That's one of the main troubles, the law. Every damn state in the dominion has its own ideas on what's dangerous. The laws are all fouled up. But what most of them boil down to is this--a man has to have a continuous reading of over ninety before he can be arrested. Not arrested really, detained. Just a reading on the board doesn't prove a thing. Some people walk around boiling at ninety all their lives--like editors. But the sweet old lady down the block, who's never sworn in her life, she may hit sixty-five and reach for a knife. And that doesn't prove a thing. Ninety sometimes means murder, but usually not; up to a hundred and ten usually means murder, but sometimes not; and anything over one-twenty always means murder. And it still doesn't prove a thing. And then again, a psychotic or a professional gunsel may not register at all. They kill for fun, or for business--they're not angry at anybody."
"It's all up to the deAngelis operators. They're the kingpins, they make the system work. Not Simon deAngelis who invented it, or the technicians who install it, or the Police Commissioner who takes the results to City Hall. The operators make it or break it. Sure, they have rules to follow--if they want. But a good operator ignores the rules, and a bad operator goes by the book, and he's still no damn good. It's just like radar was sixty, seventy years ago. Some got the knack, some don't."
"Then the deAngelis doesn't do the job," said the cub.
"Certainly it does," the older man said. "Nothing's perfect. It gives the police the jump on a lot of crime. Premeditated murder for one. The average citizen can't kill anyone unless he's mad enough, and if he's mad enough, he registers on the deAngelis. And ordinary robbers get caught; their plans don't go just right, or they fight among themselves. Or, if they just don't like society--a good deAngelis operator can tell quite a bit if he gets a reading at the wrong time of day or night, or in the wrong part of town."
"But what about the sweet old lady who registers sixty-five and then goes berserk?"
"That's where your operator really comes in. Usually that kind of a reading comes too late. Grandma's swinging the knife at the same time the light goes on in the station house. But if she waits to swing, or builds herself up to it, then she may be stopped.
"You know those poor operators are supposed to log any reading over sixty, and report downtown with anything over eighty. Sure they are! If they logged everything over sixty they'd have writer's cramp the first hour they were on watch. And believe me, Sonny, any operator who reported downtown on every reading over eighty would be back pounding a beat before the end of his first day. They just do the best they can, and you'd be surprised at how good that can be."
* * * * *
The old man woke up, but kept his eyes closed. He was afraid. It was too quiet, and the room was clammy with an early morning chill. He opened his eyelids a crack and looked at the window. Still dark outside. He lay there trembling and brought his elbows in tight to his body. He was going to have the shakes; he knew he'd have the shakes and it was still too early. Too early. He looked at the clock. It was only a quarter after five. Too early for the bars to be open. He covered his eyes with his hands and tried to think.
It was no use; he couldn't think. He sobbed. He was afraid to move. He knew he had to have a drink, and he knew if he got up he'd be sick. "Oh Lord!" he breathed.
The trembling became worse. He tried to press it away by hugging his body with his arms. It didn't help. He looked wildly around and tried to concentrate. He thought about the bureau ... no. The dresser ... no. His clothes ... he felt feverishly about his body ... no. Under the bed ... no ... wait ... maybe. He'd brought some beer home. Now he remembered. Maybe there was some left.
He rolled over on his stomach and groped under the bed. His tremulous fingers found the paper bag and he dragged it out. It was full of empty cans; the carton inside was ripped. He tore the sack open ... empty cans ... no! there was a full one ... two full ones--
He staggered to his feet and looked for an opener. There was one on the bureau. He stumbled over and opened his first beautiful, lovely can of beer. He put his mouth down close to the top so that none of the foam could escape him. He'd be all right 'til seven, now. The bars opened at seven. He'd be all right 'til seven.
He did not notice the knife lying beside the opener. He did not own a knife and had no recollection of buying one.
It was a hunting knife and he was not a hunter.
* * * * *
The light at the end of the second row was growing gradually brighter. The needle traveled slowly across the dial, 68.2, 68.4, 68.6....
King called over to the audio controller. "They all report in yet?"
The controller nodded. "Squirrel Hill's got your signal on, same reading as you have. Bloomfield thinks they may have it. Oakland's not too sure. Everybody else is negative." The controller walked over. "Which one is it?"
King pointed to the end of the second row.
"Can't you get it on your screen?"
"Hell, yes, I've got him on my screen!" King swiveled in his chair and turned on the set. The scope was covered with pale dots. "Which one is he? There?" He pointed to the left. "That's a guy who didn't get the raise he wanted. There?" He pointed to the center. "That's a little girl with bad dreams. She has them every night. There? That's my brother! He's in the Veteran's Hospital and wanted to come home a week ago."
"So don't get excited," said the controller. "I only asked."
"I'm sorry, Gus," King apologized. "My fault. I'm a little edgy ... probably nothing at all."
"Well you got it narrowed down anyway," Gus said. "If you got it, and Squirrel Hill's got it, then he's in Shadyside. If Oakland doesn't have him, then he's on this side of Aiken Avenue." The controller had caught King's fever; the "it" had become a "him". "And if Bloomfield doesn't have him, then he's on the other side of Baum Boulevard."
"Only Bloomfield might have him."
"Well what the hell, you've still got him located in the lower half of Shadyside. Tell you what, I'll send a man up Ellsworth, get Bloomfield to cruise Baum Boulevard in a scout car, and have Squirrel Hill put a patrol on Wilkens. We can triangulate."
"No," said King, "not yet. Thanks anyway, Gus, but there's no point in stirring up a tempest in a teapot. Just tell them to watch it. If it climbs over 75 we can narrow it down then."
"It's your show," said Gus.
* * * * *
The old man finished his second can of beer. The trembling was almost gone. He could stand and move without breaking out in a cold sweat. He ran his hand through his hair and looked at the clock. 6:15. Too early. He looked around the room for something to read. There were magazines and newspapers scattered everywhere; the papers all folded back to the sports section. He picked up a paper, not even bothering about the date, and tried to interest himself in the batting averages of the Intercontinental League. Yamamura was on top with .387; the old man remembered when Yamamura came up as a rookie. But right now he didn't care; the page trembled and the type kept blurring. He threw the paper down. He had a headache.
The old man got up and went over to the bathroom. He steadied himself against the door jamb and kicked the wadded sweater out of sight beneath the dresser. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water. He ran his hands over his face and thought about shaving, but he couldn't face the work involved. He managed to run a comb through his hair and rinse out his mouth.
He came back into the room. It was 6:30. Maybe Freddie's was open. If Freddie wasn't, then maybe the Grill. He'd have to take his chances, he couldn't stand it here any longer. He put on his coat and stumbled out.
* * * * *
At eight o'clock the watch was changed; Matesic replaced King.
"Anything?" asked Matesic.
"Just this one, Chuck," said King. "I may be a fool, but this one bothers me." King was a diplomat where Blaney was not.
King showed him the entry. The dial now stood at 72.8. "It's been on there all night, since before I had the watch. And it's been climbing, just slow and steady, but all the time climbing. I locked a circuit on him, but I'll take it off if you want me to."
"No," said Matesic, "leave it on. That don't smell right to me neither."
* * * * *
The old man was feeling better. He'd been in the bar two hours, and he'd had two pickled eggs, and the bartender didn't bother him. Beer was all right, but a man needed whiskey when he was sick. He'd have one, maybe two more, and then he'd eat some breakfast. He didn't know why, but he knew he mustn't get drunk.
* * * * *
At nine o'clock the needle on the dial climbed past seventy-five. Matesic asked for coverage. That meant that two patrolmen would be tied up, doing nothing but searching for an echo. And it might be a wild goose chase. He was explaining to the Captain, but the Captain wasn't listening. He was looking at the photographs in the deAngelis file.
"You don't like this?" the Captain asked.
Matesic said he didn't like it.
"And King said he didn't like it?"
"King thinks the same way I do, he's been on there too damn long and too damn consistent."
"Pick him up," the Captain turned and ordered the audio controller. "If we can't hold him, we can at least get a look at him."
"It's not too clear yet," said Matesic, "it'll take a spread."
"I know what it'll take," the Captain roared. "Don't tell me my job! Put every available man on this, I want that guy brought in."
* * * * *
The old man walked back to his room. He was carrying a dozen cans of beer, but the load was light and he walked upright. He felt fine, like a million dollars. And he was beginning to remember.
When he entered the room he saw the knife and when he saw the knife he smiled. A man had to be smart and a man had to be prepared. They were smart ... wicked and smart ... but he was smarter. He'd bought the knife a long, long time ago, in a different world--they couldn't fool him that way. They were clever all right, they fooled the whole world.
He put his beer on the bureau, then walked into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. He came back out and started to undress. He was humming to himself. When he finished undressing he went over to the bureau and opened a can of beer. He carried it into the bathroom, put it beside the tub, and lowered himself into the water.
Ah ... that was the ticket. Water and being clean. Clean and being water. Being water and being candy and being smart. They fooled the whole world, but not him. The whole, wide world, but they couldn't fool him. He was going to fool them. All pretty and innocent. Hah! Innocent! He knew. They were rotten, they were rotten all the way through. They fooled the whole world but they were rotten ... rotten ... and he was the only one who knew.
He finished the beer and stood up in the tub. The water ran off his body in greasy runlets. He didn't pull the plug. He stepped out of the tub and over to the bathroom mirror. His face looked fine, not puffy at all. He'd fool them. He sprinkled himself with lilac water, put the bottle to his lips, and swished some of it in his mouth. Oh yes, he'd fool them. A man couldn't be too clever, they were clever, so he had to be clever. He began to shave.
* * * * *
The Captain was on an audio circuit, talking to an Assistant Commissioner. "Yes, Sir, I know that--Yes, Sir, it could be, but it might be something else--Yes, Sir, I know Squirrel Hill has problems, but we need help--Yes, Commissioner, it's over ninety now (The Captain signaled wildly to Matesic; Matesic held up four fingers, then two) 94.2 and still going up--No, Sir, we don't know. Some guy gonna quit his job ... or kill his boss. Maybe he found out his wife is cheating on him. We can't tell until we pick him up--Yes, Sir--Yes, Sir--Thank you, Sir."
The Captain hung up. "I hate politicians," he snarled.
"Watch it, Captain," said Matesic, "I'll get you on my board."
"Get me on it, Hell," the Captain said, "I've never been off."
* * * * *
The old man finished dressing. He knotted his tie and brushed off the front of his suit with his hand. He looked fine. He'd fool them, he looked just like anybody else. He crossed to the bureau and picked up the knife. It was still in the scabbard. He didn't take it out, he just put it in his pocket. Good. It didn't show.
He walked out on the street. The sun was shining brightly and heat waves were coming up from the sidewalk. Good. Good. This was the best time. People, the real people, would be working or lying down asleep. But they'd be out. They were always out. Out all sweet and innocent in the hot sun.
He turned down the street and ambled toward the drug store. He didn't want to hurry. He had lots of time. He had to get some candy first. That was the ticket, candy. Candy worked, candy always worked. Candy was good but candy was wicked. He was good but they were wicked. Oh, you had to be smart.
* * * * *
"That has to be him," Matesic said. The screen was blotched and milky, but a large splash of light in the lower left hand corner outshone everything else. "He's somewhere around Negley Avenue." He turned to the Captain. "Where do you have your men placed?"
"In a box," the Captain said. "Fifth and Negley, Aiken and Negley, Center and Aiken, and Center and Negley. And three scout cars overhead."
* * * * *
The old man walked up Ellsworth to the Liberty School. There were always lots of young ones around Liberty School. The young ones were the worst.
* * * * *
"I'm losing him."
"Where are you?"
"Center and Aiken."
"Anybody getting him stronger?"
"Yeah. Me. Negley and Fifth."
"Never mind. Never mind, we got him. We see him now."
"Where?"
"Bellefonte and Ivy. Liberty School."
* * * * *
She was a friendly little thing, and pretty. Maybe five, maybe six, and her Mommy had told her not to talk to strangers. But the funny old man wasn't talking, he was sitting on the curb, and he was eating candy, and he was offering some to her. He smiled at the little girl and she smiled back.
* * * * *
The scout car settled to earth on automatic. Two officers climbed out of the car and walked quietly over to the old man, one on either side. They each took an arm and lifted him gently to his feet.
"Hello there, Old Timer."
"Hi, little girl."
The old man looked around bewildered. He dropped his candy and tried to reach his knife. They mustn't interfere. It was no use. The officers were very kind and gentle, and they were very, very firm. They led him off as though he were an old, old friend.
One of the officers called back over his shoulder, "Bye, bye, little girl."
The little girl dutifully waved 'bye.
She looked at the paper sack on the sidewalk. She didn't know what to do, but the nice old man was gone. She looked around, but no one was paying any attention, they were all watching the softball game. Suddenly she made a grab and clutched the paper bag to her body. Then she turned and ran back up the street to tell her Mommy how wonderful, wonderful lucky she was.
WIND
By CHARLES L. FONTENAY
When you have an engine with no fuel, and fuel without an engine, and a life-and-death deadline to meet, you have a problem indeed. Unless you are a stubborn Dutchman--and Jan Van Artevelde was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus.
Jan Willem van Artevelde claimed descent from William of Orange. He had no genealogy to prove it, but on Venus there was no one who could disprove it, either.
Jan Willem van Artevelde smoked a clay pipe, which only a Dutchman can do properly, because the clay bit grates on less stubborn teeth.
Jan needed all his Dutch stubbornness, and a good deal of pure physical strength besides, to maneuver the roach-flat groundcar across the tumbled terrain of Den Hoorn into the teeth of the howling gale that swept from the west. The huge wheels twisted and jolted against the rocks outside, and Jan bounced against his seat belt, wrestled the steering wheel and puffed at his pijp. The mild aroma of Heerenbaai-Tabak filled the airtight groundcar.
There came a new swaying that was not the roughness of the terrain. Through the thick windshield Jan saw all the ground about him buckle and heave for a second or two before it settled to rugged quiescence again. This time he was really heaved about.
Jan mentioned this to the groundcar radio.
"That's the third time in half an hour," he commented. "The place tosses like the IJsselmeer on a rough day."
"You just don't forget it isn't the Zuider Zee," retorted Heemskerk from the other end. "You sink there and you don't come up three times."
"Don't worry," said Jan. "I'll be back on time, with a broom at the masthead."
"This I shall want to see," chuckled Heemskerk; a logical reaction, considering the scarcity of brooms on Venus.
* * * * *
Two hours earlier the two men had sat across a small table playing chess, with little indication there would be anything else to occupy their time before blastoff of the stubby gravity-boat. It would be their last chess game for many months, for Jan was a member of the Dutch colony at Oostpoort in the northern hemisphere of Venus, while Heemskerk was pilot of the G-boat from the Dutch spaceship Vanderdecken, scheduled to begin an Earthward orbit in a few hours.
It was near the dusk of the 485-hour Venerian day, and the Twilight Gale already had arisen, sweeping from the comparatively chill Venerian nightside into the superheated dayside. Oostpoort, established near some outcroppings that contained uranium ore, was protected from both the Dawn Gale and the Twilight Gale, for it was in a valley in the midst of a small range of mountains.
Jan had just figured out a combination by which he hoped to cheat Heemskerk out of one of his knights, when Dekker, the burgemeester of Oostpoort, entered the spaceport ready room.
"There's been an emergency radio message," said Dekker. "They've got a passenger for the Earthship over at Rathole."
"Rathole?" repeated Heemskerk. "What's that? I didn't know there was another colony within two thousand kilometers."
"It isn't a colony, in the sense Oostpoort is," explained Dekker. "The people are the families of a bunch of laborers left behind when the colony folded several years ago. It's about eighty kilometers away, right across the Hoorn, but they don't have any vehicles that can navigate when the wind's up."
Heemskerk pushed his short-billed cap back on his close-cropped head, leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his comfortable stomach.
"Then the passenger will have to wait for the next ship," he pronounced. "The Vanderdecken has to blast off in thirty hours to catch Earth at the right orbital spot, and the G-boat has to blast off in ten hours to catch the Vanderdecken."
"This passenger can't wait," said Dekker. "He needs to be evacuated to Earth immediately. He's suffering from the Venus Shadow."
Jan whistled softly. He had seen the effects of that disease. Dekker was right.
"Jan, you're the best driver in Oostpoort," said Dekker. "You will have to take a groundcar to Rathole and bring the fellow back."
* * * * *
So now Jan gripped his clay pipe between his teeth and piloted the groundcar into the teeth of the Twilight Gale.
Den Hoorn was a comparatively flat desert sweep that ran along the western side of the Oost Mountains, just over the mountain from Oostpoort. It was a thin fault area of a planet whose crust was peculiarly subject to earthquakes, particularly at the beginning and end of each long day when temperatures of the surface rocks changed. On the other side of it lay Rathole, a little settlement that eked a precarious living from the Venerian vegetation. Jan never had seen it.
He had little difficulty driving up and over the mountain, for the Dutch settlers had carved a rough road through the ravines. But even the 2-1/2-meter wheels of the groundcar had trouble amid the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn. The wind hit the car in full strength here and, though the body of the groundcar was suspended from the axles, there was constant danger of its being flipped over by a gust if not handled just right.
The three earthshocks that had shaken Den Hoorn since he had been driving made his task no easier, but he was obviously lucky, at that. Often he had to detour far from his course to skirt long, deep cracks in the surface, or steep breaks where the crust had been raised or dropped several meters by past quakes.
The groundcar zig-zagged slowly westward. The tattered violet-and-indigo clouds boiled low above it, but the wind was as dry as the breath of an oven. Despite the heavy cloud cover, the afternoon was as bright as an Earth-day. The thermometer showed the outside temperature to have dropped to 40 degrees Centigrade in the west wind, and it was still going down.
Jan reached the edge of a crack that made further progress seem impossible. A hundred meters wide, of unknown depth, it stretched out of sight in both directions. For the first time he entertained serious doubts that Den Hoorn could be crossed by land.
After a moment's hesitation, he swung the groundcar northward and raced along the edge of the chasm as fast as the car would negotiate the terrain. He looked anxiously at his watch. Nearly three hours had passed since he left Oostpoort. He had seven hours to go and he was still at least 16 kilometers from Rathole. His pipe was out, but he could not take his hands from the wheel to refill it.
He had driven at least eight kilometers before he realized that the crack was narrowing. At least as far again, the two edges came together, but not at the same level. A sheer cliff three meters high now barred his passage. He drove on.
* * * * *
Apparently it was the result of an old quake. He found a spot where rocks had tumbled down, making a steep, rough ramp up the break. He drove up it and turned back southwestward.
He made it just in time. He had driven less than three hundred meters when a quake more severe than any of the others struck. Suddenly behind him the break reversed itself, so that where he had climbed up coming westward he would now have to climb a cliff of equal height returning eastward.
The ground heaved and buckled like a tempestuous sea. Rocks rolled and leaped through the air, several large ones striking the groundcar with ominous force. The car staggered forward on its giant wheels like a drunken man. The quake was so violent that at one time the vehicle was hurled several meters sideways, and almost overturned. And the wind smashed down on it unrelentingly.
The quake lasted for several minutes, during which Jan was able to make no progress at all and struggled only to keep the groundcar upright. Then, in unison, both earthquake and wind died to absolute quiescence.
Jan made use of this calm to step down on the accelerator and send the groundcar speeding forward. The terrain was easier here, nearing the western edge of Den Hoorn, and he covered several kilometers before the wind struck again, cutting his speed down considerably. He judged he must be nearing Rathole.
Not long thereafter, he rounded an outcropping of rock and it lay before him.
A wave of nostalgia swept over him. Back at Oostpoort, the power was nuclear, but this little settlement made use of the cheapest, most obviously available power source. It was dotted with more than a dozen windmills.
Windmills! Tears came to Jan's eyes. For a moment, he was carried back to the flat lands around 's Gravenhage. For a moment he was a tow-headed, round-eyed boy again, clumping in wooden shoes along the edge of the tulip fields.
But there were no canals here. The flat land, stretching into the darkening west, was spotted with patches of cactus and leather-leaved Venerian plants. Amid the windmills, low domes protruded from the earth, indicating that the dwellings of Rathole were, appropriately, partly underground.
* * * * *
He drove into the place. There were no streets, as such, but there were avenues between lines of heavy chains strung to short iron posts, evidently as handholds against the wind. The savage gale piled dust and sand in drifts against the domes, then, shifting slightly, swept them clean again.
There was no one moving abroad, but just inside the community Jan found half a dozen men in a group, clinging to one of the chains and waving to him. He pulled the groundcar to a stop beside them, stuck his pipe in a pocket of his plastic venusuit, donned his helmet and got out.
The wind almost took him away before one of them grabbed him and he was able to grasp the chain himself. They gathered around him. They were swarthy, black-eyed men, with curly hair. One of them grasped his hand.
"Bienvenido, señor," said the man.
Jan recoiled and dropped the man's hand. All the Orangeman blood he claimed protested in outrage.
Spaniards! All these men were Spaniards!
* * * * *
Jan recovered himself at once. He had been reading too much ancient history during his leisure hours. The hot monotony of Venus was beginning to affect his brain. It had been 500 years since the Netherlands revolted against Spanish rule. A lot of water over the dam since then.
A look at the men around him, the sound of their chatter, convinced him that he need not try German or Hollandsch here. He fell back on the international language.
"Do you speak English?" he asked. The man brightened but shook his head.
"No hablo inglés," he said, "pero el médico lo habla. Venga conmigo."
He gestured for Jan to follow him and started off, pulling his way against the wind along the chain. Jan followed, and the other men fell in behind in single file. A hundred meters farther on, they turned, descended some steps and entered one of the half-buried domes. A gray-haired, bearded man was in the well-lighted room, apparently the living room of a home, with a young woman.
"Él médico," said the man who had greeted Jan, gesturing. "Él habla inglés."
He went out, shutting the airlock door behind him.
"You must be the man from Oostpoort," said the bearded man, holding out his hand. "I am Doctor Sanchez. We are very grateful you have come."
"I thought for a while I wouldn't make it," said Jan ruefully, removing his venushelmet.
"This is Mrs. Murillo," said Sanchez.
The woman was a Spanish blonde, full-lipped and beautiful, with golden hair and dark, liquid eyes. She smiled at Jan.
"Encantada de conocerlo, señor," she greeted him.
"Is this the patient, Doctor?" asked Jan, astonished. She looked in the best of health.
"No, the patient is in the next room," answered Sanchez.
"Well, as much as I'd like to stop for a pipe, we'd better start at once," said Jan. "It's a hard drive back, and blastoff can't be delayed."
The woman seemed to sense his meaning. She turned and called: "Diego!"
A boy appeared in the door, a dark-skinned, sleepy-eyed boy of about eight. He yawned. Then, catching sight of the big Dutchman, he opened his eyes wide and smiled.
The boy was healthy-looking, alert, but the mark of the Venus Shadow was on his face. There was a faint mottling, a criss-cross of dead-white lines.
Mrs. Murillo spoke to him rapidly in Spanish and he nodded. She zipped him into a venusuit and fitted a small helmet on his head.
"Good luck, amigo," said Sanchez, shaking Jan's hand again.
"Thanks," replied Jan. He donned his own helmet. "I'll need it, if the trip over was any indication."
* * * * *
Jan and Diego made their way back down the chain to the groundcar. There was a score of men there now, and a few women. They let the pair go through, and waved farewell as Jan swung the groundcar around and headed back eastward.
It was easier driving with the wind behind him, and Jan hit a hundred kilometers an hour several times before striking the rougher ground of Den Hoorn. Now, if he could only find a way over the bluff raised by that last quake....
The ground of Den Hoorn was still shivering. Jan did not realize this until he had to brake the groundcar almost to a stop at one point, because it was not shaking in severe, periodic shocks as it had earlier. It quivered constantly, like the surface of quicksand.
The ground far ahead of him had a strange color to it. Jan, watching for the cliff he had to skirt and scale, had picked up speed over some fairly even terrain, but now he slowed again, puzzled. There was something wrong ahead. He couldn't quite figure it out.
Diego, beside him, had sat quietly so far, peering eagerly through the windshield, not saying a word. Now suddenly he cried in a high thin tenor:
"Cuidado! Cuidado! Un abismo!"
Jim saw it at the same time and hit the brakes so hard the groundcar would have stood on its nose had its wheels been smaller. They skidded to a stop.
The chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened, evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier. Now it was a canyon, half a kilometer wide. Five meters from the edge he looked out over blank space at the far wall, and could not see the bottom.
Cursing choice Dutch profanity, Jan wheeled the groundcar northward and drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could. He wasted half an hour before realizing that it was getting no narrower.
There was no point in going back southward. It might be a hundred kilometers long or a thousand, but he never could reach the end of it and thread the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn to Oostpoort before the G-boat blastoff.
There was nothing to do but turn back to Rathole and see if some other way could not be found.
* * * * *
Jan sat in the half-buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled with some of Theodorus Neimeijer's mild tobacco. Before him, Dr. Sanchez sat with crossed legs, cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel. Diego's mother talked to the boy in low, liquid tones in a corner of the room.
* * * * *
Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was as skimpy as it obviously was in Rathole were able to build these semi-underground domes to resist the earth shocks that came from Den Hoorn. But this one showed no signs of stress. A religious print and a small pencil sketch of Señora Murillo, probably done by the boy, were awry on the inward-curving walls, but that was all.
Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish-speaking people.
"If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here, instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been crossed before the crack opened," he pointed out.
"An effort was made," replied Sanchez quietly. "Perhaps you do not fully realize our position here. We have no engines except the stationary generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and our utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have gasoline engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand."
"You push them?" demanded Jan incredulously.
"No. You've seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the Venus Shadow in Diego, the wind was coming up, and we had no way to get him to Oostpoort."
"Mmm," grunted Jan. He shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair in the corner. The blonde head was bent over the boy protectingly, and over his mother's shoulder Diego's black eyes returned Jan's glance.
"If the disease has just started, the boy could wait for the next Earth ship, couldn't he?" asked Jan.
"I said I had just diagnosed it, not that it had just started, señor," corrected Sanchez. "As you know, the trip to Earth takes 145 days and it can be started only when the two planets are at the right position in their orbits. Have you ever seen anyone die of the Venus Shadow?"
"Yes, I have," replied Jan in a low voice. He had seen two people die of it, and it had not been pleasant.
Medical men thought it was a deficiency disease, but they had not traced down the deficiency responsible. Treatment by vitamins, diet, antibiotics, infrared and ultraviolet rays, all were useless. The only thing that could arrest and cure the disease was removal from the dry, cloud-hung surface of Venus and return to a moist, sunny climate on Earth.
Without that treatment, once the typical mottled texture of the skin appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot.
"If you have," said Sanchez, "you must realize that Diego cannot wait for a later ship, if his life is to be saved. He must get to Earth at once."
* * * * *
Jan puffed at the Heerenbaai-Tabak and cogitated. The place was aptly named. It was a ratty community. The boy was a dark-skinned little Spaniard--of Mexican origin, perhaps. But he was a boy, and a human being.
A thought occurred to him. From what he had seen and heard, the entire economy of Rathole could not support the tremendous expense of sending the boy across the millions of miles to Earth by spaceship.
"Who's paying his passage?" he asked. "The Dutch Central Venus Company isn't exactly a charitable institution."
"Your Señor Dekker said that would be taken care of," replied Sanchez.
Jan relit his pipe silently, making a mental resolution that Dekker wouldn't take care of it alone. Salaries for Venerian service were high, and many of the men at Oostpoort would contribute readily to such a cause.
"Who is Diego's father?" he asked.
"He was Ramón Murillo, a very good mechanic," answered Sanchez, with a sliding sidelong glance at Jan's face. "He has been dead for three years."
Jan grunted.
"The copters at Oostpoort can't buck this wind," he said thoughtfully, "or I'd have come in one of those in the first place instead of trying to cross Den Hoorn by land. But if you have any sort of aircraft here, it might make it downwind--if it isn't wrecked on takeoff."
"I'm afraid not," said Sanchez.
"Too bad. There's nothing we can do, then. The nearest settlement west of here is more than a thousand kilometers away, and I happen to know they have no planes, either. Just copters. So that's no help."
"Wait," said Sanchez, lifting the scalpel and tilting his head. "I believe there is something, though we cannot use it. This was once an American naval base, and the people here were civilian employes who refused to move north with it. There was a flying machine they used for short-range work, and one was left behind--probably with a little help from the people of the settlement. But...."
"What kind of machine? Copter or plane?"
"They call it a flying platform. It carries two men, I believe. But, señor...."
"I know them. I've operated them, before I left Earth. Man, you don't expect me to try to fly one of those little things in this wind? They're tricky as they can be, and the passengers are absolutely unprotected!"
"Señor, I have asked you to do nothing."
"No, you haven't," muttered Jan. "But you know I'll do it."
Sanchez looked into his face, smiling faintly and a little sadly.
"I was sure you would be willing," he said. He turned and spoke in Spanish to Mrs. Murillo.
The woman rose to her feet and came to them. As Jan arose, she looked up at him, tears in her eyes.
"Gracias," she murmured. "Un millón de gracias."
She lifted his hands in hers and kissed them.
Jan disengaged himself gently, embarrassed. But it occurred to him, looking down on the bowed head of the beautiful young widow, that he might make some flying trips back over here in his leisure time. Language barriers were not impassable, and feminine companionship might cure his neurotic, history-born distaste for Spaniards, for more than one reason.
Sanchez was tugging at his elbow.
"Señor, I have been trying to tell you," he said. "It is generous and good of you, and I wanted Señora Murillo to know what a brave man you are. But have you forgotten that we have no gasoline engines here? There is no fuel for the flying platform."
* * * * *
The platform was in a warehouse which, like the rest of the structures in Rathole, was a half-buried dome. The platform's ring-shaped base was less than a meter thick, standing on four metal legs. On top of it, in the center, was a railed circle that would hold two men, but would crowd them. Two small gasoline engines sat on each side of this railed circle and between them on a third side was the fuel tank. The passengers entered it on the fourth side.
The machine was dusty and spotted with rust, Jan, surrounded by Sanchez, Diego and a dozen men, inspected it thoughtfully. The letters USN*SES were painted in white on the platform itself, and each engine bore the label "Hiller."
Jan peered over the edge of the platform at the twin-ducted fans in their plastic shrouds. They appeared in good shape. Each was powered by one of the engines, transmitted to it by heavy rubber belts.
Jan sighed. It was an unhappy situation. As far as he could determine, without making tests, the engines were in perfect condition. Two perfectly good engines, and no fuel for them.
"You're sure there's no gasoline, anywhere in Rathole?" he asked Sanchez.
Sanchez smiled ruefully, as he had once before, at Jan's appellation for the community. The inhabitants' term for it was simply "La Ciudad Nuestra"--"Our Town." But he made no protest. He turned to one of the other men and talked rapidly for a few moments in Spanish.
"None, señor," he said, turning back to Jan. "The Americans, of course, kept much of it when they were here, but the few things we take to Oostpoort to trade could not buy precious gasoline. We have electricity in plenty if you can power the platform with it."
Jan thought that over, trying to find a way.
"No, it wouldn't work," he said. "We could rig batteries on the platform and electric motors to turn the propellers. But batteries big enough to power it all the way to Oostpoort would be so heavy the machine couldn't lift them off the ground. If there were some way to carry a power line all the way to Oostpoort, or to broadcast the power to it.... But it's a light-load machine, and must have an engine that gives it the necessary power from very little weight."
Wild schemes ran through his head. If they were on water, instead of land, he could rig up a sail. He could still rig up a sail, for a groundcar, except for the chasm out on Den Hoorn.
The groundcar! Jan straightened and snapped his fingers.
"Doctor!" he explained. "Send a couple of men to drain the rest of the fuel from my groundcar. And let's get this platform above ground and tie it down until we can get it started."
Sanchez gave rapid orders in Spanish. Two of the men left at a run, carrying five-gallon cans with them.
Three others picked up the platform and carried it up a ramp and outside. As soon as they reached ground level, the wind hit them. They dropped the platform to the ground, where it shuddered and swayed momentarily, and two of the men fell successfully on their stomachs. The wind caught the third and somersaulted him half a dozen times before he skidded to a stop on his back with outstretched arms and legs. He turned over cautiously and crawled back to them.
Jan, his head just above ground level, surveyed the terrain. There was flat ground to the east, clear in a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it.
"This is as good a spot for takeoff as we'll find," he said to Sanchez.
The men put three heavy ropes on the platform's windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome. The platform quivered and shuddered in the heavy wind, but its base was too low for it to overturn.
Shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the groundcar, struggling along the chain. Jan got above ground in a crouch, clinging to the rail of the platform, and helped them fill the fuel tank with it. He primed the carburetors and spun the engines.
Nothing happened.
* * * * *
He turned the engines over again. One of them coughed, and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust, but they did not catch.
"What is the matter, señor?" asked Sanchez from the dome entrance.
"I don't know," replied Jan. "Maybe it's that the engines haven't been used in so long. I'm afraid I'm not a good enough mechanic to tell."
"Some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here," said Sanchez. "Wait."
He turned and spoke to someone in the dome. One of the men of Rathole came to Jan's side and tried the engines. They refused to catch. The man made carburetor adjustments and tried again. No success.
He sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside. He withdrew it, wet and oily, and examined it. He turned and spoke to Sanchez.
"He says that your groundcar must have a diesel engine," Sanchez interpreted to Jan. "Is that correct?"
"Why, yes, that's true."
"He says the fuel will not work then, señor. He says it is low-grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline."
Jan threw up his hands and went back into the dome.
"I should have known that," he said unhappily. "I would have known if I had thought of it."
"What is to be done, then?" asked Sanchez.
"There's nothing that can be done," answered Jan. "They may as well put the fuel back in my groundcar."
Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform. While they worked, Jan stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rathole.
"There's nothing that can be done," he repeated. "We can't make the trip overland because of the chasm out there in Den Hoorn, and we can't fly the platform because we have no power for it."
Windmills. Again Jan could imagine the flat land around them as his native Holland, with the Zuider Zee sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkling clouds.
* * * * *
Jan looked at his watch. A little more than two hours before the G-boat's blastoff time, and it couldn't wait for them. It was nearly eight hours since he had left Oostpoort, and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker.
Jan was sorry. He had done his best, but Venus had beaten him.
He looked around for Diego. The boy was not in the dome. He was outside, crouched in the lee of the dome, playing with some sticks.
Diego must know of his ailment, and why he had to go to Oostpoort. If Jan was any judge of character, Sanchez would have told him that. Whether Diego knew it was a life-or-death matter for him to be aboard the Vanderdecken when it blasted off for Earth, Jan did not know. But the boy was around eight years old and he was bright, and he must realize the seriousness involved in a decision to send him all the way to Earth.
Jan felt ashamed of the exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient history and claim descent from William of Orange. It had been a hobby, and artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions, a defense against the monotony of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized. He did not dislike Spaniards; he had no reason to dislike them. They were all humans--the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, even the Russians--fighting a hostile planet together. He could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him, but he liked Diego and wished desperately he could do something.
Outside, the windmills of Rathole spun merrily.
There was power, the power that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless.
He turned to Sanchez.
"Ask the men if there are any spare parts for the platform," he said. "Some of those legs it stands on, transmission belts, spare propellers."
Sanchez asked.
"Yes," he said. "Many spare parts, but no fuel."
Jan smiled a tight smile.
"Tell them to take the engines out," he said. "Since we have no fuel, we may as well have no engines."
* * * * *
Pieter Heemskerk stood by the ramp to the stubby G-boat and checked his watch. It was X minus fifteen--fifteen minutes before blastoff time.
Heemskerk wore a spacesuit. Everything was ready, except climbing aboard, closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin.
What on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelde? The last radio message they had received, more than an hour ago, had said he and the patient took off successfully in an aircraft. What sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover eighty kilometers, with the wind?
Heemskerk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Den Hoorn. As a matter of fact, he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of groundcars out to search for it.
This, of course, would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelde was bringing, but Heemskerk had no personal interest in the patient. His worry was all for his friend. The two of them had enjoyed chess and good beer together on his last three trips to Venus, and Heemskerk hoped very sincerely that the big blond man wasn't hurt.
He glanced at his watch again. X minus twelve. In two minutes, it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-boat. In seven minutes the backward count before blastoff would start over the area loudspeakers.
Heemskerk shook his head sadly. And Van Artevelde had promised to come back triumphant, with a broom at his masthead!
It was a high thin whine borne on the wind, carrying even through the walls of his spacehelmet, that attracted Heemskerk's attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp. Around him, the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky, trying to pinpoint the noise.
Heemskerk looked westward. At first he could see nothing, then there was a moving dot above the mountain, against the indigo umbrella of clouds. It grew, it swooped, it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them.
A broom?
No. The platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it--a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush. It hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground.
"Jan!" boomed Heemskerk, forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing over to his friend. "I was afraid you were lost!"
Jan struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up.
"Here's your patient, Pieter," he said. "Hope you have a spacesuit in his size."
"I can find one. And we'll have to hurry for blastoff. But, first, what happened? Even that damned thing ought to get here from Rathole faster than that."
"Had no fuel," replied Jan briefly. "My engines were all right, but I had no power to run them. So I had to pull the engines and rig up a power source."
Heemskerk stared at the platform. On its railing was rigged a tripod of battered metal pipes, atop which a big four-blade propeller spun slowly in what wind was left after it came over the western mountain. Over the edges of the platform, running from the two propellers in its base, hung a series of tattered transmission belts.
"Power source?" repeated Heemskerk. "That?"
"Certainly," replied Jan with dignity. "The power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency: a windmill!"
THE END
THE FLYING CUSPIDORS
by V. R. Francis
This was love, and what could be done about it? It's been happening to guys for a long time, now.
Hotlips Grogan may not be as handsome and good-looking like me or as brainy and intellectual, but in this fiscal year of 2056 he is the gonest trumpet-tooter this side of Alpha Centauri. You would know what I mean right off if you ever hear him give out with "Stars Fell on Venus," or "Martian Love Song," or "Shine On, Harvest Luna." Believe me, it is out of this world. He is not only hot, he is radioactive. On a clear day he is playing notes you cannot hear without you are wearing special equipment.
That is for a fact.
Mostly he is a good man--cool, solid, and in the warp. But one night he is playing strictly in three or four wrong keys.
I am the ivory man for this elite bunch of musicians, and I am scooping up my three-dee music from the battered electronic eighty-eight when he comes over looking plenty worried.
"Eddie," he says, "I got a problem."
"You got a problem, all right," I tell him. "You are not getting a job selling Venusian fish, the way you play today."
He frowns. "It is pretty bad, I suppose."
"Bad is not the word," I say, but I spare his feelings and do not say the word it is. "What gives?"
He looks around him, careful to see if anybody in the place is close enough to hear. But it is only afternoon rehearsal on the gambling ship Saturn, and the waiters are busy mopping up the floor and leaning on their long-handled sterilizers, and the boys in the band are picking up their music to go down to Earth to get some shut-eye or maybe an atomic beer or two before we open that night.
Hotlips Grogan leans over and whispers in my ear. "It is the thrush," he says.
"The thrush?" I say, loud, before he clamps one of his big hands over my kisser. "The thrush," I say, softer; "you mean the canary?"
He waves his arms like a bird. "Thrush, canary--I mean Stella Starlight."
For a minute I stand with my mouth open and think of this. Then I rubber for the ninety-seventh time at the female warbler, who is standing talking to Frankie, the band leader. She is a thrush new to the band and plenty cute--a blonde, with everything where it is supposed to be, and maybe a little extra helping in a couple spots. I give her my usual approving once-over, just in case I miss something the last ninety-six approving once-overs I give her.
"What about her?" I say.
"It is her fault I play like I do," Hotlips Grogan tells me sadly. "Come on. Leave us go guzzle a beer and I will tell you about it."
Just then Frankie comes over, looking nasty like as usual, and he says to Grogan, "You are not playing too well today, Hotlips. Maybe you hurt your lip on a beer bottle, huh?"
As usual also, his tone is pretty short on sweetness and light, and I do not see why Grogan, who looks something like a gorilla's mother-in-law, takes such guff from a beanpole like Frankie.
But Grogan only says, "I think something is wrong with my trumpet. I have it fixed before tonight."
Frankie smirks. "Do that," he says, looking like a grinning weasel. "We want you to play for dancing, not for calling in Martian moose."
Frankie walks away, and Hotlips shrugs.
"Leave us get our beer," he says simply, and we go to the ferry.
We pile into the space-ferry with the other musicians and anyone else who is going down to dirty old terra firma, and when everybody who is going aboard is aboard, the doors close, and the ferry drifts into space. Hotlips and I find seats, and we look back at the gambling ship. It is a thrill you do not get used to, no matter how many times you see it.
The sailor boys who build the Saturn--they give it the handle of Satellite II then--would not know their baby now, Frankie does such a good job of revamping it. Of course, it is not used as a gambling ship then--at least not altogether, if you know what I mean. Way back in 1998 when they get it in the sky, they are more interested in it being useful than pretty; anybody that got nasty and unsanitary ideas just forgot them when they saw that iron casket floating in a sky that could be filled with hydrogen bombs or old laundry without so much as a four-bar intro as warning.
Frankie buys Satellite II at a war surplus sale when moon flights become as easy as commuters' trips, and he smoothes out its shape so it looks like an egg and then puts a fin around it for ships to land on. After that, it does not take much imagination to call it the Saturn. Then he gets his Western Hemisphere license and opens for business.
My daydreaming stops, for suddenly Hotlips is grabbing my arm and pointing out the window.
"What for are you grabbing my arm and waving your fist at the window, Hotlips?" I inquire politely of him.
"Eddie," he whispers, all nervous and excited from something, "I see one."
I give him a blank stare. "You see one what?"
"One flying cuspidor," he says, his face serious. "I see it hanging out there by the Saturn and then suddenly it is gone. Whoosh."
"Hallucination," I tell him. But I look out hard and try to see one too. I don't, so I figure maybe I am right, after all.
I do not know about this "men from space" gimmick the science-fiction people try to peddle, but lots of good substantial citizens see flying cuspidors and I think to myself that maybe there is something to it. So I keep looking back at the Saturn, but nothing unusual is going on that I can see. My logic and super-salesmanship evidently convinces Hotlips, for he does not say anything more about it.
Anyway, in a few minutes we joggle to a stop at Earthport, pile out, wave our identification papers at the doorman with the lieutenant's bars, and then take off for the Atomic Cafe a block away.
Entering this gem of a drinking establishment, we make our way through the smoke and noise to a quiet little corner table and give Mamie the high-sign for two beers. A few minutes later she comes bouncing over with the order and a cheery word about how invigorating it is to see us high-class gentlemen instead of the bums that usually hang around a joint like this trying to make time with a nice girl like her.
"That is all very nice," I say to her politely, "and we are overjoyed beyond words to see you too, Mamie, but Hotlips and I have got strange and mysterious things to discuss, so I would appreciate it if you would see us later instead of now." With this, I give her arm a playful pat, and she blushes and takes the hint.
When we are alone, I ask Hotlips, now what is the trouble which he has.
"Like I tell you before," Hotlips says, "I have a problem. So here it is." He takes a deep breath and lets fly all at once. "I am in love of the thrush, Stella Starlight."
I am drinking my beer when he says this, and suddenly I get a snootful and start coughing, and he whams me on the back with his big paw so I stop, more in self-defense than in his curing me. Somehow, the idea of a big bruiser like Hotlips Grogan in love of a sweet fluffy thing like Stella Starlight seems funny.
"So?" I say.
"So that is why I play so bad tonight," he says. Seeing I do not quite catch on to the full intent of his remarks, he continues. "I am a happy man, Eddie. I got my trumpet, a paid-for suit of clothes, a one-room apartment with green wallpaper. Could a man ask for much more?"
"Not unless he is greedy," I agree.
Hotlips Grogan is staring at his beer as though he sees a worm in it and looking sadder than ever. "It is a strange and funny thing," he says, dreamy-like. "There she is singing, and there I am giving with the trumpet, and all of a great big sudden--whammo!--it hits me, and I feel a funny feeling in my stomach, like maybe it is full of supersuds or something, and my mouth is dry just like cotton candy."
"Indigestion," I suggest.
He shakes his big head. "No," he says, "it is worse than indigestion." He points to his stomach and sighs. "It is love."
"Fine," I say, happy it is not worse. "All you got to do is tell her, get married and have lots and lots of kids."
Hotlips Grogan's big eyebrows play hopscotch around his button nose, so I can tell he does not think I solve all his troubles with my suggestion.
"You are a good man, Eddie," he tells me, "but you are too intellectual. This is an affair of the heart." He sighs again. "I am never in love of a girl before," he goes on, more worried, "and I do not know how to act. Besides, the thrush is with us only a day, and Frankie already is making with the eyes."
"So what should I do, give you lessons?" The idea is so laughable I laugh at it. "Anyway, Frankie always makes with the eyes at thrushes."
"Yes," Hotlips Grogan admits, "but never before have I been in love of any of the thrushes Frankie has made with the eyes at. Frankly, Eddie, I am worried like all get out about this."
"Sometimes I do not even understand the way you play even before the thrush comes, Hotlips," I admit. "Like for instance yesterday when we play 'A Spaceship Built for Two.' This is a song, as you know, that does not have in it many high notes, but even when you play the low notes they sound somewhat like they maybe are trying to be high notes. It is a matter which is perplexing to one of my curious nature."
Hotlips looks sheepish for a minute and then he says, "It is a physical disability with me, Eddie. When I am young and practicing with my trumpet one day, I have an accident and get my tongue caught in the mouthpiece, and it is necessary for the doctor to operate on my tongue and cut into it like maybe it is chopped liver."
"I am sorry to hear this, Hotlips," I say.
"I do not tell anyone this before, Eddie," Hotlips confesses. "But afterward when I play the trumpet, I play two notes at one time, which at first is pretty embarrassing."
"This is great, Hotlips," I proclaim as a big idea hits me; "you can play your own harmony. With talent like that, and my brain--"
But Hotlips is shaking his head. "No, Eddie," he says. "The other note is way off in the stratosphere someplace and no one can hear it, even when the melody note is low. And the higher the note is you can hear, the higher the other note is you cannot hear. Besides, now I cannot even play what I am supposed to play, what with the thrush around."
I sit there with my beer in my hand and think about it for a while, while Hotlips looks at me like a lost sheepdog. I scratch my head but I do not even come up with dandruff.
Finally, I say, "Well, thrush or not, if you play no better than you do this afternoon, Frankie will make you walk back home without a spacesuit."
"That is for positive," Hotlips agrees sadly. "So what can I do?"
I am forced to admit that I do not know just what Hotlips can do. "However," I say, "I have an idea." And I call Mamie over and tell her the problem. "So you are a woman and maybe you know what my musician friend can do," I suggest.
Mamie sighs. "I am at a loss for words concerning what your friend can do, but I know just how he feels, for it is like that with me, too. I am in love of a handsome young musician who comes in here, but he does not take notice of me, except to order some beer for him and his friend."
I click my teeth sympathetically at this news.
"And I am too shy and dignified a girl to tell him," Mamie continues sadly. "So you see I have the same problem as your friend and cannot help you."
"See," I whisper to Hotlips, "it is perfectly normal."
"Yes," he hisses back. "But I am still miserable, and the only company I desire is that of Stella Starlight."
"Maybe it really is your trumpet," I suggest, not very hopeful, though.
Hotlips shakes his head. "Look," he says and takes the trumpet from his case and puts it to his lips, "and listen to this."
Inwardly, I quiver like all get out, because I figure that is just what the management will tell us to do, once Hotlips lets go. Hotlips puffs out his cheeks and a soft note slides from the end of the trumpet--low, clear, and beautiful, without a waver in a spaceload. Only a few people close by can hear the note and they do not pay us any attention, except to think that maybe we are a little nuttier than is normal for musicians.
From his first note, Hotlips shifts to a higher note which is just as pretty. Then he goes on to another one and then to another, improvising a melody I do not hear before and getting higher all the time. After a while I can hardly hear it, it is so high, but I can feel the glass in my hand vibrating like it wants to get out on the floor and dance. I hold on to it with both hands, so my beer will not slosh over the side. Then there is no sound at all from the trumpet, but Hotlips' cheeks are puffed out and he is still blowing for all he is worth--which is plenty, if he can play like this when Stella Starlight is around.
I tap Hotlips on the shoulder. "Hotlips, that is all very well for any bats in the room which maybe can hear what you play, but--" He does not pay me any attention.
Suddenly there is a large crinkle-crash of glass from the bar and a hoarse cry from the bartender as he sees his king-size mirror come down in little pieces. At the same time, glasses pop into fragments all over the room and spill beer over the people holding them. Even my own glass becomes nothing but ground glass and the beer sloshes over the table. At the moment, however, I do not worry about that.
There are other things to worry about which are more important--like Hotlips' and my health, for instance, which is not likely to be so good in the near future.
Like I say, Hotlips does not play loud and it is noisy in the place, so there are not too many who hear him. But they look around, all mad and covered with beer, and see him there with the trumpet in his hand and a funny look on his big face, and they put two and two together. I can see they figure the answer is four. And what makes things worse, they are between us and the front door, so we cannot sneak past like maybe we are just tourists.
"Hotlips," I say to him, my voice not calm like is usual, "I think it is a grand and glorious idea that we desert here and take ourselves elsewhere."
Hotlips agrees. "But where?" he wants to know.
I am forced to admit to myself that he comes up with a good question.
"Over here," Mamie said suddenly, and we look across the room to see her poking her nose through a side door.
We do not wait for a formal invite but zoom across the floor and through the door into another, emptier room. Mamie slams the door and locks it just as two or three bodies thump into it like they mean business.
"The manager is out there and is not completely overjoyed with your actions of a short while ago," Mamie informs us, explaining, "I recognize the thump the character makes."
"Evidently," I surmise, "he is in no mood to talk to concerning damages and how we can get out of paying them, so we will talk to him later instead of now."
"See what I mean, though, Eddie," Hotlips says. "I play fine when Stella Starlight is not in the place. Like I say, it is love and what can I do about it."
"It is a problem," I say. "Even if you do play, you will no doubt be fired and cannot pay for the damages to the bar room and to the customers' clothing." Already there are holes in my plastic clothing where the beer splashes. "If you can only give out on the Saturn like you play here," I sigh, "we can break all records and show Frankie--"
Suddenly Mamie is tugging at my arm.
"Mamie," I inquire politely of her, "why are you tugging at my arm?"
"That is it," she informs me and leans forward and whispers in my ear.
"But--" I say.
"Hurry," she says, pushing us out another door. "You have only got this afternoon to do it."
"But--" I say again, and Hotlips and I are in the alley looking at the door which Mamie closes in our face.
"What does Mamie say?" Hotlips wants to know eagerly. "Can she fix it up with me and Stella Starlight?"
I scratch my head. "That I do not know, Hotlips, but she does give me an idea which is so good I am surprised at myself I do not think of it alone."
Hotlips gives me a blank stare. "Which is?"
"Come on," I say mysteriously. "You and me have got things to do."
It is hard to say who is more nervous that night, Hotlips or a certain piano player with my name. Frankie is smirking like always, and Stella Starlight is sitting and looking beautiful while she waits for her cue. Hotlips is fumbling with his trumpet like maybe he never sees one before. And I--even I am not exactly calm like always.
The band begins to warm up, but we do not knock ourselves out because there are still no customers to speak of. Frankie's license makes it plain that he has to stay over the western hemisphere so he has to wait until it gets dark enough there for the people to want to go night-clubbing, even though it is not really night on the Saturn, or morning or anything else.
We play along like always, and Hotlips has his trumpet pressed into his face, and nothing but beautiful sounds come from the band. I do not know if Frankie is altogether happy about this, for he does not like Hotlips and would like this chance to bounce him. But what surprises me most is that the thrush, Stella Starlight, keeps looking back at Hotlips like she notices him for the first time and is plenty worried by what she sees.
We have a short break after a while and I am telling Hotlips that the idea goes over real great, when Stella Starlight waltzes over. Hotlips' big eyes bug out and I can see him shaking and covered with goosebumps.
"You do not play like that before, Hotlips," she coos. "What did you do?"
Hotlips blushes and stammers, "Eddie and I fix--" But I give him a kick in his big shins before he gives the whole thing away.
"Hotlips does some practicing this afternoon," I tell her, "to get his lip in shape for tonight."
She looks at me like she is looking through me, and then she turns back to Hotlips and says, soft and murmuring: "Please do not play too high, Hotlips. I am delicate and am disturbed by high sounds."
She waltzes away, and I scratch my head and try to figure out what this pitch is for. Hotlips is not trying to figure out anything; he just sits there looking like he has just got his trumpet out of hock for the last time.
"Hotlips," I say to him.
"Go away, please, Eddie," he tells me. "I am in heaven."
"You will be in the poorhouse or maybe even in jail if you tell somebody how we fix your playing," I warn him.
"I still feel funny feelings though, Eddie," he tells me, frowning, "like I cannot hit high notes now if I try."
"Then do not try," I advise. "One problem at a time is too much."
There is a commotion at the entrance on the other side of the dance floor, where some people all dressed up come in. A woman is holding her head and moaning and threatening to faint all over the place.
Frankie hurries over to us, running fidgety hands through his hair. "For goodness sake, play something," he almost begs.
"What gives?" I inquire.
"Flying cuspidors," Frankie says in a frantic tone. "They are all around the place, like they are maybe mad at something, and a few minutes ago they buzz the ferry and get the passengers all nervous and upset. If they do that again, business will be bad; maybe even now it will be bad. Play something!"
He hops out in front with his baton and gives us a quick one-two, and we all swing into "Space On My Hands," real loud so as to get people's minds off things which Frankie wants to get people's minds off of.
Stella Starlight gets up to sing, but she looks more like she would rather do something else. She stares at Hotlips and at the trumpet on his lips and begins to quiver like she is about to do a dance.
I remember she says she does not like high notes, and this song has some pretty well up in the stratosphere, especially for the trumpet section, which is Hotlips.
She is frowning like maybe she is thinking real hard about something and is surprised her thoughts do no good. Her face becomes waxy and there is a frightened look on it.
She quivers some more, as the notes go up and up and up. Then she lets out a shriek, like maybe she is going to pieces.
And then she does. Actually.
Right before our popping eyeballs she goes to pieces.
As each one in the band sees what is going on, he stops playing, until finally Hotlips is the only one. But the trumpet is in Hotlips' hand, and the music is coming from the recording machine we place under his chair. The notes are clear and smooth, and you can almost feel the air shaking with them.
But nobody notices the music or where it comes from. They are too busy watching the thrush, Stella Starlight.
She stands there, her face as white as clay, shaking like a carrot going through a mixmaster. And then tiny cracks appear on her face, on her arms, even in her dress, and then a large one appears in her forehead and goes down through her body. She splits in the middle like a cracked walnut, and there in the center, floating three feet from the floor is a small flying cuspidor.
Nobody in the room says anything. They just stand there, bug-eyed and frightened like anything. Somewhere, across the room, a woman faints. I do not feel too well myself, and I am afraid to look to see how Hotlips takes this.
There is no sound, but I hear a voice in my mind and know that the others hear it too. The voice sounds like it is filled with wire and metal and is not exactly human. It says:
"You win, Hotlips Grogan. I, as advance agent in disguise, tell you this. We will go away and leave you and your people alone. We place a mental block in your mind, but you outsmart us, and now you know our weakness. We cannot stand high sounds which you can play so easy on your trumpet. We find ourselves a home someplace else."
With that, the cuspidor shoots across the room and plows right through the wall.
"That's the engine room!" Frankie wails.
There is a sudden explosion from the other side of the wall, and everybody decides all at once they would like to be someplace else, and they all pick the same spot. The space ferry is pretty crowded, but we jam aboard it and drift away from the Saturn--musicians, waiters and paying customers all sitting in each other's laps.
The Saturn is wobbling around, with flames shooting out at all angles, and Frankie is holding his head and moaning. In the distance, you can just about make out little specks of cuspidors heading for the wild black yonder.
So all is well that ends well, and this is it.
Frankie uses his insurance money to open a rest home on Mars for ailing musicians.
Hotlips is all broken up, in a manner of speaking, over Stella Starlight's turning out to be not human, but he consoles himself with a good job playing trumpet in a burlesque house where the girls wear costumes made of glass and other brittle stuff.
* * * * *
As for me, Mamie gets me a job playing piano at the place where she works, and everything is okay except for one thing. When Mamie is around I cannot seem to concentrate on my playing. I feel a funny feeling in my stomach, like maybe it is full of supersuds or something, and my mouth is dry like cotton candy.
I think maybe it is indigestion.
I LIKE MARTIAN MUSIC
by CHARLES E. FRITCH
Longtree played. His features relaxed into a gentle smile of happiness and his body turned a bright red orange.
Longtree sat before his hole in the ground and gazed thoughtfully among the sandy red hills that surrounded him. His skin at that moment was a medium yellow, a shade between pride and happiness at having his brief symphony almost completed, with just a faint tinge of red to denote that uncertain, cautious approach to the last note which had eluded him thus far.
He sat there unmoving for a while, and then he picked up his blowstring and fitted the mouthpiece between his thin lips. He blew into it softly and at the same time gently strummed the three strings stretching the length of the instrument. The note was a firm clear one which would have made any other musician proud.
But Longtree frowned, and at the disappointment his body flushed a dark green and began taking on a purple cast of anger. Hastily, he put down the blowstring and tried to think of something else. Slowly his normal color returned.
Across the nearest hill came his friend Channeljumper, striding on the long thin ungainly legs that had given him his name. His skin radiated a blissful orange.
"Longtree!" Channeljumper exclaimed enthusiastically, collapsing on the ground nearby and folding his legs around him. "How's the symphony coming?"
"Not so good," Longtree admitted sadly, and his skin turned green at the memory. "If I don't get that last note, I may be this color the rest of my life."
"Why don't you play what you've written so far. It's not very long, and it might cheer you up a bit."
You're a good friend, Channeljumper, Longtree thought, and when Redsand and I are married after the Music Festival we'll have you over to our hole for dinner. As he thought this, he felt his body take on an orange cast, and he felt better.
"I can't seem to get that last note," he said, picking up the blowstring again and putting it into position. "The final note must be conclusive, something complete in itself and yet be able to sum up the entire meaning of the symphony preceding it."
Channeljumper hummed sympathetically. "That's a big job for one note. It might be a sound no one has ever heard before."
Longtree shrugged. "It may even sound alien," he admitted, "but it's got to be the right note."
"Play, and we'll see," Channeljumper urged.
Longtree played. And as he played, his features relaxed into a gentle smile of happiness and his body turned orange. Delicately, he strummed the three strings of the blowstring with his long-nailed fingers, softly he pursed his frail lips and blew expertly into the mouthpiece.
From the instrument came sounds the like of which Channeljumper had never before heard. The Martian sat and listened in evident rapture, his body radiating a golden glow of ecstasy. He sat and dreamed, and as the music played, his spine tingled with growing excitement. The music swelled, surrounding him, permeating him, picking him up in a great hand and sweeping him into new and strange and beautiful worlds--worlds of tall metal structures, of vast stretches of greenness and of water and of trees and of small pale creatures that flew giant metal insects. He dreamed of these things which his planet Mars had not known for millions of years.
After a while, the music stopped, but for a moment neither of them said anything.
At last Channeljumper sighed. "It's beautiful," he said.
"Yes," Longtree admitted.
"But--" Channeljumper seemed puzzled--"but somehow it doesn't seem complete. Almost, but not quite. As though--as though--"
Longtree sighed. "One more note would do it. One more note--no more, no less--at the end of the crescendo could tie the symphony together and end it. But which one? I've tried them all, and none of them fit!"
His voice had risen higher in his excitement, and Channeljumper warned, "Careful, you're beginning to turn purple."
"I know," Longtree said mournfully, and the purple tint changed to a more acceptable green. "But I've got to win first prize at the festival tomorrow; Redsand promised to marry me if I did."
"You can't lose," Channeljumper told him, and then remembered, "if you can get that last note."
"If," Longtree echoed despairingly, as though his friend had asked the impossible. "I wish I had your confidence, Chan; you're orange most of the time, while I'm a spectrum."
"I haven't your artistic temperament," Channeljumper told him. "Besides, orange is such a homely color I feel ashamed to have it all the time."
As he said this, he turned green with shame, and Longtree laughed at the paradox.
Channeljumper laughed too, glad that he had diverted his friend's attention from the elusive and perhaps non-existent note. "Did you know the space rocket is due pretty soon," he said, "perhaps even in time for the Music Festival?"
"Space rocket?"
"Oh, I forgot you were busy composing and didn't get to hear about it," Channeljumper said. "Well, Bigwind, who has a telescope in his hole, told me a rocket is coming through space toward us, possibly from the third planet."
"Oh?" Longtree said, not particularly interested.
"I wonder if they'll look like us?" Channeljumper wondered.
"If they're intelligent, of course they will," Longtree said certainly, not caring. "Their culture will probably be alien, though, and their music--" He paused and turned a very deep yellow. "Of course! They might even be able to furnish the note I need to complete my symphony!"
Channeljumper shook his head. "You've got to compose it all yourself," he reminded, "or you don't qualify. And if you don't qualify, you can't win, and if you don't win, you can't marry Redsand."
"But just one little note--" Longtree said.
Channeljumper shrugged helplessly and turned sympathetically green. "I don't make the rules," he said.
"No. Well," Longtree went on in sudden determination, "I'll find that last note if I have to stay permanently purple."
Channeljumper shuddered jestingly at this but remained pleasantly orange. "And I'll leave you alone so you can get to work," he said, unfolding himself.
"Goodbye," Longtree said, but Channeljumper's long legs had already taken him over to the nearest sand dune and out of sight.
Alone, Longtree picked up the blowstring once more, placed it against his stomach, and gave out with a clear, beautiful, experimental note which was again not the one he desired.
He still had not found it an hour later, when the Sound came. The Sound was a low unpleasant rumble, a sound lower than any Longtree had ever heard, and he wondered what it was. Thinking of it, he remembered he had seen a large flash of fire in the sky a moment before the roar came. But since this last was clearly not likely at all, he dismissed the whole thing as imagination and tried again to coax some new note from the blowstring.
A half hour later, Channeljumper came bounding excitedly over a sand dune. "They're here," he cried, screeching to a halt and emitting yellow flashes of color.
"Who's here?" Longtree demanded, turning violet in annoyance at the interruption.
"The visitors from space," Channeljumper explained. "They landed near my hole. They're little creatures, only half as big as we are, but thicker and grey colored."
"Grey colored?" Longtree repeated incredulously, trying to picture the improbability.
"But only on the outside," Channeljumper went on. "They have an outside shell that comes off, and inside they're sort of pink-orange."
"Ah-ha," Longtree said, as though he'd suspected it all the time. "Evidently they wear grey suits of some kind, probably for protection."
"They took them off anyway," Channeljumper said, eager to impart his knowledge, "and they were sort of pink-orange underneath. There are only two of them, and one has long hair."
"Strange," Longtree mused, thinking of their own hairless bodies. "Wonder what they want."
Channeljumper shrugged to indicate he didn't know. "The short-haired one followed me," he said.
Longtree felt the chill blue of fear creep along his spine, but immediate anger at himself changed it conveniently to purple, and he was certain Channeljumper hadn't noticed. When he had controlled himself, he said, "Well, it doesn't matter. I've got to get on with my symphony. That last note--"
"He's here," Channeljumper announced.
"What?"
Channeljumper pointed eagerly, and Longtree's eyes followed the direction to where the alien stood at the top of a nearby dune staring at them. Longtree could feel his skin automatically turning red with caution, blending with the sand while the ever-trusting Channeljumper remained bright orange.
"Good gosh," the alien exclaimed. "Not only do they look like modified grasshoppers, they change color too!"
"What'd he say?" Longtree demanded.
"How should I know?" Channeljumper said. "It's in another language."
"And its voice," Longtree exclaimed, almost disbelieving it. "Low. Lower than even our drums' rumble."
"And they talk in squeaks yet!" the alien told himself aloud.
Longtree regarded the alien carefully. As Channeljumper had said, the creature was short and had close-cropped hair on its head. The legs were brief and pudgy, and Longtree felt a shade of pity for the creature who could obviously not get around as well as they. It was undoubtedly intelligent--the space rocket testified to that--and the fact that the creature's skin color stayed a peaceful pink-orange helped assure Longtree the alien's mission was friendly.
The alien raised a short arm and stepped slowly forward. "I come in peace," he said in the language they could not understand. "My wife and I are probably the only humans left alive. When we left Earth, most of the population had been wiped out by atomics. I think we were the only ones to get away."
Longtree felt his redness subside to orange, as he wondered idly what the alien had said. Except for a natural curiosity, he didn't really care, for he remembered suddenly the symphony he had to finish by tomorrow if he were to marry Redsand. But there was the element of politeness to consider, so he nudged Channeljumper.
"Don't just stand there, say something!"
Channeljumper flustered and turned several colors in rapid succession. He stammered, "Er--ah--welcome to our planet, O visitor from space," and motioned the alien to sit down.
"That's not very creative," Longtree accused.
"What's the difference," Channeljumper pointed out, "when he doesn't understand us anyway."
"You guys don't really look like grasshoppers," the man from Earth apologized, coming forward; "it's just the long legs that fooled me from up there. Boy, am I glad to find somebody intelligent on Mars; from the air we couldn't see any cities or anything, and we were afraid the planet didn't have any life. I wish we could understand each other, though."
Longtree smiled pleasantly and wished the creature would go away so he could search for the last note to his symphony. He picked up his blowstring so the alien wouldn't sit on it.
"Play for him," Channeljumper suggested, seating himself by segments. "Just the last part to see how he reacts. Music is universal, you know."
Longtree was going to do just that thing, for despite Channeljumper's warning that he must compose every single note by himself, he felt an alien viewpoint might be helpful.
He started playing. Channeljumper sat dreaming, glowing radiantly, but the alien seemed somewhat perturbed by the music and fidgeted nervously. Could it be, Longtree wondered, that the incredible beauty of his composition might not translate acceptably to alien ears? He dismissed the thought as unlikely.
"Er--that's a bit high, isn't it?" the creature said, shaking his head.
Lost in the sweeping melodies, neither Longtree nor Channeljumper paid any attention to the meaningless syllables. Longtree played on, oblivious to all else, soaring toward the great screaming crescendo that would culminate with the missing note.
Vaguely, he became aware that the creature had gotten up, and he turned a small part of his attention to the action. Longtree smiled inwardly, pleased, and turned yellow with pride to think even a man from another planet should so appreciate his symphony that he got up and danced a strange dance and even sang to the music.
The alien held onto his ears and leaped erratically, singing, "No, no, stop it. It's too high. My head's bursting!"
Channeljumper too seemed pleased by this show of appreciation, though neither of them understood the words, and Longtree swept into the final notes of the rising crescendo with a gusto he had not previously displayed. He stopped where he had always stopped--and the final note came!
It startled the Martians. Then the realization swept over them in glad tides of color. The symphony was complete now, with that final alien sound. Longtree could win both the festival prize and Redsand with it. The last note was a soft popping sound that had come from the creature from another planet. They looked to see him sagging to the ground, his head soft and pulpy.
"My symphony's complete," Longtree exclaimed jubilantly, a brilliant yellow now.
But Channeljumper's yellow happiness was tinged with green. "A pity," he said, "the creature had to give its life in exchange for the note."
"I believe it really wanted to," Longtree said, turning solemn. "Did you see how it danced to the music, as though in the throes of ecstasy, and it didn't change color once! It must have died happy to know it gave itself to a good cause."
"You could probably get by with claiming to use the creature as an auxiliary instrument," mused Channeljumper, practical once more, "and eliminate any claim that he might have assisted you. But what about the Festival? This one looks as though he doesn't have another note in him."
"There's the other one," Longtree reminded, "the one with long hair. We can save that one until tomorrow."
"Of course," Channeljumper agreed, standing up. "I'll go get it, and you can keep it safe here in your hole until tomorrow night."
"You're a good friend, Channeljumper," Longtree began, but the other was already bounding out of sight over a sand dune.
Blissfully he raised the blowstring into position and played the opening notes to his symphony. The alien lay unmoving with its head in a sticky puddle, but Longtree took no notice. He didn't even consider that after the Festival he would never be able to play his symphony again in all its glorious completeness. His spinal column tingled pleasantly, and his skin turned the golden yellow of unbearable happiness.
The music was beautiful.
IRRESISTIBLE WEAPON
By H. B. Fyfe
There's no such thing as a weapon too horrible to use; weapons will continue to become bigger, and deadlier. Like other things that can't be stopped....
In the special observation dome of the colossal command ship just beyond Pluto, every nervous clearing of a throat rasped through the silence. Telescopes were available but most of the scientists and high officials preferred the view on the huge telescreen.
This showed, from a distance of several million miles, one of the small moons of the frigid planet, so insignificant that it had not been discovered until man had pushed the boundaries of space exploration past the asteroids. The satellite was about to become spectacularly significant, however, as the first target of man's newest, most destructive weapon.
"I need not remind you, gentlemen," white-haired Co-ordinator Evora of Mars had said, "that if we have actually succeeded in this race against our former Centaurian colonies, it may well prevent the imminent conflict entirely. In a few moments we shall know whether our scientists have developed a truly irresistible weapon."
Of all the officials, soldiers, and scientists present, Arnold Gibson was perhaps the least excited. For one thing, he had labored hard to make the new horror succeed and felt reasonably confident that it would. The project had been given the attention of every first-class scientific mind in the Solar System; for the great fear was that the new states on the Centaurian planets might win the race of discovery and ...
And bring a little order into this old-fashioned, inefficient fumbling toward progress, Gibson thought contemptuously. Look at them--fools for all their degrees and titles! They've stumbled on something with possibilities beyond their confused powers of application.
A gasp rustled through the chamber, followed by an even more awed silence than had preceded the unbelievable, ultra-rapid action on the telescreen. Gibson permitted himself a tight smile of satisfaction.
Now my work really begins, he reflected.
A few quick steps brought him to Dr. Haas, director of the project, just before the less stunned observers surrounded that gentleman, babbling questions.
"I'll start collecting the Number Three string of recorders," he reported.
"All right, Arnold," agreed Haas. "Tell the others to get their ships out too. I'll be busy here."
Not half as busy as you will be in about a day, thought Gibson, heading for the spaceship berths.
* * * * *
He had arranged to be assigned the recording machines drifting in space at the greatest distance from the command ship. The others would assume that he needed more time to locate and retrieve the apparatus--which would give him a head start toward Alpha Centauri.
His ship was not large, but it was powerful and versatile to cope with any emergency that may have been encountered during the dangerous tests. Gibson watched his instruments carefully for signs of pursuit until he had put a few million miles between himself and the command ship. Then he eased his craft into subspace drive and relaxed his vigilance.
He returned to normal space many "days" later in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. They may have attempted to follow him for all he knew, but it hardly mattered by then. He broadcast the recognition signal he had been given to memorize long ago, when he had volunteered his services to the new states. Then he headed for the capital planet, Nessus. Long before reaching it, he acquired a lowering escort of warcraft, but he was permitted to land.
"Well, well, it's young Gibson!" the Chairman of Nessus greeted him, after the newcomer had passed through the exhaustive screening designed to protect the elaborate underground headquarters. "I trust you have news for us, my boy. Watch outside the door, Colonel!"
One of the ostentatiously armed guards stepped outside and closed the door as Gibson greeted the obese man sitting across the button-studded expanse of desk. The scientist was under no illusion as to the vagueness of the title "Chairman." He was facing the absolute power of the Centaurian planets--which, in a few months' time, would be the same as saying the ruler of all the human race in both systems. Gibson's file must have been available on the Chairman's desk telescreen within minutes of the reception of his recognition signal. He felt a thrill of admiration for the efficiency of the new states and their system of government.
He made it his business to report briefly and accurately, trusting that the plain facts of his feat would attract suitable recognition. They did. Chairman Diamond's sharp blue eyes glinted out of the fat mask of his features.
"Well done, my boy!" he grunted, with a joviality he did not bother trying to make sound overly sincere. "So they have it! You must see our men immediately, and point out where they have gone wrong. You may leave it to me to decide who has gone wrong!"
* * * * *
Arnold Gibson shivered involuntarily before reminding himself that he had seen the correct answer proved before his eyes. He had stood there and watched--more, he had worked with them all his adult life--and he was the last whom the muddled fools would have suspected.
The officer outside the door, Colonel Korman, was recalled and given orders to escort Gibson to the secret state laboratories. He glanced briefly at the scientist when they had been let out through the complicated system of safeguards.
"We have to go to the second moon," he said expressionlessly. "Better sleep all you can on the way. Once you're there, the Chairman will be impatient for results!"
Gibson was glad, after they had landed on the satellite, that he had taken the advice. He was led from one underground lab to another, to compare Centaurian developments with Solarian. Finally, Colonel Korman appeared to extricate him, giving curt answers to such researchers as still had questions.
"Whew! Glad you got me out!" Gibson thanked him. "They've been picking my brain for two days straight!"
"I hope you can stay awake," retorted Korman with no outward sign of sympathy. "If you think you can't, say so now. I'll have them give you another shot. The Chairman is calling on the telescreen."
Gibson straightened.
Jealous snob! he thought. Typical military fathead, and he knows I amount to more than any little colonel now. I was smart enough to fool all the so-called brains of the Solar System.
"I'll stay awake," he said shortly.
Chairman Diamond's shiny features appeared on the screen soon after Korman reported his charge ready.
"Speak freely," he ordered Gibson. "This beam is so tight and scrambled that no prying jackass could even tell that it is communication. Have you set us straight?"
"Yes, Your Excellency," replied Gibson. "I merely pointed out which of several methods the Solarians got to yield results. Your--our scientists were working on all possibilities, so it would have been only a matter of time."
"Which you have saved us," said Chairman Diamond. His ice-blue eyes glinted again. "I wish I could have seen the faces of Haas and Co-ordinator Evora, and the rest. You fooled them completely!"
Gibson glowed at the rare praise.
"I dislike bragging, Your Excellency," he said, "but they are fools. I might very well have found the answer without them, once they had collected the data. My success shows what intelligence, well-directed after the manner of the new states of Centauri, can accomplish against inefficiency."
The Chairman's expression, masked by the fat of his face, nevertheless approached a smile.
"So you would say that you--one of our sympathizers--were actually the most intelligent worker they had?"
He'll have his little joke, thought Gibson, and I'll let him put it over. Then, even that sour colonel will laugh with us, and the Chairman will hint about what post I'll get as a reward. I wouldn't mind being in charge--old Haas' opposite number at this end.
"I think I might indeed be permitted to boast of that much ability, Your Excellency," he answered, putting on what he hoped was an expectant smile. "Although, considering the Solarians, that is not saying much."
The little joke did not develop precisely as anticipated.
"Unfortunately," Chairman Diamond said, maintaining his smile throughout, "wisdom should never be confused with intelligence."
* * * * *
Gibson waited, feeling his own smile stiffen as he wondered what could be going wrong. Surely, they could not doubt his loyalty! A hasty glance at Colonel Korman revealed no expression on the military facade affected by that gentleman.
"For if wisdom were completely synonymous with intelligence," the obese Chairman continued, relishing his exposition, "you would be a rival to myself, and consequently would be--disposed of--anyway!"
Such a tingle shot up Gibson's spine that he was sure he must have jumped.
"Anyway?" he repeated huskily. His mouth suddenly seemed dry.
Chairman Diamond smiled out of the telescreen, so broadly that Gibson was unpleasantly affected by the sight of his small, gleaming, white teeth.
"Put it this way," he suggested suavely. "Your highly trained mind observed, correlated, and memorized the most intricate data and mathematics, meanwhile guiding your social relations with your former colleagues so as to remain unsuspected while stealing their most cherished secret. Such a feat demonstrates ability and intelligence."
Gibson tried to lick his lips, and could not, despite the seeming fairness of the words. He sensed a pulsing undercurrent of cruelty and cynicism.
"On the other hand," the mellow voice flowed on, "having received the information, being able to use it effectively now without you, and knowing that you betrayed once--I shall simply discard you like an old message blank. That is an act of wisdom.
"Had you chosen your course more wisely," he added, "your position might be stronger."
By the time Arnold Gibson regained his voice, the Centaurian autocrat was already giving instructions to Colonel Korman. The scientist strove to interrupt, to attract the ruler's attention even momentarily.
Neither paid him any heed, until he shouted and tried frenziedly to shove the soldier from in front of the telescreen. Korman backhanded him across the throat without looking around, with such force that Gibson staggered back and fell.
He lay, half-choking, grasping his throat with both hands until he could breathe. The colonel continued discussing his extinction without emotion.
"... so if Your Excellency agrees, I would prefer taking him back to Nessus first, for the sake of the morale factor here. Some of them are so addled now at having been caught chasing up wrong alleys that they can hardly work."
Apparently the Chairman agreed, for the screen was blank when the colonel reached down and hauled Gibson to his feet.
"Now, listen to me carefully!" he said, emphasizing his order with a ringing slap across Gibson's face. "I shall walk behind you with my blaster drawn. If you make a false move, I shall not kill you."
Gibson stared at him, holding his bleeding mouth.
"It will be much worse," Korman went on woodenly. "Imagine what it will be like to have both feet charred to the bone. You would have to crawl the rest of the way to the ship; I certainly would not consider carrying you!"
In a nightmarish daze, Gibson obeyed the cold directions, and walked slowly along the underground corridors of the Centaurian research laboratories. He prayed desperately that someone--anyone--might come along. Anybody who could possibly be used to create a diversion, or to be pushed into Korman and his deadly blaster.
The halls remained deserted, possibly by arrangement.
Maybe I'd better wait till we reach his ship, Gibson thought. I ought to be able to figure a way before we reach Nessus. I had the brains to fool Haas and ...
He winced, recalling Chairman Diamond's theory of the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
The obscene swine! he screamed silently.
Colonel Korman grunted warningly, and Gibson took the indicated turn.
They entered the spaceship from an underground chamber, and Gibson learned the reason for his executioner's assurance when the latter chained him to one of the pneumatic acceleration seats. The chain was fragile in appearance, but he knew he would not be free to move until Korman so desired.
More of their insane brand of cleverness! he reflected. That's the sort of thing they do succeed in thinking of. They're all crazy! Why did I ever ...
But he shrank from the question he feared to answer. To drag out into the open his petty, selfish reasons, shorn of the tinsel glamor of so-called "service" and "progress," would be too painful.
* * * * *
After the first series of accelerations, he roused himself from his beaten stupor enough to note that Korman was taking a strange course for reaching Nessus. Then, entirely too close to the planet and its satellites to ensure accuracy, the colonel put the ship into subspace drive.
Korman leaned back at the conclusion of the brief activity on his control board, and met Gibson's pop-eyed stare.
"Interesting, the things worth knowing," he commented. "How to make a weapon, for instance, or whether your enemy has it yet."
He almost smiled at his prisoner's expression.
"Or even better: knowing exactly how far your enemy has progressed and how fast he can continue, whether to stop him immediately or whether you can remain a step ahead."
"B-but--if both sides are irresistible ..." Gibson stammered.
Korman examined him contemptuously.
"No irresistible weapon exists, or ever will!" he declared. "Only an irresistible process--the transmission of secrets! You are living proof that no safeguards can defend against that."
He savored Gibson's silent discomfort.
"I am sure you know how far and how fast the Centaurian scientists will go, Gibson, since I guided you to every laboratory in that plant. Your memory may require some painful jogging when we reach the Solar System; but remember you shall!"
"But you--you were ordered to ..."
"You didn't think I was a Centaurian, did you?" sneered Korman. "After I just explained to you what is really irresistible?"
THE END
SATELLITE SYSTEM
By H. B. FYFE
Having released the netting of his bunk, George Tremont floated himself out. He ran his tongue around his mouth and grimaced.
"Wonder how long I slept ... feels like too long," he muttered. "Well, they would have called me."
The "cabin" was a ninety-degree wedge of a cylinder hardly eight feet high. From one end of its outer arc across to the other was just over ten feet, so that it had been necessary to bevel two corners of the hinged, three-by-seven bunk to clear the sides of the wedge. Lockers flattened the arc behind the bunk.
Tremont maneuvered himself into a vertical position in the eighteen inches between the bunk and a flat surface that cut off the point of the wedge. He stretched out an arm to remove towel and razor from one of the lockers, then carefully folded the bunk upward and hooked it securely in place.
With room to turn now, he swung around and slid open a double door in the flat surface, revealing a shaft three feet square whose center was also the theoretical intersection of his cabin walls. Tremont pulled himself into the shaft. From "up" forward, light leaked through a partly open hatch, and he could hear a murmur of voices as he jackknifed in the opposite direction.
"At least two of them are up there," he grunted.
He wondered which of the other three cabins was occupied, meanwhile pulling himself along by the ladder rungs welded to one corner of the shaft. He reached a slightly wider section aft, which boasted entrances to two air locks, a spacesuit locker, a galley, and a head. He entered the last, noting the murmur of air-conditioning machinery on the other side of the bulkhead.
Tremont hooked a foot under a toehold to maintain his position facing a mirror. He plugged in his razor, turned on the exhauster in the slot below the mirror to keep the clippings out of his eyes, and began to shave. As the beard disappeared, he considered the deals he had come to Centauri to put through.
"A funny business!" he told his image. "Dealing in ideas! Can you really sell a man's thoughts?"
Beginning to work around his chin, he decided that it actually was practical. Ideas, in fact, were almost the only kind of import worth bringing from Sol to Alpha Centauri. Large-scale shipments of necessities were handled by the Federated Governments. To carry even precious or power metals to Earth or to return with any type of manufactured luxury was simply too expensive in money, fuel, effort, and time.
On the other hand, traveling back every five years to buy up plans and licenses for the latest inventions or processes--that was profitable enough to provide a good living for many a man in Tremont's business. All he needed were a number of reliable contacts and a good knowledge of the needs of the three planets and four satellites colonized in the Centaurian system.
Only three days earlier, Tremont had returned from his most recent trip to the old star, landing from the great interstellar ship on the outer moon of Centauri VII. There he leased this small rocket--the Annabel, registered more officially as the AC7-4-525--for his local traveling. It would be another five days before he reached the inhabited moons of Centauri VI.
He stopped next in the galley for a quick breakfast out of tubes, regretting the greater convenience of the starship, then returned the towel and razor to his cabin. He decided that his slightly rumpled shirt and slacks of utilitarian gray would do for another day. About thirty-eight, an inch or two less than six feet and muscularly slim, Tremont had an air of habitual neatness. His dark hair, thinning at the temples, was clipped short and brushed straight back. There were smile wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes and grooving his lean cheeks.
He closed the cabin doors and pulled himself forward to enter the control room through the partly open hatch. The forward bulkhead offered no more head room than did his own cabin, but there seemed to be more breathing space because this chamber was not quartered. Deck space, however, was at such a premium because of the controls, acceleration couches, and astrogating equipment that the hatch was the largest clear area.
Two men and a girl turned startled eyes upon Tremont as he rose into their view. One of the men, about forty-five but sporting a youngish manner to match his blond crewcut and tanned features, glanced quickly at his wrist watch.
"Am I too early?" demanded Tremont with sudden coldness. "What are you doing with my case there?"
The girl, in her early twenties and carefully pretty with her long black hair neatly netted for space, snatched back a small hand from the steel strongbox that was shaped to fit into an attaché case. The second man, under thirty but thick-waisted in a gray tee-shirt, said in the next breath, "Take him!"
Too late, Tremont saw that the speaker had already braced a foot against the far bulkhead. Then the broad face with its crooked blob of a nose above a ridiculous little mustache shot across the chamber at him. Desperately, Tremont groped for a hold that would help him either to avoid the charge or to pull himself back into the shaft, but he was caught half in and half out.
He met the rush with a fist, but the tangle of bodies immediately became confusing beyond belief as the other pair joined in.
Something cracked across the back of his head, much too hard to have been accidental.
When Tremont began to function again, it took him only a few seconds to realize that life had been going on without him for some little time.
For one thing, the heavy man's nosebleed had stopped, and he was tenderly combing blood from his mustache with a fingertip.
For another, they had managed to stuff Tremont into a spacesuit and haul him down the shaft to the air lock. Someone had noosed the thumbs of the gauntlets together and tied the cord to the harness supporting the air tanks.
Tremont twisted his head around to eye the three of them without speaking. He was trying to decide where he had made his mistake.
Bill Braigh, the elderly youth with the crewcut? Ralph Peters, the pilot who had come with the ship? Dorothy Stauber, the trim brunette who had made the trip from Earth on the same starship as Tremont? He could not make up his mind without more to go on.
Then he remembered with a sinking sensation that all of them had been clustered about his case of papers and microfilms when he had interrupted them.
"I trust you aren't thinking of making us any trouble, Tremont," drawled Braigh. "Give up the idea; you've been no trouble at all."
"Where do you think this is getting you?" demanded Tremont.
Braigh chuckled.
"Wherever it would have gotten you," he said. "Only at less expense."
"Ask him for the combination," growled Peters.
Braigh scrutinized Tremont's expression.
"It would probably take us a while, Ralph," he decided regretfully. "It's simpler to put him outside now and be free to use tools on the box."
Tremont opened his mouth to protest, but Braigh clapped the helmet over his head and screwed it fast.
"You'll never read the code!" yelled Tremont, struggling to break free. "Those papers are no good to you without me!"
Someone slammed him against the bulkhead and held him there with his face to it. He could do nothing with his hands, joined as they were, and very little with his feet. It dawned upon him that they could not hear a word, and he fell silent. Twisting his head to peer out the side curve of his vision band, he caught a glimpse of Peters suiting up.
A few minutes later, they opened the inner hatch of the air lock and shoved Tremont inside. Peters followed, gripping him firmly about the knees from behind.
"Here we go!" grunted Peters, and Tremont realized that he could communicate again, over their suit radios.
"You won't get far, trying to read the code I have those papers written in," he warned. "You'd better talk this over before you make a mistake."
"Ain't no mistake about it," said Peters, pressing toward the outer hatch. "So you chartered the rocket. You felt you oughta go out to see about a heavy dust particle hitting the hull. You fell off an' we never found you."
"How will you explain not going yourself? Or not finding me by instruments?"
Peters clubbed Tremont's foot from the tank rack he had hooked with the toe.
"How could I go? Leave the ship without a pilot? An' the screens are for pickin' up meteorites far enough out to mean somethin' at the speeds they travel. So you were too close to register, leastways till it was way too late. You must have suffocated when your air ran out."
Tremont scrabbled about with his feet for some kind of hold. The outer hatch began to open. He could see stars out there.
"Wait!" shouted Tremont.
It was too late. He felt himself shoot forward as if Peters had thrust a foot into the small of his back and shoved. Tremont tried to grab at the edge of the air lock, but it was gone. A puff of air frosted about him, its human bullet.
* * * * *
The stars spun slowly before his eyes. After a moment, the gleaming hull of the Annabel swam into his field of view. It was already thirty feet away and the air lock was closing. He caught a glimpse of a spacesuited figure with the light behind it.
Then he was looking at the stars again.
The small, distant brilliance of Alpha Centauri made him squint in the split second before the suit's photoelectric cells caused filters to flip down before his eyes. Then it was stars again, and the filters retracted.
"They can't do this!" said Tremont. "Peters! Do you hear me? You can't get away with this!"
There was no answer.
The rocket came into view again, farther away. He had to get back somehow. Forgetting the bound position of his hands, he attempted to check his belt equipment. Holding his arms as far as possible from his body was not enough to let him get a look at the harness from within his helmet.
He tugged violently at the cord holding the thumbs of his gauntlets, and thought it gave slightly.
Maybe it just tightened, he thought.
To free his hands, he drew his arms in through the wide armpits of the suit sleeves, built that way to enable the wearer to feed himself, wipe his brow, or adjust clothing or heating units within the suit. He felt more comfortable but that got him nowhere except for the chance to consult his wrist watch.
Set at the lunar time of Centauri VII-4, it told him that when he had gone out of the airlock five minutes before the time had been 17:36. It did not strike Tremont as being a very promising bit of data--warning him merely that when he began to feel the want of air, it would be about 21:30. He longed for a pen-knife.
"There's one thing I'm going to ask about on my next trip to Sol--if I make one!" he muttered. "Has anyone developed a reliable, small suit air lock, so you can pass things out from your pockets?"
He thrust his hands once more into the arms of the suit, and felt as far along his belt as he could. He did manage to reach the usual position of the standard rocket pistol. The hook was empty.
"Well, that's that!" he groaned. "They didn't forget. I have nothing to maneuver with."
He pondered worriedly. Perhaps the air--if he dared to waste any, it would make a small jet. Slow, but he had all the rest of his life!
He settled down to picking at the cord about his thumbs with the tips of the other fingers in his gauntlets. It seemed possible that he might in time chew it up to the point where it could be snapped.
The stars streamed slowly past his line of vision as he spun through the emptiness. Two or three little bits of the cord chipped off and drifted away. Tremont realized that it was frozen and brittle. He redoubled his efforts. After a few minutes of clumsy clicking of fingertips against thumbs, he strained to pull his hands apart.
The cord parted and his arms jerked out to their full spread with such suddenness that he felt his backbone creak. For a moment, he hung motionless inside his suit, wondering if he had hurt himself.
Recovering, he groped about, checking for his equipment. He discovered that nothing had been left. No knife, no rocket pistol, no line with magnet for securing oneself to a hull.
Well, at least I can reach the valves of the air tanks, he reassured himself.
He watched for the ship, so as to judge his direction. Several minutes passed before he allowed himself to recognize the truth of his situation: he could no longer see the gleam of Alpha Centauri on the hull!
He was already too far out to dare to waste air. He might give away his last four hours of life just to send himself in the wrong direction.
"How did I get myself into this?" he groaned.
* * * * *
He set himself to thinking back to his meetings with the others. Dorothy Stauber had landed from the same starship after passage from Sol, but he had not become acquainted with her during the trip except to pass the time of day. He seemed to remember that she had turned up in the Customs dome to ask his advice on travel....
"Ye-ah!" he growled to himself. "After I phoned to lease a rocket. She must have known, but how?"
Someone in the shipping office? Well, why not Peters, the pilot? And then Braigh had come along, pretending to have been on his way back to Centauri VI and hoping to buy a fast passage on a small vessel for business reasons. He had been free and ready with his money, leading Tremont to consider cutting his own expenses on the charter.
It seemed, on the face of it, that the three of them had never met until the Annabel lifted.
"But they had, all right!" Tremont told himself. "That was no chance, anywhere along the line. I've been very neatly highjacked!"
The girl must have trailed him to make sure they picked up the right man. Braigh had never explained exactly what he was doing on the satellite; he could have arranged for the assignment of the rocket, or perhaps of the pilot, when Tremont called. Then they had gathered around to hitch rides, and had been in control ever since.
Tremont looked at the slowly progressing constellations and cursed himself. He began to have the feeling that there would be no way out of this. They would regret pitching him into space in such an offhand manner, he reminded himself, when they opened his case. It would be too late as far as he was concerned.
Come to think of it, he considered, that Braigh looks pretty smart, under that idiot-kid pose. He might just break my code, given time. And the parts made up of model photos or drawings he can sell almost as is.
When he came to think of it, Tremont was surprised that no one had tried the same racket before. He had laid out a fortune for what the three thieves were stealing from him.
He drew in his left arm again and raised the wrist to the neck of his helmet. By looking down his nose, he discovered to his surprise that he had been out nearly an hour. He had wasted more time than he thought in reviewing his earlier encounters with Dorothy aboard the starship and the others at the spaceport.
He raised the water tube to his mouth and sucked in a mouthful. The taste was stale.
I could do with a beer, if this is the way I'm going out, he thought. They can joke all they want about dying in bed after traveling to the stars; but you could order a beer even if it killed you.
It gradually dawned upon him that the hazy light he had accepted as being a nebula must be something closer. He watched for it, and discovered after a few moments that it was growing brighter. It continued to do so for half an hour.
"It might be another ship!" he breathed, then he began to shout, "Mayday! Mayday!" over his radio.
He kept it up for nearly a quarter of an hour, even after the outline was definitely recognizable as a rocket. He found himself drifting across its course near the bow. It was hard to estimate the distance, but he guessed it to be something like a hundred yards.
Drifting? he asked himself. It should be going past me like a shooting star! Unless they took exactly the same curve from Centauri VII--
Then he could read the numbers he feared to see. AC7-4-525. His own ship.
He had gone out of the air lock mainly on a puff of air, with some fumbling help from Peters. That had been enough to send him out of sight of the ship--in space, not necessarily very far--and now he was back, after two hours.
A long, flat orbit in relation to the ship, he told himself, remembering in time to avoid speaking aloud that Braigh might be at the ship's radio, but actually weaving back and forth across the rocket's course, just nipping it at this end.
He edged a hand inside the suit again and turned off his radio. If he found an answer, it would be fatal to be overheard mumbling about it.
* * * * *
The ship now seemed to be rushing at him, and Tremont deduced that his orbital speed had increased as he approached the focus represented by the Annabel. He would doubtless pass near the air lock at about his expulsion speed.
"Here's the chance!" he exulted. "A little air let out to slow down ... or even just to veer close enough to lay hands on something! You launched me, Peters, but you didn't lose me."
Getting through the airlock should be easy enough. He might be well up the shaft before the others emerged from the control room. In fact, unless Peters were on watch, the air lock operating signal might flash unnoticed on the board.
"And I'll be cracking skulls before they know what's up!" he growled.
It struck him with a flash of ironic amusement that he had not felt half so much hate when believing himself doomed. After two hours of sweating out his helplessness, he had discovered a lively resentment of the vicious callousness with which he had been jettisoned.
He was only about twenty-five yards away now, seemingly circling the ship. Peering closer, he saw that actually he was sweeping in toward it.
Now, be ready with the air tank valve, just in case! he warned himself.
The great fins loomed to his right; the hull blotted most of the sky from his view. It looked as if he would curve down to a spot beside the same air lock from which he had been expelled. It seemed to be still open.
Then he saw the shape of a helmet rise around the curve of the ship. Someone was out on the hull.
Tremont switched on his radio and listened.
The spacesuited figure climbed completely into view. There appeared to be a line running from the belt into the air lock, and the figure carried a long pole of some sort.
"Oh, there you are, Tremont!" came Braigh's voice over the receiver. "I've been waiting for you."
The chuckle that followed made Tremont curse, which in turn provoked a hearty laugh from the other.
"You didn't think I'd forget you?" asked Braigh. "We figured out what happened as soon as we heard you putting out those distress calls. After that, it was just a matter of timing. Have you had an amusing trip?"
"Have you found out you can't make anything of those papers yet?" countered Tremont.
"Oh, the coding? It might take a little time, but we have plenty ... now, now, Tremont! That kind of abusive language will get you nowhere."
Tremont had drifted to a point above the other's head, almost within reach. He was kicking out in little motions that betrayed his eagerness to come to grips with Braigh or something solid.
"Why, Tremont! I do believe that you thought I came out to bargain with you," chuckled the blond man. "Not at all! I told you that you'd be no trouble. I just came out to finish the job Peters bungled."
Tremont saw the pole jabbing upward at his stomach. Instinctively, he grabbed at the end. Braigh was not disturbed.
"Take it with you, then!" he laughed, letting go his end with a powerful push. "Let me know if you're alive the next time you come around, so I can come out again."
Tremont began to swear at him, then got a grip on himself long enough to snap his radio off.
He had begun pulling himself down the pole when Braigh had shoved. That sapped some of the force, but it was still enough to send him spinning out into the void once more.
The ship receded slowly. He saw Braigh return to the air lock and enter. A moment later, that light was cut off, and Tremont began to back off into space as he had the first time.
They know all about it, he realized. They could leave me any time just by burning a little fuel. Peters wouldn't care about wasting it--I paid for it. Maybe he's just too lazy to calculate the course correction.
If so, he decided, the pilot was right. Tremont might drift back, but two more hours from now, when he would be at his closest, would be too late. He would be too near the end of his air to use it to make sure of the last few feet.
He looked at the pole in his grip. It was an eight-foot section of aluminum from the cargo racks.
"Maybe ..." he muttered.
Whirling the pole around by the end, he managed after considerable trial and error, to slow his wild spin enough to keep the ship in view.
The only question then was whether he dared to take the chance; and he really had but one choice. The full orbit would be too long a period.
He estimated as well as he could the direction of his progress, allowed a few degrees which he fondly hoped would curve him in to a closer approach at the meeting point, and hurled the pole into space with all his strength.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait and hope that he had cut his speed enough to bring him to the ship ahead of schedule by a shorter orbit.
* * * * *
Tremont finally gave up looking at his watch when he found himself peeping every three minutes, on the average. The immensity of space was by now instilling in him a psychological chill, and he drew both arms in from their sleeves to hug an illusion of warmth to him. The air pressure in the sleeves gradually overpowered the springs of the joints, and extended them to make a cross.
As far as he could tell from the gauges lined in a miniature row along the neckpiece of the suit, his heating system was functioning as designed. The batteries had an excellent chance of lasting longer than he would.
He began to dwell upon thoughts of squeezing Peters in the steel grip of his gauntlets until the pilot's fat face turned purple and his eyes popped. Another promising activity would be to bang Braigh's head against a bulkhead with one hand and Dorothy's with the other.
Wonder if they found the gun in my locker? he mused.
Finally, only a lifetime or two after he hoped to see it, he sighted the ship again. His watch claimed the trip had lasted less than ninety minutes.
He encountered unexpected trouble approaching the hull. Realizing that he was lucky to come close at all by such a guess, he tried to steer himself with brief jets from his air tank, and wound up on the verge of bashing directly into a fin. He avoided that, but had to use more air to spin back for a more gentle contact.
The metal felt like solid Earth to him as he seized the edge of a fin and planted the magnets of his boots firmly on the hull.
It was perhaps twenty minutes later, when Tremont was beginning to worry again about his air supply, that the hatch of the air lock began to open.
Crystals of frost puffed out as the water vapor left the air. Braigh's helmet appeared, then the whole spacesuited figure floated up before the spot where Tremont was watching. The highjacker dropped the magnet of his life line against the hull and started to turn around.
Tremont grabbed the edge of the hatch with one hand, yanked the magnet loose with the other, and kicked Braigh in the right area.
The spacesuited figure shot off, tumbling end over end, into the void. A startled squawk sounded over Tremont's receiver.
"See how you like it!" he snarled.
He ignored the begging of the suddenly frightened voice, and dived into the air lock. In seconds, he had the outer hatch shut and was nervously watching the air pressure building up on the gauge.
If they notice at all, they'll think it's Braigh coming back! he exulted.
He made it into the central shaft without meeting anyone. Pulling himself forward in the bulky suit was an awkward task, but well worth it for the expression on Peters' face when Tremont burst through the control-room hatch.
After dealing with the pilot in about two minutes, most of it spent in catching him, Tremont went back along the shaft and found Dorothy in her bunk. Before she could release the netting, he folded the bunk upon her and secured it to the hook. Only then did he allow himself the time to remove his helmet and make free of the ship's air.
"What are you going to do?" demanded the girl, rather shrilly.
Tremont realized that she must have seen the unconscious Peters floating outside in the shaft.
"You won't like it!" he promised.
"Tremont! I didn't know they'd do anything to you. Can't ... you and I ... make some kind of ... deal?"
Tremont stared at her levelly.
"But I'd have to really sleep sometime," he pointed out gently. "How can I trust you...?"
* * * * *
He was hardly a million miles out from the satellite system of Centauri VI when the Space Patrol ship he had called managed to put a pilot aboard to land the Annabel for him on the largest moon.
Tremont returned wearily from helping the man in the air lock--which he did with a practiced efficiency that surprised the pilot--to resume his talk with the patrol-ship captain waiting on the screen.
"We could have done it sooner, you know," said the latter curiously. "Well, now that I see him beside you, perhaps you'll explain your request to delay, and also what those pips trailing you are."
"It's all the same story," said Tremont, and explained his difficulties.
The patrol captain frowned and expressed a wish to lay hands on the highjackers.
"Well, they're due back in"--Tremont consulted his watch--"about two hours. I wanted them near the ends of their orbits as you approached."
"You mean there are three bodies out there?"
"Live ones, in spacesuits," said Tremont. "Experience is a great teacher. As soon as I sighted Braigh coming back, I set up a regular system."
He explained how he had removed all tools from the three spacesuits, added extra tanks, and stuffed the trio into them, either unconscious or at gunpoint.
"Then, having fastened the ankles together and wired the wrists to the thighs so they couldn't move at all, I launched them one at a time with enough pressure in the air lock to give four-hour orbits. That gave me sleeping time."
"And what about them?" asked the captain.
"Oh, at the end of that period, they'd come drifting in at one-hour intervals. Counting all the necessary operations, each of them got thirty minutes actually out of the suit to eat and so on. Then out he'd go while I fished in the next one. They didn't like it, but they weren't so tough one at a time."
"Let's see--" mused the captain. "Every four hours, you'd have to spend ... why, only two hours processing them. As a result, you kept complete control and came shooting in here with your own satellite system revolving about you."
"And your friends? How have they been passing the time?"
"Well, either figuring out how to take me next time," guessed Tremont, "or wishing they were moving in more honest circles!"
BELLY LAUGH
By Randall Garrett
You hear a lot of talk these days about secret weapons. If it's not a new wrinkle in nuclear fission, it's a gun to shoot around corners and down winding staircases. Or maybe a nice new strain of bacteria guaranteed to give you radio-active dandruff. Our own suggestion is to pipe a few of our television commercials into Russia and bore the enemy to death.
Well, it seems that Ivar Jorgensen has hit on the ultimate engine of destruction: a weapon designed to exploit man's greatest weakness. The blueprint can be found in the next few pages; and as the soldier in the story says, our only hope is to keep a sense of humor!
Me? I'm looking for my outfit. Got cut off in that Holland Tunnel attack. Mind if I sit down with you guys a while? Thanks. Coffee? Damn! This is heaven. Ain't seen a cup of coffee in a year.
What? You said it! This sure is a hell of a war. Tough on a guy's feet. Yeah, that's right. Holland Tunnel skirmish. Where the Ruskies used that new gun. Uhuh. God! It was awful. Guys popping off all around a guy and him not knowing why. No sense to it. No noise. No wound. Just popping off.
That's the trouble with this war. It won't settle down to a routine. Always something new. What the hell chance has a guy got to figure things out? And I tell you them Ruskies are coming up with new weapons just as fast as we are. Enough to make your hair stand on end.
Sugar? Christ, yes! Ain't seen sugar for a year. You see, it's like this: we were bottled up in the pits around the Tunnel for seven damn days. It was like nothing you ever saw before. Oops--sorry. Didn't mean to splash you. I was laughing about something that happened there--to a guy. Maybe you guys would get a kick out of it. After all, we got to keep our sense of humor.
You see, there was me and a Kentucky kid named Stillwell in this pit--a pretty big pit with lots of room--and we were all alone. This Stillwell was a nice kid--green and lonesome and it's pretty sad, really, but there's a yak in it, and--as I say--we got to keep a sense of humor.
Well, this Stillwell--a really green kid--is unhappy and just plain drooling for his gal back home. He talks about his mother, of course, and his old man, but it's the girl that's really on his mind as you guys can plainly understand.
He's seeing her every place--like spots in front of his eyes--nice spots doing things to him, when this Ruskie babe shows up.
My gun came up without any orders from me just as she poked her puss over the edge of the pit, and--huh? Oh, thank you kindly. It sure tastes good but I don't want to short you guys. Thank you kindly.
Well, as I was saying, this Ruskie babe pokes her nose over the edge of the pit and Stillwell dives and knocks down my gun. He says, "You son-of-a-bitch!" Just like that. Wild and desperate, like you'd say to a guy if the guy was just kicking over the last jug of water on a desert island.
It would have been long enough for her to kill us if I hadn't had good reflexes. Even then, all I had time to do was knock the pistol out of her hand and drag her into the pit.
With her play bollixed, she was confused and bewildered. She ain't a fighter, and she sits back against the wall staring at us dead pan with big expressionless eyes. She's a plenty pretty babe and I could see exactly what had happened as far as Stillwell was concerned. His spots had come to life in very adequate form so to speak.
* * * * *
Stillwell goes over and sits down beside her and I'm very much on the alert, because I know where his courage comes from. But I decide it's all right, because I see the babe is not belligerent, just confused kind of. And friendly.
And willing. Kind of a whipped-little-dog willing, and man oh man! She was sure what Stillwell needed.
They kind of went together like a hand and a glove--natural-like. And it followed--pretty natural--that when Stillwell got up and led her around a wing of the pit, out of sight, she went willing--like that same little dog.
Uhuh. No, you guys. Two's enough. I wouldn't rob you. Well, okay, and thanks kindly.
Well, there I was, all alone, but happy for Stillwell, cause I know it's what the kid needs, and in spots like that what difference does it make? Yank--Ruskie--Mongolian--as long as she's willing.
Then, you guys, Stillwell comes back out--wall-eyed--real wall-eyed--like being hit but not knocked out and still walking. I know what it is--some kind of shock. I get up and walk over and take a look at the babe where he'd left her--and I bust out laughing. I told you guys there was a yak in this. I laughed like a fool--it was that funny. As much as I had time to, before Stillwell cracked. It was enough to crack him--the little thing that pushes a guy over the edge.
He lets out a yell and screams, "For crisake! For crisake! Nothing but a bucket of bolts! Nothing but a couple of plastic lumps--"
That was when I hit him. I had to. He was for the birds, Stillwell was. An hour later we got relieved and a couple of medicos carried him away strapped to a stretcher--gone like a kite.
They took the robot too, and its clothes, but they forgot the brassiere, so I took it and I been carrying it ever since, but I'll leave it with you guys if you want--for the coffee. Might make you think about home. After all, like the man says, we got to keep our sense of humor.
Well, so long, you guys--and thanks.
FIFTY PER CENT PROPHET
By Randall Garrett
That he was a phony Swami was beyond doubt. That he was a genuine prophet, though, seemed ... but then, what's the difference between a dictator and a true prophet? So was he....
Dr. Joachim sat in the small room behind his reception hall and held his fingers poised above the keys of the rather creaky electrotyper on his desk. The hands seemed to hang there, long, slender, and pale, like two gulls frozen suddenly in their long swoop towards some precious tidbit floating on the writhing sea beneath, ready to begin their drop instantly, as soon as time began again.
All of Dr. Joachim's body seemed to be held in that same stasis. Only his lips moved as he silently framed the next sentence in his mind.
Physically, the good doctor could be called a big man: he was broad-shouldered and well-muscled, but, hidden as his body was beneath the folds of his blue, monkish robe, only his shortness of stature was noticeable. He was only fifty-four, but the pale face, the full, flowing beard, and the long white hair topped by a small blue skullcap gave him an ageless look, as though centuries of time had flowed over him to leave behind only the marks of experience and wisdom.
The timelessness of an idealized Methuselah as he approached his ninth centennial, the God-given wisdom engraved on the face of Moses as he came down from Sinai, the mystic power of mighty Merlin as he softly intoned a spell of albamancy, all these seemed to have been blended carefully together and infused into the man who sat behind the typer, composing sentences in his head.
Those gull-hands swooped suddenly to the keyboard, and the aged machine clattered rapidly for nearly a minute before Dr. Joachim paused again to consider his next words.
A bell tinkled softly.
Dr. Joachim's brown eyes glanced quickly at the image on the black-and-white TV screen set in the wall. It was connected to the hidden camera in his front room, and showed a woman entering his front door. He sighed and rose from his seat, adjusting his blue robes carefully before he went to the door that led into the outer room.
He'd rather hoped it was a client, but--
"Hello, Susan, my dear," he said in a soft baritone, as he stepped through the door. "What seems to be the trouble?"
It wasn't the same line that he'd have used with a client. You don't ask a mark questions; you tell him. To a mark, he'd have said: "Ah, you are troubled." It sounds much more authoritative and all-knowing.
But Cherrie Tart--née Sue Kowalski--was one of the best strippers on the Boardwalk. Her winters were spent in Florida or Nevada or Puerto Rico, but in summer she always returned to King Frankie's Golden Surf, for the summer trade at Coney Island. She might be a big name in show business now, but she had never forgotten her carny background, and King Frankie, in spite of the ultra-ultra tone of the Golden Surf, still stuck to the old Minsky traditions.
The worried look on her too-perfect face had been easily visible in the TV screen, but it had been replaced by a bright smile as soon as she had heard Dr. Joachim opening the door. The smile flickered for a moment, then she said: "Gee, Doc; you give a girl the creepy feeling that you really can read her mind."
Dr. Joachim merely smiled. Susan might be with it, but a good mitt man doesn't give away all his little secrets. He had often wished that he could really read minds--he had heard rumors of men who could--but a little well-applied psychology is sometimes just as good.
"So how's everything been, Doc?" She smiled her best stage smile--every tooth perfect in that perfect face, her hair framing the whole like a perfect golden helmet. She looked like a girl in her early twenties, but Dr. Joachim knew for a fact that she'd been born in 1955, which made her thirty-two next January.
"Reasonably well, all things considered," Dr. Joachim admitted. "I'm not starving to death, at least."
She looked around at the room--the heavy drapes, the signs of the zodiac in gold and silver, the big, over-stuffed chairs, all designed to make the "clients" feel comfortable and yet slightly awed by the ancient atmosphere of mysticism. In the dim light, they looked fairly impressive, but she knew that if the lights were brighter the shabbiness would show.
* * * * *
"Maybe you could use a redecorating job, then, Doc," she said. With a gesture born of sudden impulse, she reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope and pressed it into the man's hands. He started to protest, but she cut him off. "No, Doc; I want you to have it. You earned it.
"That San Juan-New York flight, remember?" she went on hurriedly. "You said not to take it, remember? Well, I ... I sort of forgot about what you'd said. You know. Anyway, I got a ticket and was ready to go when the flight was suddenly delayed. Routine, they said. Checking the engines. But I'd never heard of any such routine as that. I remembered what you told me, Doc, and I got scared.
"After an hour, they put another plane into service; they were still working on the other one. I was still worried, so I decided to wait till the next day.
"I guess you read what happened."
He closed his eyes and nodded slowly. "I read."
"Doc, I'd've been on that flight if you hadn't warned me. All the money in the world isn't enough to pay for that." The oddly worried look had come back into her eyes. "Doc, I don't know how you knew that ship was going to go, and I won't ask. I don't want to know. But, ... one thing: Was it me they were after?"
She thinks someone blew up the ship, he thought. She thinks I heard about the plot some way. For an instant he hesitated, then:
"No, Susan; they weren't after you. No one was trying to kill you. Don't worry about it."
Relief washed over her face. "O.K., Doc; if you say so. Look, I've got to run now, but we've got to sit down and have a few drinks together, now that I'm back. And ... Doc--"
"Yes?"
"Anytime you need anything--if I can ever help you--you let me know, huh?"
"Certainly, my dear. And don't you worry about anything. The stars are all on your side right now."
She smiled, patted his hand, and then was gone in a flash of gold and honey. Dr. Joachim looked at the door that had closed behind her, then he looked down at the envelope in his hands. He opened it gently and took out the sheaf of bills. Fifteen hundred dollars!
He smiled and shoved the money into his pocket. After all, he was a professional fortuneteller, even if he didn't like that particular label, and he had saved her life, hadn't he?
He returned to the small back room, sat down again at the typer, and, after a minute, began typing again.
When he was finished, he addressed an envelope and put the letter inside.
It was signed with his legal name: Peter J. Forsythe.
* * * * *
It required less than two hours for that letter to end up at its destination in a six-floor brick building, a rather old-fashioned affair that stood among similar structures in a lower-middle-class section of Arlington, Virginia, hardly a hop-skip-and-jump from the Pentagon, and not much farther from the Capitol.
The letter was addressed to Mr. J. Harlan Balfour, President, The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., but Mr. Balfour was not at the Society's headquarters at the time, having been called to Los Angeles to address a group who were awaiting the Incarnation of God.
Even if he had been there, the letter wouldn't have reached him first. All mail was sent first to the office of the Executive Secretary, Mr. Brian Taggert. Most of it--somewhat better than ninety-nine per cent--went directly on to Mr. Balfour's desk, if it was so addressed; Brian Taggert would never have been so cruel as to deprive Mr. Balfour of the joy of sorting through the thousands of crackpot letters in search of those who had the true spark of mysticism which so fascinated Mr. Balfour.
Mr. Balfour was a crackpot, and it was his job to take care of other crackpots--a job he enjoyed immensely and wholeheartedly, feeling, as he did, that that sort of thing was the only reason for the Society's existence. Of course, Mr. Balfour never considered himself or the others in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much in error as he was in his assumption of the Society's raison d'être.
Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be. Anyone who was "truly interested in the investigation of the supranormal", as the ads in certain magazines put it, could pay five dollars a year for membership, which, among other things, entitled him to the Society's monthly magazine, The Metaphysicist, a well-printed, conservative-looking publication which contained articles on everything from the latest flying saucer report to careful mathematical evaluations of the statistical methods of the Rhine Foundation. Within its broad field, the magazine was quite catholic in its editorial policy.
These members constituted a very effective screen for the real work of the society, work carried on by the "core" members, most of whom weren't even listed on the membership rolls. And yet, it was this group of men and women who made the Society's title true.
Mr. Brian Taggert was a long way from being a crackpot. The big, dark-haired, dark-eyed, hawknosed man sat at his desk in his office on the fifth floor of the Society's building and checked over the mail. Normally, his big wrestler's body was to be found quietly relaxed on the couch that stood against a nearby wall. Not that he was in any way averse to action; he simply saw no virtue in purposeless action. Nor did he believe in the dictum of Miles Standish; if he wanted a thing done, he sent the man most qualified to do it, whether that was himself or someone else.
When he came to the letter from Coney Island, New York, he read it quickly and then jabbed at a button on the intercom switchboard in his desktop. He said three syllables which would have been meaningless to anyone except the few who understood that sort of verbal shorthand, released the button, and closed his eyes, putting himself in telepathic contact with certain of the Society's agents in New York.
* * * * *
Across the river, in the Senate Office Building, a telephone rang in the office of Senator Mikhail Kerotski, head of the Senate Committee on Space Exploration. It was an unlisted, visionless phone, and the number was known only to a very few important officials in the United States Government, so the senator didn't bother to identify himself; he simply said: "Hello." He listened for a moment, said, "O.K., fine," in a quiet voice, and cut the connection.
He sat behind his desk for a few minutes longer, a bearlike man with a round, pale face and eyes circled with dark rings and heavy pouches, all of which had the effect of making him look like a rather sleepy specimen of the giant panda. He finished the few papers he had been working on, stacked them together, rose, and went into the outer office, where he told his staff that he was going out for a short walk.
By the time he arrived at the brownstone building in Arlington and was pushing open the door of Brian Taggert's office, Taggert had received reports from New York and had started other chains of action. As soon as Senator Kerotski came in, Taggert pushed the letter across the desk toward him. "Check that."
Kerotski read the letter, and a look of relief came over his round face. "Not the same typewriter or paper, but this is him, all right. What more do we know?"
"Plenty. Hold on, and I'll give you a complete rundown." He picked up the telephone and began speaking in a low voice. It was an ordinary-sounding conversation; even if the wire had been tapped, no one who was not a "core" member of the S.M.M.R. would have known that the conversation was about anything but an esoteric article to be printed in The Metaphysicist--something about dowsing rods.
The core membership had one thing in common: understanding.
Consider plutonium. Imagine someone dropping milligram-sized pellets of the metal into an ordinary Florence flask. (In an inert atmosphere, of course; there is no point in ruining a good analogy with side reactions.) More than two and a half million of those little pellets could be dropped into the flask without the operator having anything more to worry about than if he were dropping grains of lead or gold into the container. But after the five millionth, dropping them in by hand would only be done by the ignorant, the stupid, or the indestructible. A qualitative change takes place.
So with understanding. As a human mind increases its ability to understand another human mind, it eventually reaches a critical point, and the mind itself changes. And, at that point, the Greek letter psi ceases to be a symbol for the unknown.
When understanding has passed the critical point, conversation as it is carried on by most human beings becomes unnecessarily redundant. Even in ordinary conversation, a single gesture--a shrug of the shoulders, a snap of the fingers, or a nose pinched between thumb and forefinger--can express an idea that would take many words and much more time. A single word--"slob," "nazi," "saint"--can be more descriptive than the dozens of words required to define it. All that is required is that the meanings of the symbols be understood.
The ability to manipulate symbols is the most powerful tool of the human mind; a mind which can manipulate them effectively is, in every sense of the word, truly human.
Even without telepathy, it was possible for two S.M.M.R. agents to carry on a conversation above and around ordinary chit-chat. It took longer, naturally; when speaking without the chit-chat, it was possible to convey in seconds information that would have taken several minutes to get over in ordinary conversation.
* * * * *
Senator Kerotski only listened to a small part of the phone discussion. He knew most of the story.
In the past eight months, six anonymous letters had been received by various companies. As Taggert had once put it, in quotes, "We seem to have an Abudah chest containing a patent Hag who comes out and prophesies disasters, with spring complete."
The Big Bend Power Reactor, near Marfa, Texas, had been warned that their stellarator would blow. The letter was dismissed as "crackpot," and no precautions were taken. The explosion killed nine men and cut off the power in the area for three hours, causing other accidents due to lack of power.
The merchant submarine Bandar-log, plying her way between Ceylon and Japan, had ignored the warning sent to her owners and had never been heard from again.
In the Republic of Yemen, an oil refinery caught fire and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property in spite of the anonymous letter that had foretold the disaster.
The Prince Charles Dam in Central Africa had broken and thousands had drowned because those in charge had relegated a warning letter to the cylindrical file.
A mine cave-in in Canada had extinguished three lives because a similar letter had been ignored.
By the time the fifth letter had been received, the S.M.M.R. had received the information and had begun its investigation. As an ex officio organ of the United States Government, it had ways and means of getting hold of the originals of the letters which had been received by the responsible persons in each of the disasters. All had been sent by the same man; all had been typed on the same machine; all had been mailed in New York.
When the sixth warning had come to the offices of Caribbean Trans-Air, the S.M.M.R., working through the FBI, had persuaded the company's officials to take the regularly scheduled aircraft off the run and substitute another while the regular ship was carefully inspected. But it was the replacement ship that came to pieces in midair.
The anonymous predictor, whoever he was, was a man of no mean ability.
Then letter number seven had been received by the United States Department of Space. It predicted that a meteor would smash into America's Moonbase One, completely destroying it.
Finally, a non-anonymous letter had come to the S.M.M.R. requesting admission to the society, enclosing the proper fee. The letter also said that the writer was interested in literature on the subjects of prescience, precognition, and/or prophecy, and would be interested in contacting anyone who had had experience with such phenomena.
Putting two and two together only yields four, no matter how often it's done, but two to the eighth power gives a nice, round two hundred fifty-six, which is something one can sink one's teeth into.
Brian Taggert cut off the phone connection. "That's it, Mike," he said to the senator. "We've got him."
Two of the Society's agents, both top-flight telepaths, had gone out to "Dr. Joachim's" place on Coney Island's Boardwalk, posing as customers--"clients" was the word Dr. Joachim preferred--and had done a thorough probing job.
"He's what might be called a perfectly sincere fraud," Taggert continued. "You know the type I'm sure."
The senator nodded silently. The woods were full of that kind of thing. Complete, reliable control of any kind of psionic power requires understanding and sanity, but the ability lies dormant in many minds that cannot control it, and it can and does burst forth erratically at times. Finding a physical analogy for the phenomenon is difficult, since mental activities are, of necessity, of a higher order than physical activities.
Some of the operations of tensor calculus have analogs in algebra; many do not.
* * * * *
Taggert gestured with one hand. "He's been in business there for years. Evidently, he's been able to make a few accurate predictions now and then--enough to keep his reputation going. He's tried to increase the frequency, accuracy, and detail of his 'flashes' by studying up on the techniques used by other seers, and, as a result, he's managed to soak up enough mystic balderdash to fill a library.
"He embellishes every one of his predictions to his 'clients' with all kinds of hokum, and he's been doing it so long that he really isn't sure how much of any prediction is truth and how much is embroidery work.
"The boys are trying to get more information on him now, and they're going to do a little deep probing, if they can get him set up right; maybe they'll be able to trigger off another flash on that moon-hit--but I doubt it."
Senator Kerotski thumbed his chin morosely. "You're probably right. Apparently, once those hunches come to a precog, they get everything in a flash and then they can't get another thing--ever. I wish we could get our hands on one who was halfway along toward the point. We've got experts on psychokinetics, levitation, telepathy, clairvoyance, and what-have-you. But precognition we don't seem to be able to find."
"We've got one now," Brian Taggert reminded him.
The senator snorted. "Even assuming that we had any theory on precognition completely symbolized, and assuming that this Forsythe has the kind of mind that can be taught, do you think we could get it done in a month? Because that's all the time we have."
"He's our first case," Taggert admitted. "We'll have to probe everything out of him and construct symbol-theory around what we get. I'll be surprised if we get anywhere at all in the first six months."
Senator Kerotski put his hand over his eyes. "I give up. First the Chinese Soviet kidnaps Dr. Ch'ien and we have to scramble like maniacs to get him back before they find out that he's building a space drive that will make the rocket industry obsolete. Then we have to find out what's causing the rash of accidents that is holding up Dr. Theodore Nordred's antigravity project. And now, just as everything is coming to a head in both departments, we find that a meteor is going to hit Moonbase One sometime between thirty and sixty days from now." He spread apart the middle and ring fingers of the hand that covered his eyes and looked at Taggert through one eye. "And now you tell me that the only man who can pinpoint that time more exactly for us is of no use whatever to us. If we knew when that meteor was due to arrive, we would be able to spot and deflect it in time. It must be of pretty good size if it's going to demolish the whole base."
"How do you know it's going to be a meteor?"
"You think the Soviets would try to bomb it? Don't be silly, Taggert," Kerotski said, grinning.
Taggert grinned back. "I'm not thinking they'd bomb us; but I'm trying to look at all the angles."
The worried look came back to the senator's pandalike face. "We have to do something. If only we knew that Forsythe's prediction will really come off. Or, if it will, then exactly when? And is there anything we can do about it, or will it be like the airline incident. If we hadn't made them switch planes, nothing would have happened. What if, no matter what we do, Moonbase One goes anyway?
"Remember, we haven't yet built Moonbase Two. If our only base on the moon is destroyed, the Soviets will have the whole moon to themselves. Have you any suggestions?"
"Sure," said Taggert. "Ask yourself one question: What is the purpose of Moonbase One?"
Slowly, a beatific smile spread itself over the senator's face.
The whole discussion had taken exactly ninety seconds.
* * * * *
"Mrs. Jesser," said Brian Taggert to the well-rounded, fortyish woman behind the reception desk at S.M.M.R. headquarters, "this is Dr. Forsythe. He has established a reputation as one of the finest seers living today."
Mrs. Jesser looked at the distinguished, white-bearded gentleman with an expression that was almost identical with the one her grandmother had worn when she met Rudolph Valentino, nearly sixty years before, and the one her mother had worn when she saw Frank Sinatra a generation later. It was not an uncommon expression for Mrs. Jesser's face to wear: it appeared every time she was introduced to anyone who looked impressive and was touted as a great mystic of one kind or another.
"I'm so glad to meet you, Dr. Forsythe!" she burbled eagerly.
"Dr. Forsythe will be working for us for the next few months--his office will be Room B on the fourth floor," Taggert finished. He was genuinely fond of the woman, in spite of her mental dithers and schoolgirl mannerisms. Mysticism fascinated her, and she was firmly convinced that she had "just a weenie bit" of psychic power herself, although its exact nature seemed to change from time to time. But she did both her jobs well, although she was not aware of her double function. She thought she was being paid as a receptionist and phone operator, and she was quick and efficient about her work. She was also the perfect screen for the Society's real work, for if anyone ever suspected that the S.M.M.R. was not the group of crackpots that it appeared to be, five minutes talking with Mrs. Jesser would convince them otherwise.
"Oh, you're staying with us, Dr. Forsythe? How wonderful! We simply must have a talk sometime!"
"Indeed we must, dear lady," said Forsythe. His voice and manner had just the right amount of benign dignity, with an almost indetectable touch of pompous condescending.
"Come along, doctor; I'll show you to your office." Taggert's face betrayed nothing of the enjoyment he was getting out of watching the mental gymnastics of the two. Forsythe and Mrs. Jesser were similar in some ways, but, of the two, Mrs. Jesser was actually the more honest. She only fooled herself; she never tried to fool anyone else. Forsythe, on the other hand, tried to put on a front for others, and, in doing so, had managed to delude himself pretty thoroughly.
Taggert's humor was not malicious; he was not laughing at them. He was admiring the skill of the human mind in tying itself in knots. When one watches a clever contortionist going through his paces, one doesn't laugh at the contortionist; one admires and enjoys the weird twists he can get himself into. And, like Taggert, one can only feel sympathy for one whose knots have become so devious and intricate that he can never extricate himself.
"Just follow me up the stairs," Taggert said. "I'll show you where your office is. Sorry we don't have an elevator, but this old building just wasn't built for it, and we've never had any real need for one."
"Perfectly all right," Forsythe said, following along behind.
Three weeks!
Taggert had to assume that the minimum time prediction was the accurate one. Damn! Why couldn't this last prediction have been as precise as the one about the air flight from Puerto Rico?
It had taken six days for the "accredited" agents of the S.M.M.R. to persuade Dr. Peter Forsythe that he should leave his little place on the Boardwalk and come down to Arlington to work. It isn't easy to persuade a man to leave a business that he's built up over a long period of years, especially during the busy season. To leave the Boardwalk during the summer would, as far as Forsythe was concerned, be tantamount to economic suicide. He had to be offered not only an income better than the one he was making, but better security as well. At fifty-four, one does not lightly throw over the work of a lifetime.
Still, he had plenty of safeguards. The rent was paid on his Boardwalk office, he had a guaranteed salary while he was working, and a "research bonus," designed to keep him working until the Society was finished with that phase of its work.
It's rather difficult for a man to resist the salesmanship of a telepath who knows exactly what his customer wants and, better, what he needs.
* * * * *
On the fourth floor, there were sounds of movement, the low staccato chatter of typers, occasional bits of conversation, and the hum of electronic equipment.
Forsythe was impressed, though not a line on his face showed it. The office to which he had been assigned was lined with electronic calculators, and his name had already been put on the door in gold. It was to his credit that he was impressed by the two factors in that order.
In the rear of the room, two technicians were working on an open panel in one of the units. Nearby, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, maturely handsome woman in her early thirties was holding a clip board and making occasional notes as the men worked. One of the men was using an electric drill, and the whine of metal on metal drowned out the slight noise that Taggert and Forsythe made as they entered. Only the woman was aware that they had come in, but she didn't betray the fact.
"Miss Tedesco?" Taggert called.
She looked up from her clip board, smiled, and walked toward the two newcomers. "Yes, Mr. Taggert?"
"'Bout done?"
"Almost. They're setting in the last component now."
Taggert nodded absently. "Miss Tedesco, this is Dr. Peter Forsythe, whom I told you about. Dr. Forsythe, this is Miss Donna Tedesco; she's the computer technician who will be working with you."
Miss Tedesco's smile was positively glittering. "I'm so pleased to meet you, doctor; I know our work together will be interesting."
"I trust it will," Forsythe said, beaming. Then a faint cloud seemed to come over his features. "I'm afraid I must confess a certain ... er ... lack of knowledge in the realm of computerdom. Mr. Taggert attempted to explain, but he, himself, has admitted that his knowledge of the details is ... er ... somewhat vague."
"I'm not a computerman, myself," Taggert said, smiling. "Miss Tedesco will be able to give you the details better than I can."
Miss Tedesco blinked. "You know the broad outline, surely? Of the project, I mean."
"Oh, yes, certainly," Forsythe said hurriedly. "We are attempting to determine whether the actions of human beings can actually have any effect on the outcome of the prophecy itself. In other words, if it is possible to avert, say, a disaster if it is foretold, or whether the very foretelling itself assures the ultimate outcome."
The woman nodded her agreement.
"As I understand it," Forsythe continued, "we are going to get several score clients--or, rather, subjects--and I am to ... uh ... exercise my talents, just as I have been doing for many years. The results are to be tabulated and run through the computers to see if there is any correlation between human activity taken as a result of the forecast and the actual foretold events themselves."
"That's right," said Miss Tedesco. She looked at Taggert. "That's what the committee outlined, in general, isn't it?"
"In general, yes," Taggert said.
"But what about the details?" Forsythe asked doggedly. "I mean, just how are we going to go about this? You must remember that I'm not at all familiar with ... er ... scientific research procedures."
"Oh, we'll work all that out together," said Miss Tedesco brightly. "You didn't think we'd plan a detailed work schedule without your co-operation, did you?"
"Well--" Forsythe said, swelling visibly with pride, "I suppose--"
Taggert, glancing at his watch, interrupted. "I'll have to leave you two to work out your research schedule together. I have an appointment in a few minutes." He grasped Forsythe's hand and pumped it vigorously. "I believe we'll get along fine, Dr. Forsythe. And I believe our work here will be quite fruitful. Will you excuse me?"
"Certainly, Mr. Taggert. And I want to thank you for this opportunity to do research work along these lines."
Brian Taggert thanked Forsythe and hurried out with the air of a man with important and urgent things on his mind.
He went up the stairs to the office directly over the one he had assigned to Forsythe and stepped in quietly. Two men were relaxed in lounge chairs, their eyes closed.
Meshing? Taggert asked wordlessly.
Meshing.
Taggert closed the door carefully and went into his own office.
* * * * *
General Howard Layton, USSF, looked no different from any other Space Force officer, except that he was rather handsomer than most. He looked as though he might have posed for recruiting posters at one time, and, in point of fact, he had--back when he had been an ensign in the United States Navy's Submarine Service. He was forty-nine and looked a prematurely graying thirty.
He stood in the observation bunker at the landing area of St. Thomas Spacefield and watched through the periscope as a heavy rocket settled itself to the surface of the landing area. The blue-white tongue of flame touched the surface and splattered; then the heavy ship settled slowly down over it, as though it were sliding down a column of light. The column of light shortened--
And abruptly vanished as the ship touched down.
General Layton took his eyes away from the periscope. "Another one back safely. Thank God."
Nearby, the only other man in that room of the bunker, a rather short civilian, had been watching the same scene on a closed-circuit TV screen. He smiled up at the general. "How many loads does that make, so far?"
"Five. We'll have the job done before the deadline time."
"Were you worried?"
"A little. I still am, to be honest. What if nothing happens at the end of sixty days? The President isn't one of us, and he's only gone along with the Society's recommendations so far because we've been able to produce results. But"--he gestured outside, indicating the newly-landed ship--"all this extra expense isn't going to set well with him if we goof this once."
"I know," said the civilian. "But have you ever known Brian Taggert to be wrong?"
General Layton grinned. "No. And in a lesser man, that sort of omniscience could be infernally irritating. How is he progressing with Forsythe?"
The civilian frowned. "We've got plenty of data so far, and the method seems to be working well, but we don't have enough to theorize yet.
"Forsythe just sits in his office and gives 'readings,' or whatever you want to call them, to the subjects who come in. The Metaphysicist has been running an ad asking for volunteers, so we have all kinds of people calling up for appointments. Forsythe is as happy as a kid."
"How about his predictions?"
"Donna Tedesco is running data processing on them. She's in constant mental contact with him. So are Hughes and Matson, in the office above. The three of them are meshed together with each other--don't ask me how; I'm no telepath--and they're getting a pretty good idea of what's going on in Forsythe's mind.
"Every once in a while, he gets a real flash of something, and it apparently comes pretty fast. The team is trying to analyze the fine-grain structure of the process now.
"The rest of the time, he simply gives out with the old guff that phony crystal-ball gazers have been giving out for centuries. Even when he gets a real flash, he piles on a lot of intuitive extrapolation. And the farther he gets from that central flash, the less reliable the predictions are."
"Do you think we'll get theory and symbology worked out before that meteor is supposed to hit Moonbase One?" asked the general.
The civilian shrugged. "Who knows? We'll have to take a lot on faith if we do, because there won't be enough time to check all his predictions. Each subject is being given a report sheet with his forecast on it, and he's supposed to check the accuracy of it as it happens. And our agents are making spot checks on them just to make sure. It'll take time. All we can do is hope."
"I suppose." General Layton took a quick look through the periscope again. The ship's air lock still hadn't opened; the air and ground were still too hot. He looked back at the civilian. "What about the espionage reports?"
The civilian tapped his briefcase. "I can give it to you in a capsule, verbally. You can look these over later."
"Shoot."
"The Soviets are getting worried, to put it bluntly. We can't hide those rockets, you know. Their own Luna-based radar has been picking up every one of them as they come in and leave. They're wondering why we're making so many trips all of a sudden."
"Have they done any theorizing?" the general asked worriedly.
"They have." The civilian chuckled sardonically. "They've decided we're trying for another Mars shot--a big one, this time."
The general exhaled sharply. "That's too close for comfort. How do they figure?"
"They figure we're amassing material at Moonbase One. They figure we intend to build the ship there, with the loads of stuff that we're sending up in the rockets."
"What?" General Layton opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he began to laugh.
The civilian joined him.
* * * * *
Donna Tedesco pushed the papers across Brian Taggert's desk. "Check them yourself, Brian. I've gone over them six ways from Septuagesima, and I still can't see any other answer."
Taggert frowned at the papers and tapped them with a thoughtful finger, but he didn't pick them up. "I'll take your word for it, Donna. At least for right now. If we get completely balled up, we'll go over them together."
"If you ask me, we've already completely balled up."
"You think it's that bad?"
She looked at him pleadingly. "Can you think of any other explanation?"
"Not just yet," Brian Taggert admitted.
"Nor can I. There it is. Every single one of his valid predictions, every single one of his precognitive intuitions--without exception--has been based on the actions of human beings. He can predict stock market fluctuations, and family squabbles, and South American election results. His disaster predictions, every one of them, were due to human error, human failure--not Acts of God. He failed to predict the earthquake in Los Angeles; he missed the flood in the Yangtze Valley; he knew nothing of the eruption of Stromboli. All of these were disasters that took human lives in the past three weeks, and he missed every one of them. And yet, he managed to get nearly every major ship, airplane, and even automobile accident connected with his subjects.
"Seven of his subjects had relatives or friends who were hurt or killed in the earthquake-flood-eruption sequence, but he didn't see them. Yet he could pick up such small things as a nephew of one of the men getting a bad scald on his arm.
"In the face of that, how can we rely on his one prediction about a meteor striking Moonbase One?"
Taggert rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. "I don't know," he said slowly. "There must be a connection somehow."
"Oh, Brian, Brian!" Her eyes were glistening with as yet unshed tears. "I've never seen you go off on a wild tangent like this before! On the word of an old fraud like Forsythe, a man who lies about half the time, you talk the Administration into sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into the biggest space lift in history!
"Oh, sure; I know. The old fraud is convinced he was telling the truth. But were you tapping his mind when the prediction flash came? No! Was anyone? No! And he's perfectly capable of lying to himself, and you know it!
"And what will happen if it doesn't come off? We're past the first deadline already. If that meteor doesn't hit within the next twenty-eight days, the Society will be right back where it was ten years ago! Or worse!
"And all because you trusted the word of Mr. Phony-Doctor Forsythe!"
"Donna," Taggert said softly, "do you really think I'm that big a fool?" He handed her a handkerchief.
"N-no," she answered, wiping at her eyes. "Of c-course I don't. It's just that it makes me so d-darn mad to see everything go wrong like this."
"Nothing's gone wrong yet. I suggest you go take a good look at Forsythe's mind again and really try to understand the old boy. Maybe you'll get more of the fine-grain structure of it if you'll try for more understanding."
"What do you mean?" she asked, sniffing.
"Look. Forsythe has made his living being a fraud, right? And yet he sent out those warning free--and anonymously. He had no thought of any reward or recompense, you know that. Why? Because he is basically a kind, decent human being. He wanted to do all he could to stop any injury or loss of life.
"Why, then, would he send out a fraudulent warning? He wouldn't. He didn't. Every one of those warnings--including the last one--was sent out because he knew that something was going to happen.
"Evidently, once he gets a flash about a certain event, he can't get any more data on that particular area of the future, or we could get more data on the Moonbase accident. I think, if we can boost his basic understanding up past the critical point, we'll have a man with controlled prescience, and we need that man.
"But, Donna, the only way we're ever going to do that--the only way we'll ever whip this problem--is for you to increase your understanding of him.
"You're past the critical point--way past it--in general understanding. But you've got to keep an eye on the little specific instances, too."
She nodded contritely. "I know. I'm sorry. Sometimes a person can get too near a problem." She smiled. "Thanks for the new perspective, Brian. I'll go back to work and see if I can't look at it a little more clearly."
* * * * *
In the White House, Senator Mikhail Kerotski was facing two men--James Bandeau, the Secretary of Space, and the President of the United States.
"Mr. President," he said evenly, "I've known you for a long time. I haven't failed you yet."
"I know that, Mike," the President said smoothly. "Neither has your Society, as far as I know. It's still difficult for me to believe that they get their information the way you say they do, but you've never lied to me about anything so far, so I take your word for it. Your Society is the most efficient espionage and counterespionage group in history, as far as I know. But this is different."
"Damned right it's different!" snapped Secretary Bandeau. "Your own Society, senator, admits that we've stirred the Soviets up with this space lift thing. They've got ships of their own going out there now. According to reports from Space Force intelligence, Chinese Moon cars have been prowling around Moonbase One, trying to find out what's going on."
"More than that," added the President, "they've sneaked a small group aboard the old Lunik IX to see what they can see from up there."
Secretary Bandeau jerked his head around to look at the President. "The old circumlunar satellite? Where did you hear that?"
The President smiled wanly. "From the S.M.M.R.'s report." He looked at Kerotski. "I doubt that it will do them any good. I don't think they'll be able to see anything now."
"Not unless they've figured out some way to combine X rays with radar," the senator said. "And I'm quite sure they haven't."
"Senator," said the Secretary of Space, "a lot of money has been spent and a lot of risks have been taken, just on your say-so. I--"
"Now, just a minute, Jim," said the President flatly. "Let's not go off half-cocked. It wasn't done on Mike's say-so; it was done on mine. I signed the order because I believed it was the proper, if not the only thing to do." Then he looked at the senator. "But this is the last day, Mike. Nothing has happened.
"Now, I'm not blaming you. I didn't call you up here to do that. And I think we can quit worrying about explaining away the money angle. But we're going to have to explain why we did it, Mike. And I can't tell the truth."
"I'll say you can't!" Bandeau exploded. "That would look great, wouldn't it? I can see the headlines now: 'Fortuneteller Gave Me Advice,' President Says. Brother!"
"Jim," the President said coldly, "I said to let me handle this."
"What you want, then, Mr. President," Kerotski put in smoothly, "is for me to help you concoct a good cover story."
"That's about it, Mike," the President admitted.
Kerotski shook his head slowly. "It won't be necessary."
Bandeau looked as though he were going to explode, but a glance from the President silenced him.
"Go on, Mike," he said to the senator.
"Mr. President, I know it looks bad. It's going to look even worse for a while. But, let me ask you one question. How is the Ch'ien space drive coming along?"
"Why ... fine. It checked out months ago. The new ship is on her shakedown cruise now. You know that."
"Right. Now, ask yourself one more question: What is the purpose of Moonbase One?"
"Why, to--"
The telephone rang.
The President scooped it up with one hand. "Yes?"
Then he listened for a long minute, his expression changing slowly.
"Yes," he said at last. "Yes, I got it. No; I'll release it to the newsmen. All right. Fine." He hung up.
"Twelve minutes ago," he said slowly, "the old Lunik IX smashed into Moonbase One and blew it to smithereens. The Soviets say that a meteor hit Lunik IX at just the right angle to slow it down enough to make it hit the base. They send their condolences."
* * * * *
Brian Taggert lay back on the couch in his office and folded his hands complacently on his abdomen. "So Donna's theory held water and so did mine. The accident was due to human intervention. Forsythe saw something from space hitting Moonbase One and assumed it was a meteor. He never dreamed the Soviets would drop old Lunik IX on it."
Senator Kerotski carefully lit a cigar. "There's going to be an awful lot of fuss in the papers, but the President is going to announce that he accepts the Soviet story. I convinced him that it is best to let the Soviets think they're a long way ahead of us in the space race now. There's nothing like a little complacency to slow someone down."
"How'd you convince him?"
"Asked the same question you asked me. Now that we have the Ch'ien space drive, what purpose does a moon base serve? None at all, of course."
Donna Tadesco leaned forward in her chair. "Did you happen to notice the sequence of events, senator? We were warned that the base would be struck. We decided to abandon it. We organized the biggest space lift in history to evacuate the men and the most valuable instruments. But the Soviets thought we were sending equipment up instead of bringing it down. They didn't know what we were up to, but they decided to put a stop to it, so they dropped an abandoned space satellite on it.
"If we hadn't decided to evacuate the base, it would never have happened.
"That is human intervention with a vengeance. We still don't know whether or not Forsythe's predictions will ever do us any good or not. Every time we've taken steps to avoid one of his prophesied catastrophes, we've done the very thing that brought them about."
The senator puffed his cigar in thoughtful silence.
"We'll just have to keep working with him," Taggert said. "Maybe we'll eventually make sense out of this precognition thing.
"At least we've got what we wanted. The Soviets think they've put us back ten years; they figure they've got more time, now, to get their own program a long ways ahead.
"When they do get to Mars and Venus and the planets of Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon, they'll find us there, waiting for them."
Senator Kerotski chuckled softly. "You're a pretty good prophet, yourself, Brian. The only difference between you and Forsythe is that he's right half the time.
"You're right all the time."
"No," said Taggert. "Not all the time. Only when it's important."
THE END
THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW
By Anthony Gilmore
CHAPTER I
"Machine-Fish"
"Full stop. Rest ready."
These words glowed in vivid red against the black background of the NX-1's control order-board. A wheel was spun over, a lever pulled back, and in the hull of the submarine descended the peculiar silence found only in mile-deep waters. Men rested at their posts, eyes alert.
Above, in the control room, Hemingway Bowman, youthful first officer, glanced at the teleview screen and swore softly.
"Keith," he said, "between you and me, I'll be damned glad when this monotonous job's over. I joined the Navy to see the world, but this charting job's giving me entirely too many close-ups of the deadest parts of it!"
Commander Keith Wells. U. S. N., grinned broadly. "Well," he remarked, "in a few minutes we can call it a day--or night, rather--and then it's back to the Falcon while the day shift 'sees the world.'" He turned again to his dials as Hemmy Bowman, with a sigh, resumed work.
"Depth, six thousand feet. Visibility poor. Bottom eight thousand," he said into the phone hung before his lips, and fifty feet aft, in a small cubby, a blue-clad figure monotonously repeated the observations and noted them down in an official geographical survey report.
* * * * *
Such had been their routine for two tiring weeks, all part of the NX-l's present work of re-charting the Newfoundland banks.
As early as 1929 slight cataclysms had begun to tear up the sea-floor of this region, and of late--1935--seismographs and cable companies had reported titanic upheavals and sinkings of the ocean bed, changing hundreds of miles of underwater territory. Finally Washington decided to chart the alterations this series of sub-sea earthquakes had wrought.
And for this job the NX-1 was detailed. A super-submarine fresh from the yards, small, but modern to the last degree, she contained such exclusive features as a sheathing of the tough new glycosteel, automatic air rectifiers, a location chart for showing positions of nearby submarines, the newly developed Edsel electric motors, and automatic teleview screen. When below surface she was a sealed tube of metal one hundred feet long, and possessed of an enormous cruising radius. From the flower of the Navy some thirty men were picked, and in company with the mother-ship Falcon she put out to combine an exhaustive trial trip with the practical charting of the newly changed ocean floor.
Now this work was almost over. Keith Wells told himself that he, like Bowman, would be glad to set foot on land again. This surveying was important, of course, but too dry for him--no action. He smiled at the lines of boredom on Hemmy's brow as the younger man stared gloomily into the teleview screen.
And then the smile left his lips. The radio operator, in a cubby adjoining the control room, had spoken into the communication tube:
"Urgent call for you, sir! From Captain Knapp!"
* * * * *
Wells reached out and clipped a pair of extension phones over his ears. The deep voice of Robert Knapp, captain of the mother-ship Falcon, came ringing in. It was strained with an excitement unusual to him.
"Wells? Knapp speaking. Something damned funny's just happened near here. You know the fishing fleet that was near us yesterday morning?"
"Yes?"
"Well, the whole thing's gone down! Destroyed, absolutely! The sea's been like glass, the weather perfect--yet from the wreckage, what there is of it, you'd think a typhoon had struck! I can't begin to explain it. No survivors, either, so far, though we're hunting for them."
"You say the boats are completely destroyed?"
"Smashed like driftwood. I tell you it's preposterous--and yet it's the fact. I think you'd better return at once, old man; you're only half an hour off. And come on the surface; it's getting light now, and you might pick up something. God knows what this means, Keith, but it's up to us to find out. It's--it's got me...."
His tones were oddly disturbed--almost scared--and this from a man who didn't know what fear was.
"But Bob," Keith asked, "how did you--"
"Stand by a minute! The lookout reports survivors!"
* * * * *
Wells turned to meet Bowman's inquisitive face. He quickly repeated the gist of Knapp's weird story. "We saw them at dusk, last evening--remember? And now they're gone, destroyed. What can have done it?"
For some minutes the two surprised men speculated on the strange occurrence. Then Knapp's voice again rang in the headphones.
"Wells? My God, man, this is getting downright fantastic! We've just taken two survivors on board; one's barely alive and the other crazy. I can't get an intelligible thing from him; he keeps shrieking about writhing arms and awful eyes--and monsters he calls 'machine-fish'!"
"You're sure he's insane?"
Robert Knapp's voice hesitated queerly.
"Well, he's shrieking about 'machine-fish'--fish with machines over them!... I--I'm going to broadcast the whole story to the land stations. 'Machine-fish'! I don't know.... I don't know.... You'd better hurry back, Wells!"
He rang off.
* * * * *
Keith slipped off the headphones and told Bowman what he had learned. Hardy, staunchly built craft, those fishing boats were; born in the teeth of gales. What horror could have ripped them--all of them--to driftwood, with the weather perfect? And a half-mad survivor, raving about "machine-fish"!
"Such things are preposterous," Bowman commented scornfully.
"But--the fleet's gone, Hemmy," Keith replied. "Anyway, we'll speed back, and see what it's all about."
He punched swift commands on the control studs. "Empty Tanks, Zoom to Surface, Full Speed," the crimson words glared down below, and the NX-1 at once shoved her snout up, trembling as her great electric motors began their pulsing whine. The delicate fingers of the massed dials before Keith danced exultantly. The depth-levels tolled out:
"Seven thousand ... six thousand ... five thousand--"
"Keith! Look there!"
Hemmy Bowman was pointing with amazement at the location chart, a black mesh screen that showed the position of other submarines within a radius of two miles. In one corner, a spot of vivid red was shining.
"But it can't be a submarine!" Wells objected. "Our reports would have mentioned it!"
The two officers stared at each other.
"'Machine-fish!'" Bowman whispered softly. "If there were machines, the metal would register on the chart."
"It must be them!" the commander roared, coming out of his daze. "And, by God, we're going after them!"
* * * * *
Rapidly he brought the NX-1 out of her zoom to the surface, and left her at four thousand feet, in perfect trim, while he read the instruments closely.
A green spot in the center of the location chart denoted the NX-1's exact position. A distance of perhaps forty inches separated it from the red light on the meshed screen--which represented, roughly, a mile and a half. Below the chart was a thick dial, over which a black hand, indicating the mysterious submersible's approximate depth, was slowly moving.
"He's sinking--whatever he is," Keith muttered to Hemmy. "Hey, Sparks! Get me Captain Knapp."
A moment later the connection was put through.
"Bob? This is Wells again. Bob, our location chart shows the presence of some strange undersea metallic body. It can't be a submarine, for my maritime reports would show its presence. We think it has some connection with the 'machine-fish' that survivor raved about. At any rate, I'm going after it. The world has a right to know what destroyed that fishing fleet, and since the NX-1 is right on the spot it's my duty to track it down. Re-broadcast this news to land stations, will you? I'll keep in touch with you."
Knapp's voice came soberly back. "I guess you're right, Keith; it's up to you.... So long, old man. Good luck!"
* * * * *
In Wells' veins throbbed the lust for action. With control studs at hand, location chart and teleview screen before his eyes and fifteen men waiting below for his commands, he had no fear of any monster the underseas might spew up. He glanced swiftly at the location chart and depth indicator again.
The mysterious red spot was slowly coming across the NX-1's bows at a distance of about one mile. Keith punched a stud, and, as his craft filled her tank and slipped down further into deep water, he spoke to Hemmy Bowman.
"Take control for a minute. Keep on all speed, and follow 'em like a bloodhound. I'm going below."
He strode down the connecting ramp to the lower deck, where he found fifteen men standing vigilantly at posts. At once Keith plunged into a full explanation of what he had learned up in the control room. He concluded:
"A great moral burden rests on us--every one of us--as we will soon come face to face with a possible world menace. Anything may happen. A state of war exists on this submarine. You will be prepared for any wartime eventuality!"
Sobered faces greeted this announcement, and perceptibly the men straightened and held themselves more alertly. Wells at once returned to the control room. A glance at the location chart and its two tiny lights told him that the intervening distance had been decreased to about half a mile.
The depth dial showed them both to be two miles below, and steadily diving lower. Charts showed the sea-floor to be three miles deep in this position, and that meant--
"Look there!" exclaimed the first officer suddenly. "It's changing course!"
* * * * *
The crimson stud had suddenly shifted its course, and now was fleeing directly before them. For a moment the distance between the green and red lights remained constant--and then Keith Wells stared unbelievingly at the chart, wiped a hand across his eyes and stared again.
"Why--why, the devils are as fast as we!" he exclaimed in amazement. "I think they're even gaining on us!"
"And there's no other submarine in the world that can do more than thirty under water!" Hemmy Bowman added. "We're hitting a full forty-one!"
A call came through the communication tube from Sparks. "Report from Consolidated Radio News-Broadcasters, sir, aimed especially at us."
"Well?" asked Keith, motioning Hemmy to listen in. Sparks read it.
"'A week ago Atlantic City reported that seven men were snatched off fishing boat by unidentified tentacled monsters. Testimony of witnesses was discredited, but was later corroborated by the almost identical testimony of other witnesses at Brighton Beach, England, who saw man and woman taken by mysterious monsters whilst bathing.' Perhaps these same creatures destroyed the Newfoundland fishing fleet." His level voice ceased.
"Tentacled monsters ... 'machine-fish,'" Wells murmured slowly. "'Machine-fish.'..."
Their eyes met, the same wonder in each. "Well," Keith rapped at last, "we're seeing this through!"
* * * * *
He turned again to the location chart. The green spot as always was in the center, and at a constant distance was the red, showing that the NX-1 was hot on the other's trail. The depth dials indicated that both were diving deeper every moment.
"Where in hell's it going?" the commander rasped. "We'll be on the floor in a few minutes!"
Here the teleview showed the world to be one of fantasy, one to which the sun did not exist. It was not an utter, pitchy blackness that pervaded the water, but rather a peculiar, dark blueness. No fish schools, Keith noted, scurried from them. They had already left these waters; aware, perhaps, of the passing Terror....
They plunged lower yet. Wells was conscious of Hemmy Bowman's quick, uneven breathing. Conscious of the tautness of his own nerves, strung like quivering violin strings. Conscious of the terrific walls of water pressing in on them. And conscious of the men below, their lives bound implicitly in his will and brain....
A thought came to him, and quickly he reached into a rack for the chart of the local sea-floor. His brow creased with puzzlement as he studied it.
"Here's more mystery, Hemmy," he muttered. "Look--there's an underwater cliff about half a mile dead ahead. It rises to within four thousand feet of the surface. And that thing out there is charging straight into its base!"
"They must be aware of it," jerked the other. "See?--they've stopped!"
* * * * *
It was true. The gulf between the two colored spots was rapidly being swallowed up. At a pulsing forty-one knots the NX-1 was closing in on the motionless mystery craft.
"They're sinking to the floor itself," observed Wells. "Perhaps waiting to attack."
The invisible beams from their ultra-violet light-beacons streamed through the silent gloom outside, yet still the teleview screen was empty. Keith punched a stud, and the NX-1's whining motors dulled to a scarcely audible purr.
"What is the thing?" muttered Hemmy Bowman. "God, Keith, what is it?"
For answer, the commander dropped them the last five hundred feet. The sea-floor rose like a gray ghost. More control studs were pushed; the order-board below read: "All Power Off, Rest in Trim." The location chart told a tale that wrung a gasp from Bowman's throat. The red and green lights were practically touching....
The hands of Petty Officer Brown, the helmsman, were quivering on the helm. Wells' fists kept tensing and relaxing as he peered for a sight of the enemy in the teleview. Nothing showed but the moving fingers of spectral kelp. Then both he and Bowman cried out as one:
"There!"
CHAPTER II
The Silent Ray
A strange shape had suddenly materialized on the screen--an immense, oval-shaped thing of dull metal, with great curving cuts of glass-like substance in its blunt bow, like staring eyes; a lifeless, staring thing, stretching far into the curtain of gloom behind. How long it was, Keith could not tell; at first his numb brain refused to grasp it and reduce it to definite, sane standards of size and length. The cold weeds of the sea-floor kelp beds swayed eerily over and around it. From its bow, he saw, peculiar knobs jutted, the function of which he guessed with dread.
Was it waiting with a purpose? Was it waiting--and inviting attack?
A frightened whisper from Hemmy Bowman broke the hush:
"Keith, the thing has ports, but shows no lights! What kind of creatures can they be?"
As he spoke, the three men in the control room felt the unmistakable, jarring tingle of an electric shock. And while their nerves still jumped, it came again; and again. They were conscious of a slight feeling of drowsiness.
Keith gaped at Bowman and Brown, and then a flash on the teleview screen drew his eyes. There, against the blackness of its otherwise inanimate hulk, one of the jutting knobs on the bow of the mysterious submarine was glowing and pulsing with orange life! With it came the tingling shock again. It flicked off as they watched, then returned and went once more.
"They're attacking, but thank God the shock was harmless!" Wells said grimly. "All right; they've asked for it: I'm going to see how they like the taste of a torpedo!"
* * * * *
The two submarines were resting on the ocean floor with perhaps two hundred feet between them. The NX-1's bow tubes were not exactly in line to score a direct hit; she would have to be maneuvered slightly to port. The range was short; the explosion from the torpedoes would be titanic.
Keith punched the control studs, ordering the men below to assume firing stations. Then, while waiting for the NX-1 to shift, he studied the teleview screen to sight the range exactly. The black dot which represented the enemy craft was not directly on the crossed hair-lines of the dial-like range-finder, but shifting the NX-1 a few feet would bring it to the perfect firing point.
But the NX-1 did not budge.
Surprised, her commander swung and looked at Bowman. "What the devil?" he cried. "Did that shock--?" He left the dread thought unfinished and leaped to the speaking tubes.
"Craig! Jones! Wetherby!" he yelled. "Men! Don't you hear me? Aren't you--"
He broke off, wordless, waiting for an answer that did not come, then sprang to the connecting ramp and ran to the deck below.
The scene he found halted him abruptly in his tracks. Every member of the crew was sprawled on the deck, in grotesque, limp postures. They had been standing rigidly at posts, he saw, when the thing, whatever it was, had struck. Without a sound, without a single cry of alarm, the NX-1's crew had been laid low!
* * * * *
The commander slowly advanced to the deck and stared more closely at the upturned faces around him. He saw that every man's eyes were open.
Bending over one still form, he pressed his hand on the heart. It was beating! The man was alive! Amazed, he moved to another and another: they were all breathing, slowly and regularly--were all alive! A curious look in their eyes staggered him for a moment. He could swear that they recognized him, knew he was staring at them--for every single pair was alight with intelligence, and Keith fancied he saw gleams of recognition.
"It must have been a paralyzing ray!" he gasped. "A thing our scientists've been trying to develop for years.... And that monster outside knows the secret...." He lifted an arm of the inert figure at his feet; when he released the grip, it flopped limply back to the deck again.
"Keith! Come back, quick!"
Startled, the commander turned to find Hemingway Bowman at the top of the connecting ramp, his face distorted with alarm.
"For God's sake, come back quick!" he yelled again. "Down there the ray might get you!"
With the words, Wells leaped to the ramp and raced to the control room. He had no sooner made it than he felt again the queer tingle of the electric charge. He found himself trembling. Bowman's face was white. His words came stuttering.
"One second later and they'd have got you.... They got Sparks in his cubby.... You see, the ray doesn't affect us in the control room because--"
"Because the Gibson insulation that protects the instruments keeps it out!" Keith finished grimly. "I see!"
Just then a slight jar ran through the submarine. Coincident with it came a cry from Brown, the helmsman. His arm was pointed at the teleview.
There they saw the enemy's mighty dirigible of metal was now within thirty feet of the NX-1. It had crept up silently, without warning. And, spanning the short gulf between them, an arm of webbed metal craned from the other's huge bow, hooking tightly into the American submarine's forward hawser holes!
As they took this in, the enemy ship moved away and the arm of metal tightened. The NX-1 shuddered. And, at first slowly, but with ever increasing speed, she got under way and slid after her captor. They were being towed away. Kidnaped! Men, submarine and all!
* * * * *
Keith Wells mopped sweat from a hot brow and rapidly reviewed his weapons. He was sorely restricted. Through an emergency system the NX-1 could be propelled and maneuvered from her control room; but the torpedo tubes needed local attendance.
"Hemmy, reverse engines," he jerked, himself spinning over a small wheel. "Let's see if we can out-pull the devil!"
At once they felt the shock of the paralyzing ray, and then the surging whine of the Edsel electrics pulsed up and in the teleview screen they watched the grim struggle of ship against ship.
Imperceptibly, almost, as her screws cut in and churned, the forward progress of the NX-1 was slowing, the speed of the other being cut down, until finally they but barely forged ahead. Slowly, ever so slowly they were out-pulled; inch by inch they were dragged ahead. Their motors could not hold even.
"She's more powerful than we!" Wells' bitter voice spoke. "Damn!" He thought desperately, while Bowman and Brown stared at the fantastic tale the teleview spelled out.
Again the paralyzing shock tingled, an intangible jailer that bound them, more surely than steel bars, to the control room. To dare that streaming barrage meant instant impotence, and perhaps, later, death....
"Our two bow torpedoes," Keith mused slowly. "We're a bit close, but it's our only chance. The ray comes at intervals of about a minute; the torps are ready for firing. If one of us could dash forward and discharge 'em.... Brown, that's you!"
The petty officer met his commander's gaze levelly. He smiled. "Yes, sir, I'm ready!" he said.
"Good! It'll have to be quick work, though; I'll try and keep the sub pointed straight. Wait for the ray, then run like hell!"
* * * * *
The first officer took over the helm and Brown stepped to the forward ladder, waiting for the periodic ray to be discharged.
The odd tingle came and vanished. "Now!" Wells roared, and Brown leaped down the thin steel rungs.
He staggered at the bottom from the force of his impact, then straightened and raced madly forward. Through the drone of the motors the two officers could hear the staccato beat of his feet.
But their eyes were glued to the teleview. Through clutching beds of seaweed the enemy submarine was ploughing. Her great, smooth bow lay straight ahead, metal hawser arm spanning the thirty feet between them. In another second, Keith thought grimly, two dynamite packed tubes of sudden death would thunderbolt into that hull, and--
Brown pulled the lever.
The tubes spat out compressed air; a scream ran through the submarine; and the two steel fish leaped from their sheaths, their tiny props roaring. Over the narrow gulf they shot; the range was short, their target dead ahead--and yet by bare inches they missed!
No answering roar bellowed back. Keith had watched their course; had seen them flash by the enemy's bow, flicking it with their rudders, but nothing more. "Why?" he cried. And, as Bowman moved his hands in a hopeless gesture, he saw in the teleview the reason.
It was a jagged pinnacle of rock, which, just before Brown had fired, had been straight ahead. The towing monster had seen it and veered sharply to avoid crashing. The barest change of course, yet sufficient to avoid the torpedoes....
* * * * *
Wells and Bowman were cursing savagely when the sound of Brown, racing desperately aft, jerked the commander to the ladder. He saw the petty officer at its foot. "Hurry!" Wells shouted. "The ray!"
Brown grasped the steel rungs and scrambled upward, but he was too late. The fatal charge tingled. A peculiar, surprised expression washed over his face; his hands loosened their grip. For a second his eyes looked questioningly at his commander; a faint sigh escaped him; and then his arms flung out, his body relaxed, and he slumped like a slab of meat to the deck below....
Keith Wells saw red. Blind to everything, he was just about to charge down the ladder to himself re-load the forward tubes when the grip of Hemmy Bowman's hand stayed him. The thing Hemmy was staring at in the teleview screen sobered him completely.
The wall of rock to which the enemy submarine had first been charging had become visible, soaring vastly from the gloom of the sea-floor. And the monster was towing them straight into a dark, jagged cleft at its base.
"It's a cavern!" Keith breathed. "A split in the rock--the lair of that devil. And we're being dragged into it!"
CHAPTER III
Sacrifice
At that moment Keith Wells knew fear. Each second they were being hauled closer to the monster's dim lair. It lay there, dark, mysterious, fingered by gently swaying, clammy kelp. A hushed solitude seemed to reign over it, aweing all undersea life from the vicinity.... Wells turned his head to meet Bowman's eyes, and read in them a silent question.
What now?
He groaned in the agony of his mind. In a few minutes, all would be over. Once the NX-1 was dragged into that dark cavern there'd be no chance of escaping to warn the world above, of saving the submarine. What now? The question brought beads of sweat to his tormented brow. He, Keith Wells, standing impotently by while his ship, the pride of the service, was hauled inch by inch to some strange doom!
Racked by these thoughts, he murmured tortured, jerky phrases, unconscious he was giving voice to the things that flogged his brain.
"What can I do? I've got to save my ship--I've got to get back to break the news--I've got to tell the world! But how? How--" His expression changed suddenly. "That's it! That hawser arm between us must be broken!"
"Yes."
First Officer Hemingway Bowman's clear voice broke in on the older man's thoughts with that one crisp word. Keith swung to find the other's eyes fixed levelly on his.
"You're right, Keith. The hawser arm must be broken; with a depth charge, of course. It's the only way.
"To attach a depth charge," he continued evenly, "a man must leave the ship. You can't, Keith. It will be me."
* * * * *
The commander did not speak. "I'll put on a sea-suit," Hemmy went on quickly, eyes lighting. "You tip the submarine and I'll slide out the conning tower exit port on the lee side, so they can't see me, and worm forward through the kelp. We're almost holding them even; that'll be easy. I'll be protected from the paralyzing shock until the last second, and it may not get me outside; that'll have to be chanced. The hawser arm's only some ten feet above the sea-floor; I can reach it with a hook on the charge." He paused.
"I'll attach it; and when it bursts I'll try to get back and grab that ring on the midships exit port, and you can let me in when we get to the surface. But if I take too long, Keith--if I miss--you beat it without me. You understand? Beat it!"
He gazed straight at his friend. "Understand, Keith?"
Commander Keith Wells bowed his head in acquiescence. He was afraid that if he met Hemmy Bowman's steady eyes he'd make a fool of himself....
Hemmy glanced at the screen once more, shivering as he saw how near the black cavern was. Then he moved rapidly, playing the cards carefully for his gamble with death. He had to: the trumps were in the other hand.
From the locker where their sea-suits were stowed he grabbed his own, and with quick fingers ripped the slides and fitted it on. A sheath of yellow Lestofabrik, its weighted feet and gleaming casque transformed his slim figure into a giant such as might stalk through a nightmare. Built cunningly into the helmet was a tiny radio transmitter and receiver, with a range of a quarter-mile; hugging to the shoulders, inside nestled the air-making mechanism, its tiny generators already in motion. Around the helmet was fastened a small removable undersea-light. The wrists of the suit were very flexible, permitting the freest motion.
Once in the suit, Hemmy smiled through the still-opened face-shield.
"Got the depth charge ready, Keith? Make it fast--that cavern's near!... Good!"
* * * * *
Silently the commander fitted the black bomb to his friend's shoulders. It was timed to fire a minute after being set. A long wire hook craned from its top, and this hook Bowman would fasten on the hawser arm.
"Without Sparks, I guess I'll have to communicate with you through portable," Keith said, and quickly donned one of the tiny portable sets.
"Right. Ready, Keith."
Bowman started his awkward, crawling progress up the ladder into the conning tower just above, Keith helping from behind. When they stood before the exit port on the lee side, Wells shot back its bolts and the door swung open, revealing the black emptiness of the water chamber. The commander gazed for a second into Bowman's eyes. The moment had come.
Keith turned his head away, felt a hand grip his. He wrung it tightly....
Bowman clumped into the chamber.
The commander closed and locked the door, and he heard the streaming water pour in as Hemmy turned the valve. Then Wells sped down the ladder and tilted the diving and course rudders of the submarine.
She swayed daintily over to port; held there. A moment later the recurring electric tingle brushed him. Had the enemy seen Bowman leave? Had the ray struck him down?
He glared into the teleview. "Thank God!" he breathed. For Hemmy had already slid down the NX-1's smooth hull and was safe on the sea-floor beside her.
"Everything right?" Wells asked, speaking into the microphone of his portable.
"All O.K.," came the answer. "Going forward now. Kelp thick as hell."
* * * * *
Keith's eyes bored at the screen. This misshapen monster who was his friend! Almost obscured by bands of thick-leaved kelp the yellow form moved, hands clearing a pathway through the weeds. Slowly but surely he made for the bow of the submersible.
"Hard going, Keith. God--the cavern's right ahead!"
It was ghostly to hear Hemmy's warm voice from the lifeless solitude outside. Breath coming quickly, Wells watched the silent scene--the cleft in the wall of rock overshadowing everything now. The diver fought ahead, gaining inch by inch.
Now, save for occasional clumps of weed, he was exposed to the enemy.... Now the last desperate gauntlet was reached.... Keith felt his blood pound hotly.
"I'm gaining, Keith. Gaining...."
Bowman had little breath for speech. His tiny form battled on, now sinking from sight as he dropped into some masked gully, now wrestling slowly with great swaying strands of kelp, but always struggling ahead.
"I'm at the bow, Keith! The hawser arm's right in our mooring holes. I'll go halfway before fastening the charge. Any signs of life from the devil?"
"None yet, Hemmy. But go slow. Hide all you can, old man, for God's sake!..."
Right beneath the metal arm, Bowman's dwarfed figure crept doggedly ahead. Forward, inch by breathless inch. Kelp thickened, washed away; the two hulking submersibles, captor and captive, surged onward--but just a little faster went the valiant figure with the black charge on its back.
The towing monster had its snout in the cavern. The darkness thickened. Bowman was quarter way!
He plunged desperately. Half way!
"I'm there, Keith! Now for it!"
"Oh, God!" Wells cried. "They see you; they're coming!"
For he had seen strange shapes leaving the enemy submarine.
And at that same moment, Bowman saw them, too.
* * * * *
They came like the blink of a dark eye from a door that had quickly slid open in the mysterious ship's bow. As tall as a man they were, and there were two of them, though at first the nature of their bodies merged with the wreathing kelp made them seem like a dozen. Bowman stared at them, hypnotized with fear. His legs and arms went dead, and his whole gallant spirit seemed to slump into lifeless clay. Now he knew why the fishermen had shrieked "machine-fish." Each one of them had eight tapering arms, eight restless tentacles. These were octopi, most hideous scavengers of the ocean floor! And not only octopi--but octopi sheathed in metal-scaled armor!
As they came closer, he realized this preposterous fact. The dark substance of their writhing tentacles was not flesh: it was a coat of metal scales. And the fat central mass which held their eyes and vital organs and beaked jaw--this mass was completely enveloped by a globe of glass. From inside, he could see great eyes staring at him. The monsters came towards him quite slowly, obviously wary, advancing over the sea-floor in what was a hideous mockery of walking, their forward tentacles outstretched.
With a sob, Hemmy Bowman pulled himself from his trance. He glanced back at the NX-1. He still had time to retreat. He might be able to get back inside before these monsters seized him.
But that meant abandoning his job. And already his own submarine was nosing into the cavern. The choice between the octopi and retreat stared him in the face. He pulled himself together and jerked his arms back to action.
* * * * *
Eyes bulging, Keith Wells peered at the dim teleview screen. He saw the creatures approaching Hemmy. And then, suddenly, he remembered his radiophone.
"Hemmy! Come back, for God's sake!" he cried. "Come back while you can--it's hopeless!"
But Bowman had already seized the depth charge from his back and hooked it on the hawser arm above.
Immediately, with that action, all caution fled from the approaching monsters. Their tentacles whipped furiously; and in a great arc they sprang for the tiny figure of the diver.
With a deep breath, Hemmy staggered forward to meet them. "Keith!" he gasped. "I'll try to hold 'em away from the charge! When it bursts, zoom! Zoom like hell to the surface!" And then the tentacles had him.
Keith watched, cursing his impotence to help. Hemmy had no weapon; he was trying to hold them back by the weight of his body; he reached out and grasped a tentacle and hugged it to him, shoving forward with all his puny strength. But all his effort was as nothing. One of the octopi writhed past him and darted onto the depth charge. Its tentacles tugged at the bomb; pulled furiously.
The time charge exploded. The NX-1 rocked like a quivering reed; Wells was knocked violently to the floor; a vast roar smote his ear-drums. When he staggered to his feet he found that the octopus that was pulling at the charge had disappeared--blown into fragments of flesh and metal. But the hawser arm was broken! The NX-1, free, shot back a full fifty feet under the pull of her reversed screws. A cry echoed in her commander's ears:
"Go back, Keith! Go like hell!"
He saw the remaining octopus lift Bowman and whip to the exit port of its submarine. The lid slid into place, closing on the monster and his friend, and the enemy ship vanished into the black cavern....
* * * * *
Once clear of the opening, Keith set his motors full forward and brought the diving rudders up. Quickly the ship sped from the haunted sea-floor to the sun-warmed surface. A last thin call rang in his radiophone:
"They've got me inside, Keith. It's dark, and filled with water. I can't see anything, but I--I guess we're going through the cavern.... Forget about me, old boy. So long! So--"
The voice was abruptly cut off.
Keith ripped the instrument from his head. Then, face white and drawn, he ran to the radio cubby. Standing over Sparks' inert body, he put through a call to Robert Knapp, on the Falcon.
"Knapp?" he said harshly. "This is Wells. I'll be with you in a few minutes. Yes--yes--I'll tell you the whole story later. But get this now: Have the day shift all ready to take over the submarine by the time I pull alongside."
He said no more just then; but rang off, and, looking back, he muttered savagely:
"But I'll be back, Hemmy--I'll be back!"
CHAPTER IV
In the Cavern
"That's the story, Knapp. They got Bowman, and I had to run away. Their ship disappeared into the cavern. I've got a hunch, though, that it's not just a cavern, but a tunnel, leading through to some underwater world. That series of sub-sea earthquakes probably opened it up; and now these devil-octopi are free to pour out. I've got to find out what's what, and that's why I'm going down again as soon as the torpedo system's ready!"
Keith and Robert Knapp were in the Falcon's chart room. On the table before them lay a broad white map with a cross-mark indicating the position of the mysterious dark cavern.
Wells was striding up and down like a caged tiger in his impatience to be off. Every other minute he glared down to where the NX-1 lay alongside. On her conning tower stood the tall blond-haired figure of Graham, the first officer of the day shift, supervising the final details of the work of installing a system of jury controls whereby the submarine's torpedoes could be fired from her control room.
Keith stopped short and faced Knapp. "It won't be so one-sided this time, Bob," he promised. "You see: when the location chart shows the enemy ship, I'll rush all men into the control room, where the paralyzing ray can't harm them. I don't know but what they have in other weapons, but I'm gambling on getting my torps in first. They've killed Bowman; they've ravaged a whole fishing fleet; they're free to emerge from their hole and maraud every ocean on the globe! They've got to be stopped! And since I'm armed and have the only submarine on the spot, I've got to do it! I know how to fight them now!"
* * * * *
Captain Robert Knapp's sense of things was badly disordered. He had just heard a story which his common sense told him couldn't be true, but which the evidence of his eyes had grimly authenticated. He had seen fifteen men slung aboard his ship from the NX-1's silent hull; men stretched in grotesque, limp attitudes; men struck down by a paralyzing ray. Why, no nation on earth had developed rays for warfare! Yet--a crew of helpless men was even then in the sick bay, receiving attention in the hope that they might recover.
"You're going right through that cavern, then, Wells?" he asked incredulously. "You're going to investigate what lies beyond?"
"Nothing else! And I won't come out till I've blown that octopi ship to pieces!"
"It sounds preposterous," Knapp murmured, shaking his head. "Octopi, you say--and clad in metal suits! Running a submarine more powerful than the NX-1! Armed with a ray--a paralyzing ray! I can't believe--I can't conceive--"
"You've seen the men!... Knapp, if I were you I'd swing my eight-inchers out, bring up the plane catapult and keep the deck torpedo tubes loaded and ready. It's best to be prepared; God knows what's going on underseas these days!"
First Officer Graham appeared at the door. "Work finished, sir," he said. "Ready to cast off."
"Thank heaven!" Wells muttered, and stretched out his hand to Robert Knapp. "Broadcast what I've told you, Bob, and say that the NX-1 won't be back till everything's under control. I'll keep in touch with you. So long!" And he was gone before the captain could even wish him good luck.
* * * * *
Orders raced from her commander's fingers on the stud board in the control room. "Crash Dive" filled her tanks and put her nose perilously down, so that in thirty seconds only a swirling patch of water was left to show where once she'd lain. A brief command to the helmsman and she pointed straight for the dark cavern marked on the chart.
When well under way, Keith descended with Graham to inspect the new torpedo firing system, and found it in good working order. "Graham," he ordered tersely, "instruct the crew fully about rushing to the control room on one ring of the general alarm. And send the cook up to me in a minute or so. I'll be in Sparks' cubby."
Above again, he instructed the radio man to rig a remote control sender and receiver in the insulated control room. The need for centering the whole crew there during engagements would crowd the room awkwardly, but at other times, while proceeding on their inspection of the cavern lair, they could remain at their regular posts.
That, at least, was Wells' plan.
He looked up and found the cook, McKegnie, grinning at him from the door of the control room. Keith smiled, running his eyes over the portly magnificence of his gently perspiring figure. "Keg," he said cheerfully, "I want you to move your hot plate and culinary apparatus up here; you see, we're all likely to be crowded in here for some time, and your coffee's going to be an absolute necessity." He couldn't resist a crack at McKegnie's well-known and passionate curiosity as to what made the thigmajigs of the control board work: "And besides, it'll give you a chance to observe the instruments and perfect yourself for your future career as a naval officer. Much better than a correspondence course in 'How to Be a Submarine Commander,' eh?"
Cook McKegnie grinned sheepishly, and left. He was well used to such jests, but he never would admit that his extraordinary interest in watching the ship's wheels go round was accompanied by a miraculous inability to comprehend why they went round....
* * * * *
Fifteen minutes later the helmsman's cry, "Cavern showing, sir!" swung the commander to the teleview screen. The dark, kelp-shrouded opening he knew so well was already looming on it. And he was prepared.
"Enter," he said, while his punched studs ordered, "Quarter Speed, Ready at Posts, Tanks in Trim." The NX-1 slackened her gait, balanced cautiously, and struck a straight, even course as she crept closer to the cleft entrance through which, some two hours earlier, the octopi ship had nosed.
Screws turning slowly, she edged through the jagged cavern. Shades of inky blackness grew on the teleview and danced in fantastic blotches; the screen turned to a welter of black, threatening shadows; became a useless maze of ever-changing forms. Keith mouthed curses as he stared at it; he now had nothing by which to judge his progress, to maneuver the submarine, save directional instruments and, perhaps, chance scrapings of the tunnel's ragged walls against the outer hull. The NX-1 was running a gauntlet of immeasurable danger, her only assurance of success being the fact that a larger craft had preceded her.
But how far, Keith wondered, had that ship preceded her? How was he to know that it had gone straight through? There might be a dozen different turnings in this tunnel: the submarine could easily tilt head-on against a jagged rock and puncture her hull. There might be mines planted directly in their course; he might be swimming straight into some hideous ambuscade.
He drove these thoughts from his mind. The passage had to be made on the fickle authority of the senses; and, realizing this, Wells took the helm into his own hands. Graham was posted at the location chart, with instructions to report the red light if it showed.
* * * * *
Down below, the Edsel electrics were humming very softly; the men stood vigilantly at posts. On their brows were little beads of sweat, and here and there a hand clenched nervously. All knew they were in a tight place; otherwise they were ignorant of where their commander was leading them. Occasionally a long, shivering rasp ran through the ship as her hull nudged the rough tunnel wall. Then the course rudders would swing gently over; and perhaps, almost immediately, another grinding cry of rock and steel would come from the other side. Then would come quickly indrawn breaths as the rudders swung again and the humming silence droned on.
The scrapings came quite often. Often, too, the motors would go silent altogether, and the NX-1 would rest almost motionless as her commander felt for an opening. It was a tense, nerve-wringing ordeal. The silence, the waiting, the dainty scrapings were maddening.
Keith Wells' skin was prickling. He kept only fingertips on the tiny helm: he was playing that uncanny sixth sense of the submarine commander. When it misled him, the rasping rock groaned out, scarring the submarine's smooth skin. Generally, the tunnel was straight; but each time he heard his ship rub against some exterior obstruction, his teeth went tight--for who knew but what it might be a mine?
They had penetrated perhaps a half-mile when Graham, eyes steady on the teleview, reported: "Light growing, sir!"
* * * * *
Wells saw that the screen was filling with a soft, faintly glowing bluish color. The walls of the tunnel became visible, and he noted that they were widening out, funnel-like. He dared to increase speed slightly. Three minutes later he saw that the blue illumination was seeping from the end of the tunnel. They continued out.
"Thank God, we're through!" he muttered to Graham. "You see, I was right! It's an underground sea--and we're at the top of it." For the instruments indicated a depth beneath them of roughly three miles. They were in, evidently, a large cavern, of vast length and depth.
The NX-1 continued slowly forward, two pairs of eyes intent on her teleview screen. Keith jotted down the tunnel's position, and the funnel-shaped hole sank away behind their slow screws. And then, upon the location chart, a faint red dot suddenly glowed!
It was upon them in a flash. A small tube of metal, shaped somewhat in the form of the big octopi submarine, had darted up from below, hovered a second close to them, and then, almost before they realized they were being surveyed, sped back into the mysterious depths from which it had come.
"A lookout, I suppose," Keith muttered, breathing more easily. "Couldn't have held more than two of those creatures.... Well, the alarm's out, I guess, Graham, but it can't be helped. Let's see what it's like down below."
* * * * *
They plunged steadily down, then ahead. And presently there grew on the teleview vague forms which widened their eyes and made their breath come quicker. Keith had guessed the tunnel led to a civilization of some kind, but he was not prepared for the sight that loomed hazily through the soft blue water.
Strange, moundlike shapes appeared far below, mounds grouped in orderly rows and clusters, with streets running between them, thronged with tiny, spidery dots. Octopi! It was, the commander realized, a city of the monsters--a complete city like those of surface peoples! For several miles in every direction the water-city spread out, farther than the teleview could pierce. Wells marveled at this separately developed civilization, this deep-buried realm of octopi whose unexpected intellectual powers had permitted such development. Perhaps, he pondered, this city was only one of many; perhaps only a village. He could but vaguely glimpse the queer mound buildings, but saw that they were of varying height and were filled with dark round entrance holes, through which the creatures streamed on their different errands....
He saw no schools of fish around. "I guess they're been all killed off, or eaten," he commented to the wonder-struck Graham. "Probably the octopi have separate hatcheries where they raise them for food."
"But--good Lord!" the first officer exclaimed. "A city--a city like ours! Down here, filled with octopi!..."
"Yes," answered Wells grimly, "and this 'city' may only be a small settlement; there may be scores of these places. We'd better continue ahead now that we're here; for we've got to get all the information we can. I only hope these monsters haven't more than one big submarine. We can expect an attack any minute...."
* * * * *
The NX-1 pressed on. The city dropped behind. A breathless tenseness had settled down over the submarine; she was proceeding with utmost caution, her anxious officers alert at the location chart. The great fear that tormented them was that they might be attacked, not by one, but by a fleet of the octopi ships....
Then, at the rim of the chart, a red dot appeared! It grew rapidly, charging down on them at great speed. The spot was large; this was no small sentry boat! At once the alarm bell shrilled its warning; the crew below left their posts and raced to the control room. With sure mechanical fingers the emergency system gripped the valve handles and motor levers; Keith swung the NX-1 onto a level keel, straightened her out, and decreased speed still more. Giving the rods of the motor and rudder controls to Graham, he moved to the small lever which would unleash his bow torpedoes, and fingered it lightly. The NX-1 was ready for action.
Scarcely had the men reached the small control room than the familiar electric charge tingled. They stared wonderingly at each other, half afraid. No one seemed hurt. One hand on the torpedo lever, Wells watched his charts and instruments. He thanked God that there was only one of the enemy.
The ray's shock came again--and stronger. The red dot was practically upon them. The screen was still empty. Coolly, Keith slowed the submarine to a dead stop. The crimson stud came closer....
* * * * *
And then he saw it. It was the same fearsome, hulking form. The same curving windows, dark and lifeless. The same knobs on its bow, one now leaping and pulsing with the paralyzing glow. At a distance of a few hundred feet the octopi ship swerved to a halt, dousing the NX-1 with its ray unceasingly. Again those two underwater craft, so oddly contrasted, were face to face. And again the weapon that had once struck the American ship's crew down at their posts was directed full onto the NX-1.
But it was harmless! It merely tingled, and did not paralyze! The control room sheathing held it out stoutly. The men's faces showed overwhelming relief.
Keith smiled grimly. Now, at least, he had the devils where he wanted them; now it was his turn to strike with a--to them--terrible, mysterious weapon. They had attacked; had failed--and now he could square up for Hemmy and send a pair of torpedoes into that ship of hideous tentacles.
"Port five!" The ship swerved slightly. "Hold even!" The enemy craft was very close. The NX-1's bow tubes were sighted in direct line. Her torpedoes could not possibly miss. This time, destruction for the octopi ship was inevitable....
Keith Wells gripped the lever that held the torps in leash.
"Wait!"
Sparks, a bare foot from him, yelled out the word. Wells, alarmed, released his grip on the knob. The radio operator was listening intently, a circle of taut faces around his crouched back. He swung excitedly around.
"For God's sake, don't fire!" he cried. "Hemingway Bowman's on that submarine! He's alive--and calling for you!"
CHAPTER V
The Other Weapon
Bowman--alive!
Keith Wells let go the torpedo lever. His whole orderly plan of action was crashed in a second.--For an instant he stood gaping at the radio man, forgetful of the peril outside, striving desperately to hit on some way of surmounting this unlooked-for obstacle. The idea of firing on his friend--killing Hemmy Bowman with his own hand--paralyzed his brain.
And in that unguarded instant the octopi struck.
From the bow of the enemy submarine, slanting from another of its peculiar knobs, a narrow beam of violet light poured, cutting a vivid swathe across the teleview. The huddled men stared at it, not comprehending what it was. They felt no shock of electricity, nor could they discern any other harmful effect. The ray held steadily on their bow, not varying in the slightest, for a full thirty seconds. And still none of them could feel or see any damage.
Wells, however, gradually became aware that he was bathed in perspiration, that great streams of sweat were coursing down his face. A quick glance told him that every member of the crew was the same way; and then, suddenly, he was conscious of a wave of intense heat--heat which quickly became terrific. The control room was stifling!
Before he could act, the NX-1 slipped sharply to one side. A sharp hissing sound grew at her bow, climbing steadily to a shriek. Long streamers of white steam crept along the lower deck and seeped up into the control room. And then rose the fatal sound of rushing water--water pouring into the submarine from outside!
For the violet beam was a heat ray--a weapon surface civilizations had not yet developed. While the NX-1's crew had stared at it in the teleview, it had melted a hole in their bow.
Immediately the submarine lost trim, and the deck tilted ominously. In the face of material danger--danger from a source he understood--the commander became cool and methodical.
"Sea-suits on!" he snapped. "Then forward and break out steel collision-mat and weld it in place! Every man! You, too, Sparks and McKegnie!"
"But--but, sir!" stammered Graham. "Do you want them to get us with their paralyzing ray?"
"You'd rather drown?" Wells flung back. Silenced, the first officer donned his sea-suit, and in thirty seconds the rest of the crew had theirs on and were cluttering clumsily forward.
* * * * *
Alone in the control room, Keith battled with the unbalancing flow of water, maneuvering with all his skill in a futile attempt to keep the NX-1 on even keel. The men forward worked with great speed, spurred on by the realization that they were fighting death itself, but even as they labored the submarine swung in ever increasing rolls and dips; the great weight of water she had shipped slopped back and forth; her bow went steadily down. Keith swept her forward tanks clean of water, always conscious of the immobile, staring octopi submarine in the teleview, watching them, it seemed, curiously, and not driving home their advantage with additional bolts of the violet heat ray.
Despite her commander's frantic efforts, the NX-1 fluttered down remorselessly; the cavern floor rose, and, sinking with them, came the octopi craft, in slow mockery of a fighting plane pursuing its stricken foe to the very ground....
She struck bottom with a soft, thudding jar, and settled on even keel. At once Wells released the helm, jumped into his own sea-suit and stumbled down to take command.
He found the steel collision-mat in place, and the welding of it nearly completed. A few feathery trickles of water still seeped through on each side, but under his terse directions the pumps were soon draining it out. The weird figures of the crew in their sea-suits looked like creatures from another planet as they rapidly finished the job.
"All right--up to the control room, everybody! Fast!" Wells roared.
The men stumbled aft as rapidly as they could in their cumbersome suits. Several were already on the ladder. A few feet further--
But at that moment the paralyzing ray again stabbed into the ship--and Keith Wells slumped helplessly to the deck. And as he crumpled, he glimpsed the grotesque, falling figures of his men, and saw one come tumbling down the ladder from the control room, where he had almost reached safety....
* * * * *
Peculiar sensations, unendurable thoughts raced through the commander as he lay there limply. He knew his predicament. He wanted desperately to rise, to rush to the control room. Time and time again in those first few moments of impotence he strove mightily to pull his limbs back to life. But his greatest efforts were barren of result, save to leave him feeling still weaker. The fate that he had seen strike down Brown now enmeshed him. He was paralyzed. Helpless. In the midst of his crew.
After a moment all sensation left his body. His limbs might not have existed. Sensation, pain, lived only in his brain--and there it was terrible, because self-created.
He found himself sprawled flat on his back, his eyes directed stiffly upward. He could not move them, but out of the corners he vaguely sensed the other figures around him. Helpless, every one! And who knew if they would ever come out of the spell! Victory had gone to the octopi....
Minutes that seemed like hours passed. And then a well-remembered voice sounded in the radio earphones in his helmet. It was Hemmy Bowman, speaking from the enemy ship.
"Keith! Keith Wells! Are you there?" the voice cried. "Keith! What have they done to you?"
And Keith, he could not answer! He could not answer that troubled voice of his friend--that voice from a friend he had thought dead.
Again Bowman spoke. "Keith! Can't you hear me? What are they doing to you? Oh--" For a moment it stopped, then came once more, thick with anguish. "Oh, God, what's happened?" Then lower: "If only there were light, so I could see what they're doing...." The voice tapered into silence. Keith could picture Hemmy, probably bound, giving him up for dead....
* * * * *
Then, quite distinctly, he heard a clank at the NX-1's bow! The submarine jerked, her bow tilted up--and with increasing speed she moved forward, silently as a ghost.
Keith thought he knew what that meant. The octopi ship had grasped them with another of its hawser arms, and was pulling them away. But where to? One of those mound cities? His brain was a turmoil as he tried to imagine what was before them. But all he could do was lie there and wait.
The American craft was towed for perhaps ten minutes--ten ages to her commander--then coasted slowly to a pause, and with a sharp jar settled into rest. As she did so, every light in her hull went suddenly out.
It had been bad enough with the lights on, but the darkness was far worse. The submarine was a tomb--as silent as one, and full of men who lived and yet were dead. Hemmy Bowman's voice came no more to Wells. He was alone with his moiling doubts and fears and unanswerable questions, and he knew that every other man there was alone with them, too....
As his eyes became partially accustomed to the darkness, he could distinguish vaguely the forms of the familiar mechanisms above him. A slight noise grew suddenly and resolved itself into a prolonged scraping along the outer hull of the submarine. At intervals it paused and gave way to a series of sharp, definite taps.
Keith realized what those sounds signified: the octopi were striving to find some entrance to the NX-1! This, he told himself, was the end. The creatures would break through; water would rush in, and every man would drown. For the face-shields of their sea-suits were open!
The dull scrapings ran completely around the motionless submarine, punctuated with the same staccato tappings. By the movement of the sound, Wells realized the octopi were approaching the lower starboard exit port. And as they neared that port, the noise abruptly stopped.
Then for some minutes silence fell. Next, the commander heard what was unmistakably the exit port's water chamber being filled--and a moment later emptied again. The devilish creatures had solved the puzzle of the means of entrance!
* * * * *
In the awful darkness the inner door of the port swung open. A slow, slithering sound came to Wells' ears. He sensed, though he could not see, the presence of alien creature. An odor struck his nostrils--that of fish....
A deliberate something crawled directly across one outstretched arm, and another across his legs. And above him loomed a monstrous, complicated shadow, which, after a moment, slowly melted from his line of vision. Panicky, he strove again to bring his limbs back to life, but still could not....
Keith knew that in the darkness which their huge unblinking eyes could penetrate they were inspecting the NX-1's interior, examining the men stretched on its deck, feeling them with their cold metal-scaled tentacles. Another complicated shadow crept back over the commander's line of sight, and from all around rose the slithering, shuffling tread of the octopi's many tentacles, rasping on the steel flooring.
Sweat from Wells' forehead trickled down and stung his eyes as he lay in that dark agony. There seemed to be countless investigating tentacles feeling through the entire submarine. One of them, iron-hard, suddenly coiled under his armpit and lifted him lightly as a feather from the deck. Another snaked up and clicked his face-shield securely shut. Keith heard other clicks, and knew that the shields of his men were likewise being closed.
The commander was held straight out from the octopus' revolting body, and as he swung, helpless, he could see that more men were grasped similarly in other mighty arms. Dangling in the shadow-filled darkness he was carried slowly to the exit port, and he heard the inner door swing open, then close again. Water streamed through the valves; it encompassed him with a feeling of lightness, a feeling of floating, as he swung at the end of the long metal-sheathed tentacles. A moment later a soft bluish glow burst on his vision, and he saw that he was outside. There was a long wait, and when the current next swung him around he was dismayed to see that every one of the monstrous creatures near him was dangling on high two or three men of his helpless crew. The whole outfit was in the power of the devil-fish!
And then their captors moved forward with them on a ghastly march of triumph....
But Keith Wells did not know that, crouched behind the instrument panel in the control room, shivering and sick with fear, was the plump form of Cook Angus McKegnie, who had just gained it just before the paralyzing ray had struck.
CHAPTER VI
The Monster with the Armlets of Gold
Hemingway Bowman's ardent wish, after he was whipped quickly through the round exit port of the octopi submarine, was for a quick, clean death. The horror and mystery of his situation had left him with one conscious emotion, that he was afraid. The worst had been when he was hauled through the port; when, expecting anything, he had been able to see nothing in the dark, water-filled mystery ship.
Deliberate tentacles had stroked over every inch of his body--tentacles that were not metal-scaled, as had been the arms of the creature that captured him. It was then that he guessed the true purpose of the metal suits the octopi wore--to protect their bodies against the lesser pressure near the surface of the sea. Inside the submarine they did not need them. He decided that the ship was used for rapidly transporting large numbers of the octopi to distant regions, and also for a weapon of offense and defense. The intelligence of the cuttlefish astounded him.
Keith had got away. At least he knew that, and he thanked God for it. His bold stroke had not been in vain, his sacrifice not useless.
After the inspection of the tentacles, Hemmy had been shoved to a corner of the octopi submarine. He had felt cords wrapped around his body. After being thus secured, he was left to himself. He was utterly alone, except for strange, vague shadows that floated through the darkness--shadows that heated his brain as he realized how many of the devil-fish there were.
Hours that seemed like endless days passed.
Bowman concluded that the submarine had gone straight through the cavern and emerged finally into what seemed to be another sea. Dead silence filled the ship. What was happening, he could only guess. The craft seemed to run on forever. Never once did tentacles brush or inspect him again.
* * * * *
Finally the ship stopped, and a great round door opened in one wall. By the soft bluish glow that seeped in Hemmy caught a glimpse of his surroundings, and his gorge rose at the sight. The ship was literally filled with a slowly waving forest of long black tentacles. Weird instruments, unlike anything he had ever seen, were grouped around the walls, and before them attendant octopi poised, their hideous eyes fixed and steady. There were no dividing decks as in the NX-1; the craft was one huge shell.
Then came furious activity. The door fell shut again, and the ship shot off at great speed. Hemmy felt sure that they were advancing to again attack the NX-1, and at once began to try to reach his comrades through radiophone. He knew that Wells would come back.
Finally he caught a human voice, and heard the NX-1's radio operator shout to the commander that he, Bowman, was alive and calling. But when he tried to speak further, the American craft's radio was silent.
And then, in the octopi submarine, had come a soft glow of violet....
Was it a more deadly weapon than the paralyzing ray? In great suspense the prisoner waited. Silence--silence! Horrible doubts beset his mind. Was Keith refraining from firing his torpedoes because he, Bowman, was on board the enemy boat? The thought stung him. He tried desperately again to reach Wells; but there was no answer. Were the Americans dead?
Age-long minutes passed. Then the exit port opened and several metal-clad octopi swam out. Hemmy had a glimpse of the NX-1 lying silent and apparently lifeless on the sea-floor, a gaping hole in her bow!
As if to taunt him with the sight, the creatures left the round door open, and presently Bowman beheld the octopi open the NX-1's starboard exit port and enter. Later the port swung open again, and he saw the monsters emerge, each gripping several men clad in yellow sea-suits! That they were dead, or victims of the ray, was obvious from the way they limply dangled.
The exit port closed, and darkness filled the octopi ship. Hemmy Bowman panted with the futile effort to break his bonds.
"You devils!" he yelled in blind rage, exhausted. "Why don't you take me with them? Take me! Take me, damn your stinking hides!"
* * * * *
When Keith Wells was taken from the silent NX-1, a host of astounding impressions swarmed his brain. Swinging lightly at the end of his captor's tentacle, he strove as best he could, with eyes rigidly fixed straight ahead, to grasp his new surroundings. He had, first, one flash of the octopi ship lying quite close to them, its hulk, as always, immobile and apparently lifeless. And inside it, he was sure, was his friend and first officer, Hemmy Bowman--a captive.
He saw that the octopi submarine had towed the NX-1 into one of the weird mound cities. His own ship was lying in what seemed a kind of public square, and crowds of black octopi were swarming around it as he and his crew were brought out. Shooting straight off the square ran one of the wide streets he had previously seen from above, and on each side the brown mound-buildings rose. Their details were hazy, because of the cuttlefish inhabitants who swam thickly in front of them.
His captors started their march down this broad street. Great crowds of reddish-colored octopi clustered on each side of it; other swarms hung almost motionless--except for their constantly writhing tentacles--above, so that their line of progress was through what resembled a restless, living tunnel of repulsive black flesh, snaky arms and huge, unblinking eyes. Keith felt faint from the horror of it. Thousands of the monsters were there, all hanging in the soft, blue-glowing water; and occasionally, as he floated almost horizontally in his captor's firm grip, his legs would brush the wall of clammy flesh; or perhaps one of the tentacles would reach out as if to touch him.
The octopus that held him swam some five feet off the street bed itself; at intervals the thick swarm on either side would part for a second, and Keith could glimpse the huge mound-buildings, ever growing larger, with round entrance holes dotted all over their smooth surface, above as well as the sides.
The march was ghastly. Their captors were taking them through the heart of the water-metropolis; displaying their human captives as did the Caesars in Roman triumphs of old!
* * * * *
The swarming crowds of tentacled monsters grew thicker as they progressed, and their tentacles began to whip more quickly, as if anger was burning in their loathsome bodies. Keith noted the menace of their sharp-beaked jaws, and the sickening sucker-discs on the livid under-side of the tentacles. As far as he could see, the swarms fell in behind the procession after it had passed. Following them--where?
Just as Wells felt himself on the verge of fainting, the procession turned to the right and entered the largest mound-building of all, a vast dome rising in the very center of the octopi metropolis. They continued through a corridor perhaps twenty feet high, from which at intervals other corridors branched. Held by one arm, and ever and again turning helplessly over in his horizontal transit, Keith caught glimpses of walls covered with intricate designs on a basic eight-armed motif--designs of artistic value, that gave evidence of culture and civilization.
The passage ended as suddenly as it had begun, and they came into the main body of a gigantic building.
The commander could hardly credit his eyes. The place resembled a stadium, and was so vast that he felt dwarfed to nothingness. The domed roof soared far above in misty bluish light. On the floor, exactly beneath the center of the great dome, was a raised platform, and on it a dais resembling a very wide throne. Around the dais a score or more of octopi--officials, Keith supposed--were grouped.
Rapidly the creatures following the procession swam into the chamber. Monstrously large as the place was, the floor soon was filled with the thick flood of cuttlefish which swarmed in from many doors. Keith, held with the other captives just to one side of the hole he had entered by, began to think that they must soon refuse to let any more in--when, to his surprise, he saw the latest arrivals begin to form a gallery twenty feet above those on the ground floor, and, when this was extended far back and completely filled, start yet another above it--and another, and another.... In ten minutes the mighty hall was crowded with countless layers of the cold-eyed monsters, each layer angling up from the central dais so that all could see.
"God!" the commander thought. "Nothing but solidly-packed devil-fish all the way to the dome! A slaughter pit! And we, of course, are to be the cattle!"
* * * * *
Minutes passed. The throne was still empty, and the thousands in the amphitheater seemed waiting for an occupant. Keith wished he was able to close his eyes. The restless, never-ceasing weaving of the countless tentacles in the levels above made the scene a nightmare. Some waved slowly, others whipped excitedly, but never for an instant did one pause. The movements were like the never-ceasing shifting and swaying of the trunks and feet of elephants; in the dim glow the huge chamber seemed to be filled with one fantastic, million-tentacled monster that stared with its thousand eyes down on the forlorn group of puny human beings....
As if at a command the arms of the octopi on the platform suddenly began to weave in perfect unison in some weird ceremony. First they swayed out towards the waiting captives, then they swerved slowly to the empty throne. Then came a few quick, excited whippings; and once more the long arms reached out at the small group at the entrance. This went on for some minutes. Then, very suddenly, a creature swam up from what must have been an opening in the floor onto the dais-throne.
Keith saw it well.
It was an octopus, a giant amongst octopi, and Wells knew at once it was the ruler of the realm, the lord and master of the swarming galleries and the cities of mound-buildings.
It was larger than its fellows by a full three feet. And, encircling each great tentacle just where it joined the central mass of flesh, was a broad, glittering band of polished gold--eight thick armlets that ringed the creature's revolting head-body with a circle of gleaming pagan splendor. Keith could almost fancy that a certain royal air hung over the monster.
The huge, unblinking eyes of the king stared at the horror-frozen captives. One long tentacle lifted slowly upward, and their captors at once started towards the throne with them. The score of octopi on each side stilled their weaving arms. A battery of emotionless eyes drilled into Wells' paralyzed body. He felt faint. Unquestionably the horrible ceremony was leading up to some form of cold-blooded sacrifice....
* * * * *
The monarch stretched a mighty arm towards Keith, and, as in a dream, he felt himself lifted out of his guard's grasp. The snakelike tentacle gripped him about the waist, and held him dangling like a puppet twenty feet in the water while the two deadly eyes stared steadily at him. He was brought closer, until the hideous central mass, with its cruel beaked jaw and ink sac hanging behind, was no more than a foot away.
Then another arm stroked slowly along the commander's helpless body. Once or twice it prodded sharply, and Wells felt a surge of fear, for his sea-suit might break. Deliberately the prying tentacle moved over him, delicately feeling his helmet, his weighted feet, his legs.
Keith Wells grew angry. He was being inspected like a trapped monkey! He, commander of the NX-1, representative of one of the world's mightiest nations--prodded and stared at by this fish, this octopus! A great rage suffused him, and with a terrific effort he tried to jab his arms into one of those devilish eyes. But try as he might, his body would not respond. He could not move a finger.
For a long time the loathsome inspection continued, until the monstrous king seemed satisfied. Wells was handed back. There followed an interminable period in which nothing whatever was done, as far as he could see. He was sure that they must be talking, debating, but no sound reached his ears through the tight helmet. All the time the endless motion in the swarming levels above went on. It became hazy, dreamlike, and in spite of himself the commander began to feel drowsy. The weaving and swaying was producing a hypnotic effect. At last the desire to sleep grew overpowering.
Wells and his men were more than half unconscious when their original captors finally pulled them back from the royal presence and began a humble retreat from the throne room. Slowly they backed to the entrance. Keith's last drowsy glimpse was of a grotesque, gold-ringed monster on a throne, with a score of smaller tentacled creatures around him, and a vast haze of weaving tentacles and unblinking eyes above.
They passed from the huge chamber. The commander felt delirious, as in a nightmare, but he knew that they were again in the long corridor, and that their captors were taking them further into the mighty building, further from the street outside. He glimpsed great rooms branching off the corridor, and swarms of black octopi inside them. The light became fainter; and at last the procession turned into a separate, rough-walled chamber, dimly lit and empty.
Wells felt the grip around his arm loosen, and he floated limply to the floor among his men. He slept....
CHAPTER VII
The Glass Bell Jar
Keith awoke hours later.
Slowly he became conscious of a cramped, stiff body, of a dull pain racking his head. He stretched out his limbs--and, suddenly, realized he could move.
Remembering the paralyzing ray that had struck him down, and half afraid that his senses were tricking him, he kicked his left leg out. It moved with its old vigor. He quickly found that his strength had returned, that he could feel and move. The effect of the ray had worn off!
With a glow of new hope he rose to his feet and exercised numb muscles. Looking around, he saw the other men still stretched out on the floor of their rough-walled, watery prison. He called into his radiophone mouthpiece:
"Graham! Graham, wake up!" A grotesque figure stirred among its fellows; turned over. "It's Wells, Graham," Keith continued. "Get up; you can, now!" And he watched the form of his big first officer stretch out and finally rise, while stupid, sleepy sounds came to his radio receiver.
"Why--why; the paralysis is gone!" Graham said at length.
"Yes, but maybe the octopi don't know it. Rouse the other men at once, and we'll see what we can do."
It was weird, the sight of the lifeless figures of the men stirring to life in the dim-lit water as Graham shook each one's shoulder. The radiophones buzzed and clicked with their excited comments and ejaculations. Keith felt much better. With his men restored to strength, and clustered in a determined, hard-fighting mass, he saw a hope of breaking out and regaining the NX-1.
He let them exercise as he had for some minutes, then proceeded to a brisk roll-call. There should be fifteen men and two officers. Rapidly Graham ran over the names, and each time a voice rang back in reply--until he came to the cook.
"McKegnie?... Cook McKegnie?"
There was no answer. Wells stared around the group of dim figures and himself called the name again. But McKegnie was not present. And as the commander and his men realized it the numbing spell of their desperate position settled down on them again like a shroud.
Keith shook off the mood. "Well," he muttered, "I guess the devils got him. Poor McKegnie's seen the wheels go round for the last time.... All right: take command, Graham. I'm going to do a little reconnoitering."
* * * * *
The round entrance hole was some fifteen feet from him, at the far end of the cell. Keith advanced cautiously to it, the peculiar light feeling the water gave him making his steps uncertain. The dim blue illumination made the details of the corridor outside hazy, shadowy, but it seemed to be empty. Peering out, Wells could sight no guarding octopi. He edged closer and stared down to the left. Twenty feet away the vague light tapered into darker gloom, filled with thick, wavering shadows; but it was apparently devoid of tentacles. He wondered if the octopi were unaware that the effects of their ray had worn off, and peeped cautiously around the edge to the right.
Immediately a long arm whipped out, grasped him around the waist and flung him twisting and turning back into the chamber. Graham laboriously made his way to the commander and helped him to his feet. "Hurt, sir?" he asked anxiously.
"No," Keith gasped. "But that devil--"
He stopped short. The first officer turned and followed his commander's stare.
The entrance hole of the cell had filled with a monstrous shape. A huge octopus was resting there, its unblinking eyes coldly surveying the crew of the NX-1. On each of its thick tentacles was a broad band of polished gold. It was the king, the same creature that had inspected them from the throne-dais a few hours before. And behind him in the corridor the men glimpsed another octopus.
Slowly the ruler of the octopi swam into the chamber. Its great eyes centered icily on Keith Wells, standing at the head of his cowering men; and its mighty tentacles waved slowly, gracefully, as if the creature stood in doubt. One of them tentatively reached out and hovered over their heads, moving uncertainly back and forth. Then, like a monstrous water snake, the tentacle poised, flicked out and plucked a man from his comrades.
His shriek of terror rasped in their earphones. "Steady, men!" Keith cried. "It's hopeless to try and fight them! The monster just wants to look him over!"
* * * * *
The man--Williams, a petty officer--was dangled by the armpit in mid-water and made to slowly revolve. The tip of another huge arm snaked out and for some seconds stroked his body, probing curiously. He panted with fright, and in their earphones his friends could hear his every tortured exhalation. Anxiously, Keith watched. Then, without warning, another tentacle darted up, fastened its tip on the breast of the captive's sea-suit, and deliberately ripped it open.
The doomed man's last scream rang in their helmets as the water poured into his suit. They saw him writhe and struggle desperately in the remorseless grip which held him. The two huge eyes of the cuttlefish surveyed his death throes minutely; watched his agonized struggles gradually weaken; watched his legs and arms relax, his head sink lower.... And then the tentacle let a lifeless body float to the floor.
Jennerby, a huge engineer, went completely mad. "I'll get him, the devil!" he yelled, and before Keith could command him to stay back, had flung himself onto the giant king.
Death came as a mere matter of course. Without apparent effort, the monarch ripped off Jennerby's helmet and sent him spinning back. The man's body writhed and shuddered, and in a moment another stark white face showed where death had struck....
Trembling, sick at heart, the commander yet had to think of his men. "For God's sake," he cautioned them, "keep back. Don't try to fight now; we've got to wait our chance! Steady. Steady...."
The king's deliberate tentacle again began its slow weaving. It was choosing another victim. And this time it darted straight out at Keith Wells and gripped him with a mighty clutch about the waist.
The commander did not cry out. As he was brought close to the staring eyes, and felt their sinister gaze run over him, it flashed through him for some obscure reason that the monster knew him for what he was, the leader, from the tiny bars on each shoulder of his sea-suit.... He waited for the tentacles to rip it open.
But they did not. Instead, the creature turned and swiftly swam with him out through the entrance hole.
* * * * *
They went to the left in the corridor, further into the heart of the building. The bluish light became stronger. As Keith twisted in the giant monarch's grip he glimpsed the other octopus following with the two dead men. He saved his strength knowing it was hopeless just then to try and struggle free.
Quick as was his passage, he noticed that the walls of the corridor were covered with intricate designs, in bas-relief, and colored. He passed row after row of mural paintings of octopi in various activities, and guessed that they represented the race's history. One was obviously a scene of battle, with a tentacled army locked in combat with another strange horde of fishlike creatures; a second showed the construction of the queer mound-buildings on the sea-floor, with scores of monsters hauling great chunks of material into place, and another pictured the huge audience chamber, with a gold-banded king motionless on his throne.
As the king drew him rapidly along, he had a glimpse through a circular doorway of a large room, inside which were clustered the black shapes of thousands of baby octopi, tended by what were evidently nurses. Other such rooms were passed, and the young commander's brain whirled as he tried to measure the size and progress of this undersea civilization. Perhaps the race of octopi was growing, reaching out; needed new room to colonize. That would explain why their submarine had been sent through the tunnel....
A voice sounded in his ears:
"Keith? Are you all right?" It was Graham, calling from the cell behind.
"So far," Wells assured him. "I'll keep in touch, and let you know what happens."
At that moment, his captor carried him into a large chamber at the end of the corridor. He looked around, and decided it was a laboratory. He beheld strange instruments, anatomical charts of octopi on the walls and, in one corner, a small jar of glass, in which a dull flame was burning. Many-shaped keen-bladed knives lay on various low tables, and thin, wicked-looking prongs and pincers.
"I'm in their experimental laboratory, Graham," Wells spoke into the mouthpiece of his tiny radio. And then his roving eyes saw something that made him audibly gasp.
"What's the matter, Keith?" came the first officer's anxious voice.
After a moment the commander answered. "It's--it's a pile of human bodies. The bodies of those fishermen. They--they've been experimenting on them...."
* * * * *
Was he, too, Wells wondered, to be experimented on? The sight of that stacked pile of bodies chilled him with horror. He kept his eyes from them, till the octopus with the golden bands swung him through a hinged door in the farther wall.
He found himself in a side room, smaller than the outer chamber, the whole center of which was occupied by a huge glass bell jar, some thirty feet in diameter. Inside it was much strange-looking apparatus on tables, and trays of operating instruments--knives like those in the outer room, and the same thin prongs. The great jar was empty of water, and on one side was an entrance port.
The king tossed Keith into a corner and quickly donned a metal-scaled water-suit. When he had it all on, and the glass body-container fastened into place, he picked up his captive again and advanced through the bell jar's entrance port into a small water chamber. A moment later Wells felt his body grow heavy as the water of the compartment ran out, and then there was a click and he found himself inside the jar, still held in the merciless grip of a tentacle.
He twisted around to find the cold eyes of the octopus staring at him only a foot away. And as he wondered what was going to happen next, the king unfastened the glass face-shield of the commander's sea-suit with a quick flip of the tip of a tentacle.
Keith's arms were pinned to his sides; he could not move to try to refasten the face-shield. Fearful, he held his breath; held it until his face was purple and his lungs were near to bursting. But at last the limit was reached, and with a great wrench he sucked in a full breath.
It was clean, fresh air!
* * * * *
The air was like a breath of his own world brought down to this cold realm of octopi. Once he had caught up with his breathing it poured new life into his limbs, jaded from the artificial air of the sea-suit. Keith felt his muscles respond, felt his whole body glow with new strength and life. Twelve inches away the king was watching his every reaction closely through the huge helmet of glass. The thought passed through the commander's mind that he was not only king, but chief scientist of this strange water civilization.
Then, while his lungs swallowed hungrily the good, fresh air, several tentacles began to feel around him in an attempt to unfasten the rest of his sea-suit.
Wells blanched at the sudden realization of how helpless he would be if the suit were taken from him. He would then not only be a prisoner of the octopi, but a prisoner of the glass jar, unable ever to leave it, and more than ever at the mercy of his captor's least whim. Not that he had any delusion that he would live long in any case: it was just the simple strong instinct of self-preservation that made him grab at every chance for life.
This thought flashed through his mind, even while the octopus was fumbling with the catches of his suit. And along with it was born a desperate plan of escape. He was in his own element, air; the octopus out of his. If he could crack the glass of the king's helmet, and let the water out and air in!... The glass was only twelve inches away.
The commander stopped his resistance, and at the same time felt about with his legs until he had them well braced against a lower tentacle. He pushed gently, and came a few inches nearer the glass; a little more. Then, with a quick, strong jerk of his body he crashed the steel frame of his helmet square against the cuttlefish's sheathing of glass.
The creature was taken wholly by surprise. Tentacles whipped out to tear the rash human quickly away--but not before Keith had pounded again, and heard the splinter of smashed glass! He had jabbed a hole in the glass body-piece, and already the life-giving water was pouring out!
Panic seized the king, and he became a nightmare of tortured tentacles. Wells was flung wildly away and fetched up against the side of the jar with a crash that for a second stunned him. More and more water poured from the octopus' suit, and air at once rushed in to take its place. The creature's great eyes became filmy, while the revolting spidery body slewed here and there across the jar, all the time whipping and thrashing at the strangling air. Keith scurried from side to side, trying to keep out of reach of the crazy, writhing tentacles. Once a glancing blow knocked him flat, but the monster was altogether unconscious of him and he got away.
Little by little the terrific whipping and coiling of the tentacles quieted down. The drowning king lay in one place now; its loathsome red body, no longer protected by glass, turned bluish. Keith thrilled with elation at his victory.
And then, for the first time, he noticed that there was a full three inches of water on the floor--far too much to spill from the king's suit. A quick look around showed him where it came from. There was a long crack in the side of the glass jar, at the place where he had been crashed against it--and water was pouring in!
Keith flung himself against the crack, jammed his arm into the broadest part of the leak. But still the water rushed in. The octopus was in its death throes, weakening steadily--but just as steadily the water poured in and rose up the sides of its body. In a flash Wells saw that the liquid would win the race to cover it and allow the monster to resume breathing.
"Oh, damn it!" he cursed fervently. "Now I've got to run for it!"
* * * * *
He stumbled to the port, snapping shut his face-shield as he went. In a moment he had solved the working of the mechanism and was in the water chamber, then outside in the room itself. Fortunately his sea-suit was unhurt. He thanked heaven for that as he tore away a boardlike piece of apparatus and jammed it over the leak in the jar.
Keith paused a moment to plan. The king of the octopi was still writhing in ever weakening struggles, but the water was halfway up his body. "It'll cover him soon," thought the commander, "and then it's a question how long it'll take him to come to. I've got to move fast--slip out into the corridor and run the gauntlet back to the men." His eyes rested on a large knife, and he appropriated it, since he saw nothing else he might use.
For the first time since the beginning of the fight he answered the questions and exclamations that had constantly sounded in his ears from the distant crew. Tersely he told them what had happened, and of the gauntlet he had to run.
"Make ready for a dash to the NX-1," he finished. "It's now or never. Wait three minutes for me, and if I don't make it, go ahead anyway. Remember--three minutes. This is an order. So long, fellows!"
He shut his ears to the bedlam of comment that followed. His knife ready, he took a few steps to the door and pushed out--right into the tentacles of a waiting octopus.
* * * * *
His knife was useless. While locked motionless by three arms of his captor, another streaked out and wrenched it from his hand. Once again Keith was absolutely helpless.
Great confusion resulted in the laboratory. The commander heard no sound, but the guard must have called, for five more octopi darted rapidly out of an adjoining room. Their tentacles writhing in great excitement, they swam past and into the inner chamber to the rescue of their nearly drowned king.
The devil-fish that held Wells almost crushed him to death in its excitement. It was obviously undecided what to do; but finally it sped him down the passageway and cast him back inside the cell with his men. Then it quickly retreated.
The commander staggered to his feet and faced Graham and the others. "A miracle!" he gasped; "I'll tell you later. But now we've got to make our break. The king's out, and we've got to get away before they bring him to. There's nothing to do but rush the door. It means sure death for half of us, and probably for all--but God help us if the king catches us!"
He paused and surveyed them keenly. "Everybody with me?" he asked. And not one man held back his answer.
Wells smiled a little. "Good!" he said.
* * * * *
There were twelve men and two officers. There were thousands of octopi. On the face of it, their chances seemed hopeless. Not for a second did Keith count on getting many men to the NX-1. But he knew where the submarine was, and he had to try.
Tersely he gave them final instructions.
"This corridor leads to the main entrance. That is, to the right--understand? Then straight down the street outside, to the left, is the square where they towed the NX-1. I'd say it was a hundred yards.
"There's one guard outside. Graham, you and half the men to the right of the door. I'll take the rest to the left. Our only chance is to try and destroy the octopus' eyes."
His mind cast about desperately for some form of weapon. The only detachable thing on their sea-suits was the small helmet-light, a thing, Keith told himself, without possible offensive use. Still, the beams would enable them to more clearly see their path and keep together, so he ordered them in hand.
The men were grouped and alert. The moment had come.
"Remember," he said, "--its eyes. Then stick together and run like hell. All right--good luck--and let's go!"
Awkwardly, stumbling clumsily in the retarding water, the small group surged through the door. Immediately a black shape pounced upon them from the clustered shadows--the guarding octopus.
Its tentacles seemed to be everywhere. In seconds five men were clutched in its awful grip, their fists rising and falling impotently as the hideous arms constricted and crushed them inward. Keith, free of the clasp, yelled: "The eyes! The eyes! Put out its eyes!"
* * * * *
For answer, a yellow arm clutching a helmet-light broke through the grotesquely milling mass and struck at the cuttlefish's great pools of eyes. It missed, but the switch flicked on, and there stabbed through the gloom a broad, glaringly white ray.
Its effect was astounding. The beam smote the octopus squarely in its huge eyes, and immediately the creature shuddered; writhed with pain. The tentacles released the men--and the monster fled back into the protecting shadows!
A shout from the men roared in the commander's earphones. "They can't stand the light!" he cried. "Thank God! Beams on, everyone! Flash 'em in their eyes! Forward!"
Fourteen shafts of eye-dazzling light forked through the corridor. The tiny company, beating their path with criss-crossing shafts of white, forged ahead. They thrashed the shadows with their beams, probing each inch of water--clearing their way even as a tank hoses machine-gun bullets before its clumsy body. Their former slender chance grew; they filled with hope.
Another swarm of devil-fish, long arms whipping before them, raced from branching corridors and bore down on the company of humans. The men were ready, and fourteen tongues of white met them squarely. They faltered; the weight of their fellows behind shoved them on; but the rays steadied, and the front row of octopi broke in panic. The others at once followed in wild retreat.
"Keep together, men!" Keith ordered sharply. "One beam to each octopus--straight in its eyes till it retreats! Forward!"
* * * * *
They pressed on. The octopi, with eyes used only to the soft blue glow of the cavern, could not stand against the brilliant rays. Keith leading, the NX-1's crew stumbled out into the street.
They faltered a moment when they saw each entrance hole of the mound-buildings shooting out streams of octopi. Hundreds were in sight already. The whole city was evidently alarmed. Wells at once formed his men in a circle, so their beams would guard them on every side and above. Apparently the octopi could not approach within thirty feet of them, and even at that distance they turned and fled, writhing with pain, whenever a shaft of light struck full in their eyes.
"The square's just ahead!" the commander roared. "One last rush, now, and we'll reach the submarine! Stick close; keep your arms locked; and watch out above!"
The circle of men narrowed. The rays gave their tiny cluster the appearance of a monster even more fantastic than those moiling around them--a monster with long straight tentacles of glaring white. They stumbled forward through the magically parting ranks of black octopi. The beams kept the creatures back; they were helpless before them.
Foot by foot under the inverted bowl of threshing tentacles the NX-1's crew lumbered ahead. The street at last ceased; the wide square opened before them.
"We're here!" Wells yelled exultantly. "This is the--"
His voice fell into abrupt silence. He stared around the square, and his heart went cold indeed. They had reached the right place, but it was empty.
The NX-1 was not there!
CHAPTER VIII
Cook, the Navigator
Through all these hours, one man had remained on the NX-1, and that man was, to put it mildly, scared to death.
Cook Angus McKegnie had been nearest the connecting ladder when Keith Wells roared out the command to retreat above, and his desire to regain a place of safety was so earnest that he made the control room in record time. At once he had felt the tingle of the paralyzing ray. Struck by a horrible thought, he ventured to peer down the ladder--and groaned to see the figures of his comrades, all lying limply on the deck. His portly frame quivered like jelly as realization came to him that he was the only one who had escaped the ray.
Heroic ideas of saving the submarine, of rescuing the men below, flashed wildly through his head. But only for a moment. On second thought, he felt he ought to hide. So, in the tomblike silence that had fallen, the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound McKegnie wormed a way behind an instrument panel, effecting the journey by vigorous shoves of his stomach. It was minutes later that he first noticed that some sharp jutting object was jutting deep into his ample paunch, but he could do nothing to remedy it. He was hidden, anyway, and he was going to stay hidden!
The cook felt the NX-1 being towed forward. Then, after a dreadful wait, he heard queer noises down below, and was positive the exit ports had opened. The snakelike slithering and shuffling which followed would mean that the enemy was inside the NX-1. The thought brought St. Vitus' dance to his limbs, and, try as he might, he couldn't still them. Then again the ports opened, the gloomy silence returned, and Angus McKegnie was alone with his reflections.
* * * * *
After the first hour he gave voice to them in one simple, bitter sentence. "Just why the hell," he muttered, "did I ever join the Navy?" The silence offered no reply, and McKegnie, desperate from his cramped position, ventured to poke his head around the instrument panel. The faint emergency lights showed the control room to be empty. He decided to come out, and did so, worming his way back with great difficulty.
Once out, the first thing his eyes fell on was the teleview screen. Now the cook had never seen one of the octopi, and the screen showed hundreds of monsters clustering around the NX-1. So with unusual promptness he acted, jamming himself once again into his hiding place. Maybe, he thought, they had some way in which they could see into the control room and discover him!
Hours passed. The cook was sopping with sweat. Finally his thoughts emerged into words.
"I got to get out of here!" he said intensely. "I got to! And I got to run this submarine!"
The sound of his voice somehow emboldened him. Once more he backed out of his cranny, and with cautious, trembling steps explored the control room. He kept his eyes from the teleview, though it had a terrible fascination for him, and surveyed the NX-1's array of control instruments. The prospective navigator groaned at the sight.
There were dozens of mysterious wheels, jutting from every possible angle, squads of black and red-handled levers, whole armies of queer little stud-buttons and dials. His knowledge of cooking helped him not at all in the presence of that maze of devices. Timidly he touched one of the levers, but immediately snatched his hand away as if afraid it would bite. His boldly announced purpose of running the craft went glimmering.
* * * * *
An accidental glimpse of the monsters in the teleview suddenly decided him that he needed a weapon. He hunted frantically through the lockers and found three service revolvers, which he fastened at his waist, adding his own carving knife to the arsenal. But he didn't feel much better. Then, remembering for the first time his sea-suit radio, he yelled: "Mr. Wells! Mr. Wells! Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you? Can you hear me?" There was, of course, no answer.
He tried to bring his muddled thoughts and fears to order. "I got to run this thing," he said doggedly. "Got to! Now, let's see: what the hell's this thing for?... What the--"
He broke off short, and his eyes went wide. He had heard a noise!
Yes--there it was again! The same peculiar scraping at one of the exit ports! He glanced fearfully at the teleview. "Oh, Lord!" he yelped. "They're comin' in to get me!"
He started to dive back behind the instrument panel, but stopped, drew two guns, and in an agonized muddle trotted back and forth for a moment, waving them. Another look at the screen showed that an exit port was open, admitting two metal-scaled octopi. McKegnie couldn't stand it any longer: he wedged himself behind his panel again. Soon sounds of the metal tentacles on the deck below told him that one of the creatures was coming up the ramp--then slithering into the control room itself. The cook was a lather of cold perspiration.
For a few minutes there was silence. The octopus was apparently surveying this new part of the submarine. Then, without warning, the tip of a metal-scaled tentacle felt around the panel and crept, exploring, up Angus McKegnie's leg--which leg was again suddenly afflicted with St. Vitus' dance. The tentacles coiled, pulled hard--and the cook with a yowl was yanked out into the room.
* * * * *
Dangling upside down, high in the air, he submitted to the fishy stare of the great eyes under the sheathing of glass. But soon he started to squirm, and his violent contortions brought a rush of blood to his head, making him quite dizzy. It was while he was in that state that things started to happen.
First, a great roar rolled through the NX-1, and McKegnie found himself flat on the floor with his breath knocked out. Then, while this was registering on his mind, he discovered himself the center of a madly milling set of tentacles, and instinctively scrambled out of the way. From a distance he saw that the tentacles belonged to the octopus that had held him, and that their coilings and threshings were gradually dying down, until only a quiver ran through them from time to time. While McKegnie was trying to figure this all out he noticed that the monster's glass sheeting was shattered, that it lay in a pool of water, and that the odor of burnt powder was in the air. Looking down he found that he had a gun in his hand. A thin wisp of smoke was curling from the barrel.
"Gee whiz!" he ejaculated. "Gee whiz!"
As he stood there recovering from his surprise, he heard the other octopus crawling up the connecting ramp, coming to see what had befallen its fellow. Preceded by two trembling guns, McKegnie tiptoed to the ramp and peered down.
From the darkness he saw another complicated mass of metal tentacles and glass advancing up towards him. Fear smote the cook, and almost without volition be pointed his guns and pulled the triggers. As before, a bullet crashed into the great dome of glass, and he watched a short but terrible death struggle. He had, by himself, slain two octopi!
A tremendous elation filled McKegnie--until it occurred to him that his shots might have been heard outside. At once he ran and looked at the teleview view screen, and what he saw on its silver surface took all the triumph abruptly out of him. The octopi outside were darting about with alarming activity; a whole cluster of them was centered at the exit port, and, even as the cook stared, the preliminary sounds of opening it came to his ears.
"Now I got to run this ship!" he groaned.
* * * * *
He peered at the mass of levers and wheels, put out a hand, closed his eyes, hesitated, and pulled one of them back. Nothing happened.
He tried another. The noise below grew, but still the NX-1 remained motionless. Desperate, the cook jerked several other levers. The whine of electric motors surged through the silence; the submarine shuddered and slewed off to the right, as if trying to dig into the sea-floor.
"I got it started!" he cried. He did something else. The NX-1 stuck her bow dizzily up and sped into the misty-blue realm above in a grand, sweeping circle. The sea-floor with its mound-buildings and swarming octopi fell away behind with a rush.
"There!" muttered the triumphant cook. "But--how did I do it?"
The submarine was rising like a sky-rocket. McKegnie remembered suddenly that Wells had said the cavern was only a few miles high; he must now be very near the top. He held his breath while he pushed a likely looking lever the other way.
He was lucky. The NX-1 capered like a two-year-old, kicked up her stern and bolted eagerly for the depths once more. Again the floor of the cavern rushed up at him, again he pulled the potent lever back, and again the submarine meteored upward.
This procedure went on for some time. McKegnie was only running an elevator. Was he doomed to dash up and down between floor and ceiling forever? He gave forth pints of sweat, now and then groaning as the submarine grazed horribly close to top or bottom. The dead octopus at his feet slithered limply around on the crazy-angling deck.
"I can't keep this up forever!" the cook said peevishly. "Now, what the hell's this thing for?"
* * * * *
He turned it, and the NX-1 tilted in one of her dives and raced forward, midway between ceiling and floor. Her navigator relaxed slightly. He had found the major controls; at least he had been able to stop his dizzy game of plunging up and down. Then, just as he was beginning to wonder where he could go, a large red spot glowed at the edge of the location chart.
"Oh, Lord!" he cried. "That's the other submarine--an' it's comin' after me!"
Evidently it was, for the red spot rapidly approached the green one. The paralyzing ray tingled, and a moment later the enemy's huge bulk loomed on the teleview screen, a band of violet light spearing from one of her jutting knobs.
Frantically McKegnie juggled his levers, and then it was that the NX-1 really showed what was in her. She emulated, on a grand scale, a bucking bronco: she stood almost on her nose, and threatened to describe somersaults; she tried it the other way, on her stern; she rolled dizzily; she all but looped the loop, and went staggering around the cavern in great erratic bounds that must have made the octopi think she was in the hands of a mad-man--which she practically was. Her designer would have had heart failure.
In the teleview screen the frantic McKegnie would see the octopi submarine rush erratically by with a flash of its violet heat ray; the location chart showed the red spot zigzagging drunkenly around the green one. Each boat made occasional short, crazy darts at the other; sometimes they would stand approximately still. It was a riotous game of tag, and McKegnie knew too well that he was "it."
During one brief pause the anguished cook found himself groaning aloud: "Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you? I can't keep this up! I can't! I can't!"
* * * * *
There were still several important-looking controls that were mysteries to him. But what if he should pull one and open all the exit ports? He shuddered at the thought.
Things had become nightmarish. The ship was pitted scores of places by the heat ray. The control room had grown stifling. McKegnie was losing pounds of flesh, and literally stood in a pool of his own perspiration. The octopi craft kept doggedly after the NX-1, no matter how often and effectually the sweating cook's reckless hands prevented her getting the heat ray home.
For a long time the two ships continued to race up and down. The NX-1 would plunge, pirouette around the other, and scamper away towards the ceiling as if enjoying it all hugely, abruptly to forsake her course and come zooming down once more. She would weave in romping circles and seem to go utterly crazy as her jumbled navigator pulled his levers and turned his wheels in a frantic effort to get somewhere.
To get somewhere! Yes--but where?
"Oh, Mr. Wells, where are you?" the harried cook would bleat at intervals.
Or, plaintively: "Now, what the hell's this thing for?"
CHAPTER IX
At Bay
Fourteen humans stood at bay on the cold sea-floor, dazed by the ruthless stroke of ill-luck which had taken the NX-1 from where they had left it.
"It's gone," whispered Graham over and over in a hopeless tone. Keith tried to pull himself together. He had to think of his men.
In a second, his whole plan, which had seemed to be approaching success so rapidly, was smashed by the disappearance of the submarine. Mechanically he kept his helmet-light playing into the ever-thickening eyes and tentacles around him, while he scanned the sea-floor nearby. It was filling more closely than ever with the black, writhing forms of the cuttlefish. The rays still held them back, but their great bulk loomed over the small party of humans like a sinister storm cloud. Soon, in their overwhelming mass, they would crush down, and the submarine's crew be conquered by sheer force of numbers.
"Look!" Keith cried. "There's where she was lying!"
He pointed out on the floor of the square a deep groove, obviously made by the hull of the NX-1. Its length and jaggedness seemed to denote that the submarine had tried to bore into the bed of the cavern itself. Wells was mystified. If the octopi-ship had towed her away, she would certainly not have gouged that deep scar on the sea bottom....
But he dismissed the strange disappearance from his mind. He had to work out a plan of action.
"Keep together, men, and follow that scar!" he ordered tersely. "There's a chance that the NX-1's somewhere further along!"
It was a futile hope, he knew--but there was nothing else. The tiny group, centered in the inverted bowl of black, writhing tentacles, lumbered onward.
* * * * *
Then the octopi struck with another weapon, in an effort to dull the spearing beams of white. Here and there from the mass of black an even blacker cloud began to emerge. It quickly settled over the whole scene, pervading it with a pitchy, clinging darkness that obscured each man from his neighbor.
"Ink!" cried one of them. It was sepia from the cuttlefish's ink sacs--the weapon with which these monsters of the underseas blind and confuse their victims.
"Faster!" the commander roared in answer. "And for heaven's sake, keep together!"
They huddled closer. Under the protecting cloud of ink the mass of octopi pressed nearer. The struggle became fantastic, unreal, as the brilliant beams of white bored through the utter blackness searching for eyes which the men knew were there, yet could not see until their rays chanced upon them. Snaky shadows milled horribly close to the little group of bulging yellow figures. Blacker and blacker grew the water; they could not always see the monsters as they drove them back on each side. Now and then a bold tentacle actually touched one of them for a moment before its owner was thrust, blinded, away.
Suddenly the dark cloud cleared a little as the fight moved into an unseen current. Their range of vision lengthened to ten or twelve feet; they could dimly sense the looming mass of cuttlefish: and it was less often that one of the monsters darted forward, daring the rays of white, and became altogether visible. When this did happen, half a dozen dazzling beams converged on the octopus' eyes and drove it back in writhing agony.
The men were the hub of a grotesque cartwheel, whose spokes were inter-crossing rays of white. They still forged onward along the groove, but moved more slowly now, and Keith Wells, tired to death, realized the combat could not go on much longer. Their advance was useless; a mere jest. The NX-1 had vanished. It would only be a question of time before their batteries gave out, or the swarms of octopi crushed in on the struggling crew. Their overwhelming numbers would tell in the end.... The men were silent, except for the occasional gasps which came from their laboring lungs.
* * * * *
And then the king of the octopi appeared.
Keith had been wondering, in the aching turmoil that was his brain, where the gold-banded monarch was. He knew the monster had been rescued, and he dreaded coming face to face once more with that huge form. Now, armlets of glittering yellow suddenly flashed in the thick of the besieging tentacles, and two great evil eyes glared for a second at Keith Wells. The commander flung a burst of light at them and laughed crazily as the monster scurried back. For a few moments the king was not visible.
"Well, fellows," Wells said, "it won't be long now. His Majesty's back on the field." He grinned a little through his weary face. "I wonder what he'll hatch up to combat our helmet-lights? Watch close: he's damn clever!"
The commander did not have long to wonder. The vague wall of tentacles began retreating deeper into the ink. Keith could not imagine the reason for it, but held himself taut and ready. His men, likewise noting the move, unconsciously grouped closer, waiting tensely for they knew not what.
The king of the octopi had indeed hatched a plan of attack. After a moment the mass of creatures again became slowly visible, but this time when the rays shot out they did not hold them back. Could not--for their eyes were not visible.
"My God!" Wells cried. "They're coming backwards!"
* * * * *
It was so. The octopi--no doubt under their ruler's orders--had turned themselves around, and now, with eyes directly away from the dazzling shafts of white, were closing slowly in on the humans from all sides. The helmet-lights were useless. They could not reach the creatures' eyes.
Tentacles coiling, whipping, interweaving, the wall of flesh pressed in. Death stared the helpless crew of the NX-1 in the face. First Officer Graham shrugged his shoulders and said tiredly:
"Well, I guess it's all over.... Unless," he added with a feeble smile, "somebody figures a way to melt us through the sea-floor...."
Keith Wells' face suddenly lit up with an idea. He swung around and roared:
"The hell it's over! We can go up!"
His crew understood at once. "What fools we--" Graham began, but Keith cut him short.
"Listen," he rapped quickly. "Jam together in one bunch and lock arms tight. When I give the word, flood your suits with air. We'll go up like comets; crash right through the devils.... Hurry!... All ready?"
He saw that they were. "Then, together--go!" he commanded.
As one man the crew adjusted their air-controls, bulging the sea-suits with air. Their weighted feet left the cavern floor at once, and, locked tightly together, the whole fourteen of them shot like a bullet to the living ceiling of unsuspecting cuttlefish above.
They hit with a terrific crash. Keith was momentarily stunned by the force of impact. He felt himself torn away from his men, felt a dozen tentacles snake over him, and mechanically stabbed out with his helmet-light. For a moment he was held; then the air and his light pulled him through, and he broke out through the top.
In his rocketing upward progress the extra oxygen rapidly cleared his mind. Glancing below he saw a great, dark, many-fingered cloud dropping rapidly away, and was glad to know that the octopi could not follow him into the lesser pressures above without their suits. Over the dark cloud he glimpsed a few scattered pin-points of light--the helmet-beams of the other men. They were rising as swiftly as he.
"Thank God!" he murmured reverently. "We broke through! We broke through!"
CHAPTER X
The Return of the Wanderer
Wells watched the several helmet-lights shooting upwards and wondered if they represented all the men that had got safely through the net of tentacles. Remembering the rocky ceiling they were rapidly approaching, he ordered the others to reduce speed by discharging air from their sea-suits. He received no articulate answer.
Although he cut down the rush of his own progress, it was with a jar that he bounded into the top of the cavern. As he dangled there, he beheld four light beams hurtling upward; his earphones registered crash after crash: and then he saw the beams go spinning down into the gloom again, weaving and crossing fantastically, the shock having jerked them from their owner's hands. Keith had lost his own helmet-light below, but peering around he could make out a few vague forms, bumping and twisting in the current.
"Graham!" the commander called. "Graham, you there?" After a moment his first officer's voice came thickly back.
"Yes--here. A bit groggy. That crash...." Wells swam clumsily towards him.
"I guess only a few of us broke through," the commander said slowly. As the two officers hung at the roof, swinging grotesquely, one by one the other men came to their senses and reported their presence in the radiophone. Keith ordered them to cluster around him, and soon eight weird figures had grouped nearby. After a while they located two others, which brought their total to ten men and two officers. They looked a long time, but could not find any more. Two were gone.
* * * * *
Deep silence fell over the tiny group. The dark mass of the rocky ceiling scraped their helmets; below, the bluish waters tapered into a thick gloom, hiding, miles beneath, the mound-buildings and swarming octopi.
One of the men spoke. His words were audible to everyone, and they voiced the thought in every brain:
"What're we going to do now?"
Keith had no answer. They had escaped the immediate danger, but it was only a temporary respite. The commander knew it was hopeless to try and locate the tunnel leading to the outer sea, for they were very tired, and in their clumsy suits they would be able to swim only a few rods. Their helmet-lights were gone; they had played their last card.
"They're goin' to find us after a while," the pessimistic voice continued. "They'll send that submarine of theirs after us--or maybe they'll come up in their metal suits...."
"Well," Keith replied with forced cheerfulness, "then we'll have to fight 'em off."
"Why not rip our suits an' end it now--" began another, but Graham's voice cut in sharply.
"Quiet!" he said. "I heard something!"
The men stilled abruptly. In tense silence their ears strained at the headphones. Wells asked: "What did you hear?"
"Wait!" Graham interrupted, listening intently. "There it is again! Listen! Can't you hear it? Why, it sounded like--like--"
Keith concentrated his whole mind on listening, but could catch nothing at all. He was just about to give up when he caught a faint, jumbled murmur--the murmur of a human voice.
"My God!" he whispered. The voice, little by little, grew, and Wells could distinguish words. They formed into a complete sentence. Keith heard it plainly. It was:
"Now, what the hell's this thing for?"
* * * * *
Unmistakably, it was the voice of Cook Angus McKegnie, whom they all had thought dead.
Amazed, the men of the crew started to jabber. "Quiet!" Wells ordered sharply. He listened again. McKegnie's voice was growing quickly and steadily louder.
"McKegnie!" the commander cried excitedly. "McKegnie, can you hear me?" There was no answer. Patiently Wells waited a minute, every second of which increased the volume of his long-lost cook's bewildered tones. Again he tried.
"McKegnie! Can you hear me? This is Commander Wells. McKegnie!"
The cook's stammering voice came back:
"Why--why--is that you, Mr. Wells? Did I hear you, Mr. Wells?"
"Yes!" Keith shouted impatiently. "This is Commander Wells! For heaven's sake, McKegnie, where are you?"
"I don't know, sir!" the cook responded. "Where are you?"
Keith was for the moment perplexed. "But--but, are you a prisoner?" he questioned. And he could have sworn he heard a distinct note of pride as the invisible McKegnie replied: "Oh, no, sir! Not yet! These devils been tryin' their best to get me, but they couldn't! No, sir!"
Wells became more and more puzzled. "Then--but--you're not running the NX-1, are you?"
McKegnie's voice was much louder now, and growing every second. The note of pride persisted. "Of course, sir!" he confirmed. "It was kind of hard at first, with these octopises botherin' me, but I got onto it pretty quick. That octopis ship chased me with them heat rays for a long time, but I ain't seen them lately. I guess I kinda tired them out."
* * * * *
His last words grew louder with a rush, and from the dark depths beneath a long shape suddenly appeared, hurtling up at the group of astounded men in a zoom that bade fair to take it straight through the ceiling. It was the NX-1.
"Dive, man, dive!" Keith yelled. "Cook, pull that black-handled lever towards you! Yank it back! Yank it back! Quick!" He sighed with relief as he saw his madly-driven submarine pause, whip its nose downward, and crash back for the depths from which it had come.
The commander spoke rapidly. "McKegnie, listen: Leave the black lever halfway, so you'll level out. Straighten your helm. We're only a little above you; come round in a circle till I tell you to stop."
The NX-1 came out of her dive, and, as the cook evidently shoved her helm over, went skirting around in a wide, drunken circle, some thousand feet below her regular crew.
"All right!" Keith shouted. The fear that the octopi submarine would dart back before he could get aboard his ship was looming in his mind. "You're at the helm, Cook; there's a wheel right over your head. Spin it around--oh, my God, there you go again!" He groaned while the NX-1 went swooping off on a repetition of her crazy circle.
"Sorry, sir," the culinary navigator said thickly. "I guess I got the wrong thing."
"Now!" Wells roared. "Spin that wheel above your head.... That's right--right--there! Don't touch a thing, Cook! We're coming down."
The submarine had paused directly beneath them, listing slightly to port. Then began the cautious business of the descent. Under Wells' rapid orders the men linked arms again and discharged more air from their sea-suits. Slowly, thin chains of bubbles rising behind them, they sank towards the dim shape of the NX-1 below. Wells' eyes kept probing the thick gloom far beneath. Every moment he expected to see it disgorge a swarm of octopi.
They neared the submarine, and saw numberless pitted spots in her body, where the heat ray had stabbed for a moment. In their excitement they missed their level by some feet, but clutching together they admitted more air and soon rose even with the starboard exit port.
"Swim forward," Keith ordered. "Hurry!" The weird figures groped clumsily, and very slowly neared the port. The commander, in the van, at last reached out and gripped its jutting external controls. He could not work them at first: his hands were numb and awkward.
As he tugged and struggled with them a shout rang in his headphone. It was McKegnie, scared to death.
"Oh, hurry, Mr. Wells!" he yelled. "Quick! Quick, please! The octopis ship's comin', sir! The red light's back!"
CHAPTER XI
To the Death
The emergency steadied Keith's fingers. He got the door open and motioned Graham and six men inside the water chamber. The passage took but a minute. Then he sent the rest of the crew in, being himself the last to enter. When the chamber was finally empty, and Wells had stepped through the inner door onto the lower deck of the NX-1, a great sigh of relief broke from him. Never before had anything looked so good as that brilliantly lit deck with its familiar maze of machinery and bulkheads.
"Thank God," he said simply, and his joy was shared by the whole crew. A new feeling had come over them. Back home--in their own submarine, their own element--they had at least a fighting chance with the octopi. But Keith let them waste no time. He knew that a final, desperate duel to the death with their foe still was ahead. "Above to the control room," he ordered. "Fast!"
They lumbered up the connecting ramp. A disheveled, wild-eyed form met them. Keith couldn't help chuckling as he passed the now much thinner and paler cook, with the arsenal handy at his waist. On the deck of the control room lay a huge tentacled body, metal-scaled, with its dome of glass shattered and its great cold eyes staring unseeingly away. "I killed him," stammered McKegnie pridefully; "but Mr. Wells--look at that red light, sir!"
Keith glanced rapidly at the location chart, ripping off his sea-suit as he did. The fateful red stud was moving swiftly down on the motionless green one. The men had surrounded McKegnie, laughing and slapping him on the back, but the commander's terse orders jerked them abruptly back to action.
"The rectifiers, Graham: clean out this stale air. Sea-suits off; at emergency posts. Take the helm, Craig; you, Wetherby, trim the ship. No, no, Cook--keep away from the controls!"
The NX-1 balanced herself; fresh air came rushing in, sweeping out the stale. Keith stared at the location chart, waiting for the submarine to be ready. The red light was almost upon them.
"Right!" he roared at last. "Diving rudder controls, Graham! Full speed for the tunnel!"
* * * * *
At that moment the octopi ship swept into view, its full battery of offensive weapons flaring forth. The paralyzing ray tingled again and again over the control room. Someone laughed at its uselessness. The violet heat ray leveled full at them, but the commander avoided it with "Port ten, starboard ten! Maintain zigzag course to the tunnel." He understood the enemy's weapons now; he was throbbing with the fierce thrill of action. This duel was to be the climax of their whole adventure. "And, by heaven," he promised, "it's going to be a fight!"
The other craft seemed to realize the NX-1 was now in expert hands. She raced along to starboard for some minutes, her heat ray trying vainly to steady on the American's weaving form. Wells wondered if the king of the octopi was aboard her, in command; he thought perhaps the ship had postponed her chase of McKegnie to pick him up. "I hope he is!" the commander breathed, and fingered the torpedo lever. He had some debts to pay.
The NX-1, engines working smoothly, proceeded on a desperate dash for the tunnel that led to the outer sea. But the octopi ship apparently knew what Keith intended, for she abandoned her offensive rays, changed course a few degrees and slowly but steadily pulled ahead. "Damn!" Keith exclaimed. "She'll get there before us!"
The dim shape dwindled on the screen, and before long her bulk had disappeared entirely. Wells then could watch her swift, straight progress only on the location chart.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later the funnel-like opening of the tunnel loomed on the teleview, and squarely in front, blocking it, was the waiting form of the octopi submarine.
"Quarter speed!" Keith snapped. "Hold her steady, Graham; I'm going to try a bow torpedo. I think we're beyond their ray."
Sighting his range on the telescopic range-finder, he worked the NX-1 slowly into position. He noticed that his first officer was staring oddly at him. He was bothered by the queer look. "What's wrong?" he asked impatiently.
"But--what about Hemmy Bowman?"
Bowman! In the rush of action and suspense, Keith Wells had completely forgotten his officer in the enemy submarine. "Oh, God!" he groaned. The cruel situation that had stayed his hand once before had again come to falter his course of action. The men were watching him; Graham had a question in his eyes. They all knew what had to be decided....
Keith shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. It was his greater duty to destroy the octopi submarine. And yet--
"Fish for Hemmy, Sparks," he ordered. "Craig, keep present distance from enemy. Full stop."
A moment later the radio operator looked up. "Mr. Bowman on the phones, sir." With a heavy weight on his heart the commander clipped on the extension headphones.
"Hemmy?"
"Keith? Keith? Thank God you're alive!" Bowman's voice shook with gladness. "You're all back on the NX-1, Keith? The whole crew's with you? Oh, Lord, it's good to hear you again!"
"Yes. We got back all right, Hemmy--a miracle. They've still got you prisoner?"
"Yes.... Keith--you're trying to dodge out of the tunnel, aren't you?"
* * * * *
Wells smiled bitterly, and as he paused to frame an answer Bowman spoke again.
"I want you to blow up this submarine, Keith," he said quickly. "A favor to me."
He cut Wells short when the commander started to interrupt. "Wait! Let me finish," he pleaded. "I want to explain. I'd been hoping--but never mind that.... Keith, a while ago I managed to work loose. I lost my head completely and tackled these devils. It was a foolish thing to do; they overcame me, naturally. But, in the struggle, they tore my sea-suit."
"What!"
"Oh, just a tiny tear, or I wouldn't have lasted till now. But a leak all the same--in the right leg. Since then I've been gripping the edges of the fabric as tightly as I can--but I couldn't keep the water inside this ship from seeping through. It came in slowly at first, then faster as my hands grew numb. It's up to my neck now, Keith ... and--it won't be long! I've just a few minutes left...."
The faint words tapered into silence.
"No!" roared Keith in a great rush of emotion. But Hemmy's eager voice came right back:
"Oh yes, you must! It would be a mercy to kill me, Keith."
There were tears in the commander's eyes. "Are you sure, Hemmy?" he asked. "Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes. It would be a mercy."
Wells' lips formed a straight grim line. His words squeezed through it tightly. "All right, Hemmy. Thanks. Thanks. I--I'll go after them now, old man. I'll try and keep in touch with you through the duel, but I--I can't promise--"
He could almost see Hemingway Bowman give his old familiar smile as he answered:
"Then so long, Keith!"
* * * * *
Commander Keith Wells studied the teleview screen. The men were half afraid to look at his strained blanched face.
Repeatedly the violet beam speared through the water, reaching for the NX-1's bow.
"Turn ship. Line up for stern torpedoes," the commander ordered harshly. He realized he could not hold his submarine steady to obtain a perfect sight, for the heat ray needed only thirty seconds to melt through their shell. He would have to swing the ship slowly about; and, as the shape of the enemy crossed the hair-lines on the range-finder, unleash his torpedoes and gamble on hitting the moving target.
The NX-1 swung around, always maintaining a slight forward motion and zigzagging constantly to nullify the heat beam. Wells watched the range-finder closely. The octopi ship slanted downwards, the deadly violet ray stabbing from her bow. Slowly the black dot that represented her appeared on the dial, and slowly it dropped towards the crossed lines that showed the perfect firing point.
Keith grasped the torpedo lever. The NX-1's stern was towards her target. Dead silence hung in the control room. The NX-1 swung slightly. The octopi craft appeared directly in the middle of the dial.
Wells pulled back the lever.
The hiss of compressed air sprang from her stern. He had fired two tubes, his whole stock of stern torpedoes. The pair of dreadful weapons leaped out and settled on their course. Keith shot his gaze to the teleview.
The torpedoes missed. Only by feet, but a miss all the same. They raced on past the octopi submarine and, with a tremendous, ear-numbing explosion, burst on the wall of the cavern beyond. Both ships reeled from the shock. Graham swore viciously, but Wells' masklike face showed no slightest change of expression....
A voice rang in Keith's headphones. "Tough, Keith! Better luck next time!" Then the commander winced. He simply could not answer Hemmy Bowman; could not answer that fine, brave voice....
* * * * *
The stern torpedoes were gone. The tubes could not be reloaded, for the paralyzing ray bound the men to the control room. That left them two torpedoes in the bow.
The violet heat ray kept fingering hungrily on their outer hull, and every man knew that the plates were weakening under the steady strain, which was only lessened by the NX-1's constant zigzagging. The control room was very hot. Both ships were now a full mile from the tunnel entrance. Keith plunged the NX-1 down, swung her around, to bring his bow tubes to bear, and zigzagged upwards.
It was obvious that the octopi craft had been alarmed by the terrific explosion. They now adopted tactics similar to the American ship's, and for awhile both submarines circled cautiously, maneuvering for an opening.
"If only we could keep the ship steady!" Graham muttered. "But then that heat ray'd get us!"
The commander kept his eyes on the teleview. Again and again the violet shaft pronged at them. The heat grew stifling. Sweat was pouring from all the men's bodies. Every face was strained and taut.
"Starboard full!" Wells said suddenly. "A little up, Graham!" He had seen a chance; the octopi craft was slightly above, and in a moment would pass directly in the line of the bow tubes. The NX-1 stuck her nose up, swung rapidly to the right. Keith pulled back the firing lever, releasing one torpedo.
The long messenger of death hurtled straight for the enemy's hull. They watched its course breathlessly....
"My God!" the first officer groaned. "Could they see it coming?" For the octopi submarine had swung to one side, neatly dodging the speeding tube of dynamite.
"One left!" he added bitterly. "One left!"
* * * * *
A desperate plan formed in Keith Wells' mind. His last torpedo simply had to strike the mark; he could take no chances with it. He motioned the haggard-faced Graham to him.
"There's only one thing left to do," he said quietly. "We've got to deliberately face that heat ray; chance its puncturing our plates."
"How do you mean, sir?"
"Get in very close, so as to make our last torpedo sure to hit. We've got to approach the enemy head-on at full speed. We'll corkscrew up to them until we get within two hundred yards, then go straight forward for ten or fifteen seconds, giving us the opportunity to sight the remaining torpedo directly on them. The heat ray may break through before I fire--but when I do fire it's a sure hit."
The men had heard every word. Quietly Wells ordered:
"Take the torpedo control, Graham. I'll take the helm."
The first officer obeyed without a word. Keith grasped the helm. The plans were made for their last desperate attempt.
"Right," the commander said shortly. "Here we go."
* * * * *
There had been a taut silence before, but now, knowing that they were deliberately offering themselves a perfect target for the heat ray in order to get their last torpedo home, the intensity was almost unbearable. The men felt like shrieking, jumping--doing anything to break the awful hush. The air was charged with the same unnameable something that heralds a typhoon.
Keith Wells was like a white statue at the helm, save for the betraying trickles of sweat that coursed down his drawn cheeks. His hands moved the wheel slowly from port to starboard; his eyes bored at the screen before him. The ship was in command of a man of steel, a man with but one purpose....
"Up--up," he ordered. "Hold--in trim--full speed forward!"
He had brought the NX-1 directly in line with the octopi ship. And now the craft leaped forward under full power, while he shot the helm back and forth ceaselessly. His ship was describing a corkscrewing motion, weaving straight at the enemy. Grasping her opportunity, the octopi submarine remained motionless, steadily dousing the approaching American craft with her silent violet ray and driving the temperature in the control room to even greater heights.
The distance between them rapidly lessened. Would the plates stand it? Would the ray melt through the weakened steel before he could fire? With an effort Keith drove these doubts from his mind ... but he could not banish a certain dull, steady ache from his consciousness....
* * * * *
The range dwindled. The heat became intolerable. Everyone's clothing was sopping wet. A man ripped off his shirt, gasping for air. Wells kept his eyes on the screen, though half-blinded by smarting sweat. The plates had to give soon, he knew.
The octopi submarine, beam on and dead ahead, began to move to port at quickly increasing speed. At once Keith stopped swinging the helm, and the NX-1's corkscrewing motion of protection ceased. And then came the real test, the gauntlet of seconds.
Right straight into the retreating violet beam they went, at top speed. They gained rapidly. The heat was furnace-like. The commander, watching the range-finder, kept moving the helm slightly over. A shaft of violet heat spanned the two shells of metal. For ten seconds it had held on the NX-1. The black dot of the enemy craft moved slowly to exact center on the dial. Fifteen seconds ... twenty ... twenty-three--
"Fire!"
Graham jammed the torpedo lever back.
"Crash dive!"
The deck tilted downward. And Wells' white lips formed the words, "So long, Hemmy!"--and he tore the phones from his head.
Seconds later a titanic explosion sounded through the cavern; echoed and re-echoed in vasty roars. The American craft's lights went off--but not before her men had seen, in the teleview, a fire-shot maelstrom where a moment before the octopi submarine had been.
"We got them!" yelled Graham.
* * * * *
A roar of exultation burst from every throat. The men flung their arms out, jumped, yelled crazily. Faint emergency lights lit the scene.
"Below, at regular posts," Wells ordered. "Reload bow and stern tubes. Graham, see to the lights." He himself remained at the helm. In a few moments the submarine had climbed back to the level of the tunnel. At quarter speed she nosed into the wide entrance, and slowly forged into the dense, deceptive shadows.
The commander acted mechanically. Again by touch he steered his ship through the black, ragged cleft. Fifteen minutes after leaving the cavern of the octopi her bow poked through the weaving kelp into the free, salty depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
There was one more task to perform, and Wells lost no time in doing it. When two hundred yards away he halted the NX-1, steadied her and sighted the stern tubes just above the dark tunnel hole. Quickly he sent forth two torpedoes.
A huge roar rumbled through the water, whipping the beds of kelp to mad convulsions. "Turn around," the commander ordered harshly. He sighted his bow tubes and again let loose a bolt of two torpedoes. Then he sent the submarine forward, and, through the teleview, examined what his four weapons had done.
Huge chunks of rock had been tumbled down, completely closing the tunnel.
"Well," said Graham, "it's over! Finished! They'll never get through that!"
* * * * *
A full-throated cheer burst from the men below, a cheer that rang for minutes as they realized they were free forever of the octopi, of the cold underwater city, of the clutching tentacles. Graham grinned broadly.
"Sound happy--eh?" he chuckled. "Say, Keith, it's good we've got those two octopi our fighting cook killed. Knapp would never believe our story without them!"
He stared curiously at his commander. Wells was standing quite still, facing the teleview screen. A strange, far-away look was in his eyes.
"What's the matter, old man?" the first officer asked, smiling straight at him. "Aren't you glad we won through?"
"Of course," answered Keith with a tired smile in return.
"But why did you look that way?" Graham persisted. And Keith Wells told him:
"I was just wondering if Hemmy told the truth."
THE STARS, MY BROTHERS
By EDMOND HAMILTON
He was afraid--not of the present or the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and silent space.
1.
Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.
The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677 Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a pump technician.
Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street, Midland Springs, Ohio.
Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where Kieran taught Physics Two.
One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, "If she sniffs this morning, I'm through. I'll resign and join the UNRC."
Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of duty in UNRC Space Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel Five.
Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were rotated at regular eight-month intervals.
* * * * *
Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining veils, the quietness, the peace.
But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all Earth's problems and people.
Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies, believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong--and it had worried him. He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.
And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind. Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke when he saw the ferry coming in.
He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it happened. There was a tremendous crash that flung him violently from his feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.
He was dying.
He was dead.
The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the tiny something went wrong, in the ship or in the judgment of the pilot. Its drive-rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.
Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety bulkheads had all closed, and the big spoke--Section T2--was the only section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead men in it, was still drifting close by, everyone in the Wheel was in his pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.
* * * * *
Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to survive this accident. It was edging slowly out of orbit from the impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the construction its small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding, had got first reports from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired off peremptory demands for the repair materials he would need, and was assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico City that the ferries would be loaded and on their way as soon as possible.
Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought up a minor but vexing problem. Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In their pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for some time, and young Vinson was tired when he made his report.
"We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty badly mangled in the crash. Kieran wasn't physically wounded, but died from space-asphyxiation."
The captain stared at him. "Alongside? Why didn't you bring them in? They'll go back in one of the ferries to Earth for burial."
"But--" Vinson started to protest.
Meloni interrupted sharply. "You need to learn a few things about morale, Lieutenant. You think it's going to do morale here any good to have four dead men floating alongside where everyone can see them? Fetch them in and store them in one of the holds."
Vinson, sweating and unhappy now, had visions of a black mark on his record, and determined to make his point.
"But about Kieran, sir--he was only frozen. Suppose there was a chance to bring him back?"
"Bring him back? What the devil are you talking about?"
Vinson said, "I read they're trying to find some way of restoring a man that gets space-frozen. Some scientists down at Delhi University. If they succeeded, and if we had Kieran still intact in space--"
"Oh, hell, that's just a scientific pipe-dream, they'll never find a way to do that," Meloni said. "It's all just theory."
"Yes, sir," said Vinson, hanging his head.
"We've got trouble enough here without you bringing up ideas like this," the captain continued angrily. "Get out of here."
Vinson was now completely crushed. "Yes, sir. I'll bring the bodies in."
* * * * *
He went out. Meloni stared at the door, and began to think. A commanding officer had to be careful, or he could get skinned alive. If, by some remote chance, this Delhi idea ever succeeded, he, Meloni, would be in for it for having Kieran buried. He strode to the door and flung it open, mentally cursing the young snotty who had had to bring this up.
"Vinson!" he shouted.
The lieutenant turned back, startled. "Yes, sir?"
"Hold Kieran's body outside. I'll check on this with Mexico City."
"Yes, sir."
Still angry, Meloni shot a message to Personnel at Mexico City. That done, he forgot about it. The buck had been passed, let the boys sitting on their backsides down on Earth handle it.
Colonel Hausman, second in command of Personnel Division of UNRC, was the man to whom Meloni's message went. He snorted loudly when he read it. And later, when he went in to report to Garces, the brigadier commanding the Division, he took the message with him.
"Meloni must be pretty badly rattled by the crash," he said. "Look at this."
Garces read the message, then looked up. "Anything to this? The Delhi experiments, I mean?"
Hausman had taken care to brief himself on that point and was able to answer emphatically.
"Damned little. Those chaps in Delhi have been playing around freezing insects and thawing them out, and they think the process might be developed someday to where it could revive frozen spacemen. It's an iffy idea. I'll burn Meloni's backside off for bringing it up at a time like this."
Garces, after a moment, shook his head. "No, wait. Let me think about this."
He looked speculatively out of the window for a few moments. Then he said,
"Message Meloni that this one chap's body--what's his name, Kieran?--is to be preserved in space against a chance of future revival."
Hausman nearly blotted his copybook by exclaiming, "For God's sake--" He choked that down in time and said, "But it could be centuries before a revival process is perfected, if it ever is."
Garces nodded. "I know. But you're missing a psychological point that could be valuable to UNRC. This Kieran has relatives, doesn't he?"
Hausman nodded. "A widowed mother and a sister. His father's been dead a long time. No wife or children."
Garces said, "If we tell them he's dead, frozen in space and then buried, it's all over with. Won't those people feel a lot better if we tell them that he's apparently dead, but might be brought back when a revival-technique is perfected in the future?"
"I suppose they'd feel better about it," Hausman conceded. "But I don't see--"
Garces shrugged. "Simple. We're only really beginning in space, you know. As we go on, UNRC is going to lose a number of men, space-struck just like Kieran. A howl will go up about our casualty lists, it always does. But if we can say that they're only frozen until such time as revival technique is achieved, everyone will feel better about it."
"I suppose public relations are important--" Hausman began to say, and Garces nodded quickly.
"They are. See that this is done, when you go up to confer with Meloni. Make sure that it gets onto the video networks, I want everyone to see it."
Later, with many cameras and millions of people watching, Kieran's body, in a pressure-suit, was ceremoniously taken to a selected position where it would orbit the Moon. All suggestions of the funerary were carefully avoided. The space-struck man--nobody at all referred to him as "dead"--would remain in this position until a revival process was perfected.
"Until forever," thought Hausman, watching sourly. "I suppose Garces is right. But they'll have a whole graveyard here, as time goes on."
As time went on, they did.
2.
In his dreams, a soft voice whispered.
He did not know what it was telling him, except that it was important. He was hardly aware of its coming, the times it came. There would be the quiet murmuring, and something in him seemed to hear and understand, and then the murmur faded away and there was nothing but the dreams again.
But were they dreams? Nothing had form or meaning. Light, darkness, sound, pain and not-pain, flowed over him. Flowed over--who? Who was he? He did not even know that. He did not care.
But he came to care, the question vaguely nagged him. He should try to remember. There was more than dreams and the whispering voice. There was--what? If he had one real thing to cling to, to put his feet on and climb back from-- One thing like his name.
He had no name. He was no one. Sleep and forget it. Sleep and dream and listen--
"Kieran."
It went across his brain like a shattering bolt of lightning, that word. He did not know what the word was or what it meant but it found an echo somewhere and his brain screamed it.
"Kieran!"
Not his brain alone, his voice was gasping it, harshly and croakingly, his lungs seeming on fire as they expelled the word.
He was shaking. He had a body that could shake, that could feel pain, that was feeling pain now. He tried to move, to break the nightmare, to get back again to the vague dreams, and the soothing whisper.
He moved. His limbs thrashed leadenly, his chest heaved and panted, his eyes opened.
He lay in a narrow bunk in a very small metal room.
He looked slowly around. He did not know this place. The gleaming white metal of walls and ceiling was unfamiliar. There was a slight, persistent tingling vibration in everything that was unfamiliar, too.
He was not in Wheel Five. He had seen every cell in it and none of them were like this. Also, there lacked the persistent susurrant sound of the ventilation pumps. Where--
You're in a ship, Kieran. A starship.
* * * * *
Something back in his mind told him that. But of course it was ridiculous, a quirk of the imagination. There weren't any starships.
You're all right, Kieran. You're in a starship, and you're all right.
The emphatic assurance came from somewhere back in his brain and it was comforting. He didn't feel very good, he felt dopey and sore, but there was no use worrying about it when he knew for sure he was all right--
The hell he was all right! He was in someplace new, someplace strange, and he felt half sick and he was not all right at all. Instead of lying here on his back listening to comforting lies from his imagination, he should get up, find out what was going on, what had happened.
Of a sudden, memory began to clear. What had happened? Something, a crash, a terrible coldness--
Kieran began to shiver. He had been in Section T2, on his way to the lock, and suddenly the floor had risen under him and Wheel Five had seemed to crash into pieces around him. The cold, the pain--
You're in a starship. You're all right.
For God's sake why did his mind keep telling him things like that, things he believed? For if he did not believe them he would be in a panic, not knowing where he was, how he had come here. There was panic in his mind but there was a barrier against it, the barrier of the soothing reassurances that came from he knew not where.
He tried to sit up. It was useless, he was too weak. He lay, breathing heavily. He felt that he should be hysterical with fear but somehow he was not, that barrier in his mind prevented it.
He had decided to try shouting when a door in the side of the little room slid open and a man came in.
He came over and looked down at Kieran. He was a young man, sandy-haired, with a compact, chunky figure and a flat, hard face. His eyes were blue and intense, and they gave Kieran the feeling that this man was a wound-up spring. He looked down and said,
"How do you feel, Kieran?"
Kieran looked up at him. He asked, "Am I in a starship?"
"Yes."
"But there aren't any starships."
"There are. You're in one." The sandy-haired man added, "My name is Vaillant."
It's true, what he says, murmured the something in Kieran's mind.
"Where--how--" Kieran began.
Vaillant interrupted his stammering question. "As to where, we're quite a way from Earth, heading right now in the general direction of Altair. As to how--" He paused, looking keenly down at Kieran. "Don't you know how?"
Of course I know. I was frozen, and now I have been awakened and time has gone by--
Vaillant, looking searchingly down at his face, showed a trace of relief. "You do know, don't you? For a moment I was afraid it hadn't worked."
He sat down on the edge of the bunk.
"How long?" asked Kieran.
Vaillant answered as casually as though it was the most ordinary question in the world. "A bit over a century."
* * * * *
It was wonderful, thought Kieran, how he could take a statement like that without getting excited. It was almost as though he'd known it all the time.
"How--" he began, when there was an interruption.
Something buzzed thinly in the pocket of Vaillant's shirt. He took out a thin three-inch disk of metal and said sharply into it,
"Yes?"
A tiny voice squawked from the disk. It was too far from Kieran for him to understand what it was saying but it had a note of excitement, almost of panic, in it.
Something changed, hardened, in Vaillant's flat face. He said, "I expected it. I'll be right there. You know what to do."
He did something to the disk and spoke into it again. "Paula, take over here."
He stood up. Kieran looked up at him, feeling numb and stupid. "I'd like to know some things."
"Later," said Vaillant. "We've got troubles. Stay where you are."
He went rapidly out of the room. Kieran looked after him, wondering. Troubles--troubles in a starship? And a century had passed--
He suddenly felt an emotion that shook his nerves and tightened his guts. It was beginning to hit him now. He sat up in the bunk and swung his legs out of it and tried to stand but could not, he was too weak. All he could do was to sit there, shaking.
His mind could not take it in. It seemed only minutes ago that he had been walking along the corridor in Wheel Five. It seemed that Wheel Five must exist, that the Earth, the people, the time he knew, must still be somewhere out there. This could be some kind of a joke, or some kind of psychological experiment. That was it--the space-medicine boys were always making way-out experiments to find out how men would bear up in unusual conditions, and this must be one of them--
A woman came into the room. She was a dark woman who might have been thirty years old, and who wore a white shirt and slacks. She would, he thought, have been good-looking if she had not looked so tired and so edgy.
She came over and looked down at him and said to him,
"Don't try to get up yet. You'll feel better very soon."
Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran, and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him.
"You were the one who talked to me," he said, looking up at her. "In the dreams, I mean."
She nodded. "I'm Paula Ray and I'm a psychologist. You had to be psychologically prepared for your awakening."
"Prepared?"
The woman explained patiently. "Hypnopedic technique--establishing facts in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years ago."
* * * * *
The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true--
He asked, with some difficulty, "You say that they found out how to revive space-frozen men, that long ago?"
"Yes."
"Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?"
The woman sighed. "You have a misconception. The process of revival was perfected that long ago. But it has been used only immediately after a wreck or disaster. Men or women in the old space-cemeteries have not been revived."
"Why not?" he asked carefully.
"Unsatisfactory results," she said. "They could not adjust psychologically to changed conditions. They usually became unbalanced. Some suicides and a number of cases of extreme schizophrenia resulted. It was decided that it was no kindness to the older space-struck cases to bring them back."
"But you brought me back?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"There were good reasons." She was, clearly, evading that question. She went on quickly. "The psychological shock of awakening would have been devastating, if you were not prepared. So, while you were still under sedation, I used the hypnopedic method on you. Your unconscious was aware of the main facts of the situation before you awoke, and that cushioned the shock."
Kieran thought of himself, lying frozen and dead in a graveyard that was space, bodies drifting in orbit, circling slowly around each other as the years passed, in a macabre sarabande-- A deep shiver shook him.
"Because all space-struck victims were in pressure-suits, dehydration was not the problem it could have been," Paula was saying. "But it's still a highly delicate process--"
He looked at her and interrupted roughly. "What reasons?" And when she stared blankly, he added, "You said there were good reasons why you picked me for revival. What reasons?"
Her face became tight and alert. "You were the oldest victim, in point of date. That was one of the determining factors--"
"Look," said Kieran. "I'm not a child, nor yet a savage. You can drop the patronizing professional jargon and answer my question."
Her voice became hard and brittle. "You're new to this environment. You wouldn't understand if I told you."
"Try me."
"All right," she answered. "We need you, as a symbol, in a political struggle we're waging against the Sakae."
"The Sakae?"
"I told you that you couldn't understand yet," she answered impatiently, turning away. "You can't expect me to fill you in on a whole world that's new to you, in five minutes."
She started toward the door. "Oh, no," said Kieran. "You're not going yet."
He slid out of the bunk. He felt weak and shaky but resentment energized his flaccid muscles. He took a step toward her.
The lights suddenly went dim, and a bull-throated roar sounded from somewhere, an appalling sound of raw power. The slight tingling that Kieran had felt in the metal fabric around him abruptly became a vibration so deep and powerful that it dizzied him and he had to grab the stanchion of the bunk to keep from falling.
Alarm had flashed into the woman's face. Next moment, from some hidden speaker in the wall, a male voice yelled sharply,
"Overtaken--prepare for extreme evasion--"
"Get back into the bunk," she told Kieran.
"What is it?"
"It may be," she said with a certain faint viciousness, "that you're about to die a second time."
3.
The lights dimmed to semi-darkness, and the deep vibration grew worse. Kieran clutched the woman's arm.
"What's happening?"
"Damn it, let me go!" she said.
The exclamation was so wholly familiar in its human angriness that Kieran almost liked her, for the first time. But he continued to hold onto her, although he did not feel that with his present weakness he could hold her long.
"I've a right to know," he said.
"All right, perhaps you have," said Paula. "We--our group--are operating against authority. We've broken laws, in going to Earth and reviving you. And now authority is catching up to us."
"Another ship? Is there going to be a fight?"
"A fight?" She stared at him, and shock and then faint repulsion showed in her face. "But of course, you come from the old time of wars, you would think that--"
Kieran got the impression that what he had said had made her look at him with the same feelings he would have had when he looked at a decent, worthy savage who happened to be a cannibal.
"I always felt that bringing you back was a mistake," she said, with a sharpness in her voice. "Let me go."
She wrenched away from him and before he could stop her she had got to the door and slid it open. He woke up in time to lurch after her and he got his shoulder into the door-opening before she could slide it shut.
"Oh, very well, since you insist I'm not going to worry about you," she said rapidly, and turned and hurried away.
Kieran wanted to follow her but his knees were buckling under him. He hung to the side of the door-opening. He felt angry, and anger was all that kept him from falling over. He would not faint, he told himself. He was not a child, and would not be treated like one--
He got his head outside the door. There was a long and very narrow corridor out there, blank metal with a few closed doors along it. One door, away down toward the end of the corridor, was just sliding shut.
* * * * *
He started down the corridor, steadying himself with his hand against the smooth wall. Before he had gone more than a few steps, the anger that pushed him began to ebb away. Of a sudden, the mountainous and incredible fact of his being here, in this place, this time, this ship, came down on him like an avalanche from which the hypnopedic pre-conditioning would no longer protect him.
I am touching a starship, I am in a starship, I, Reed Kieran of Midland Springs, Ohio. I ought to be back there, teaching my classes, stopping at Hartnett's Drug Store for a soft drink on the way home, but I am here in a ship fleeing through the stars ...
His head was spinning and he was afraid that he was going to go out again. He found himself at the door and slid it open and fell rather than walked inside. He heard a startled voice.
This was a bigger room. There was a table whose top was translucent and which showed a bewildering mass of fleeting symbols in bright light, ever changing. There was a screen on one wall of the room and that showed nothing, a blank, dark surface.
Vaillant and Paula Ray and a tall, tough-looking man of middle age were around the table and had looked up, surprised.
Vaillant's face flashed irritation. "Paula, you were supposed to keep him in his cabin!"
"I didn't think he was strong enough to follow," she said.
"I'm not," said Kieran, and pitched over.
The tall middle-aged man reached and caught him before he hit the floor, and eased him into a chair.
He heard, as though from a great distance, Vaillant's voice saying irritatedly, "Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this--we're going to cross another rift--"
There were a few minutes then when everything was very jumbled up in Kieran's mind. The woman was talking to him. She was telling him that they had prepared him physically, as well as psychologically, for the shock of revival, and that he would be quite all right but had to take things more slowly.
He heard her voice but paid little attention. He sat in the chair and blankly watched the two men who hung over the table and its flow of brilliant symbols. Vaillant seemed to tighten up more and more as the moments passed, and there was still about him the look of a coiled spring but now the spring seemed to be wound to the breaking-point. Webber, the tall man with the tough face, watched the fleeting symbols and his face was stony.
"Here we go," he muttered, and both he and Vaillant looked up at the blank black screen on the wall.
Kieran looked too. There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning splendor that Kieran could not grasp it.
* * * * *
Stars blazed like high fires across the screen, loops and chains and shining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they had looked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starry firmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness, ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomical photographs like this and knew what the blackness was.
Dust. A dust so fine that its percentage of particles in space would be a vacuum, on Earth. But, here where it extended over parsecs of space, it formed a barrier to light. There was a narrow rift here between the titan cliffs of darkness and he--the ship he was in--was fleeing across that rift.
* * * * *
The screen abruptly went black again. Kieran remained sitting and staring at it. That incredible fleeting vision had finally impressed the utter reality of all this upon his mind. They, this ship, were far from Earth--very far, in one of the dust-clouds in which they were trying to lose pursuers. This was real.
"--will have got another fix on us as we crossed, for sure," Vaillant was saying, in a bitter voice. "They'll have the net out for us--the pattern will be shaping now and we can't slip through it."
"We can't," said Webber. "The ship can't. But the flitter can, with luck."
They both looked at Kieran. "He's the important one," Webber said. "If a couple of us could get him through--"
"No," said Paula. "We couldn't. As soon as they caught the ship and found the flitter gone, they'd be after him."
"Not to Sako," said Webber. "They'd never figure that we'd take him to Sako."
"Do I have a word in this?" asked Kieran, between his teeth.
"What?" asked Vaillant.
"This. The hell with you all. I'll go no place with you or for you."
* * * * *
He got a savage satisfaction from saying it, he was tired of sitting there like a booby while they discussed him, but he did not get the reaction from them he had expected. The two men merely continued to look thoughtfully at him. The woman sighed,
"You see? There wasn't time enough to explain it to him. It's natural for him to react with hostility."
"Put him out, and take him along," said Webber.
"No," said Paula sharply. "If he goes out right now he's liable to stay out. I won't answer for it."
"Meanwhile," said Vaillant with an edge to his voice, "the pattern is forming up. Have you any suggestions, Paula?"
She nodded. "This."
She suddenly squeezed something under Kieran's nose, a small thing that she had produced from her pocket without his noticing it, in his angry preoccupation with the two men. He smelled a sweet, refreshing odor and he struck her arm away.
"Oh, no, you're not giving me any more dopes--" Then he stopped, for suddenly it all seemed wryly humorous to him. "A bunch of bloody incompetents," he said, and laughed. "This is the one thing I would never have dreamed--that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship, and find the starship manned by blunderers."
"Euphoric," said Paula, to the two men.
"At that," said Webber sourly, "there may be something in what he says about us."
Vaillant turned on him and said fiercely, "If that's what you think--" Then he controlled himself and said tightly, "Quarrelling's no good. We're in a box but we can maybe still put it over if we get this man to Sako. Webber, you and Paula take him in the flitter."
Kieran rose to his feet. "Fine," he said gaily. "Let us go in the flitter, whatever that is. I am already bored with starships."
He felt good, very good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impede his mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-care indifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula had given him--it still made his body feel better and removed his shock and worry and made everything seem suddenly rather amusing.
"Let us to Sako in the flitter," he said. "After all, I'm living on velvet, I might as well see the whole show. I'm sure that Sako, wherever it is, will be just as full of human folly as Earth was."
"He's euphoric," Paula said again, but her face was stricken.
"Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one who thinks like that," said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.
"You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best," said Webber. "Sako will change him."
Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something that he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.
"Come along," he said buoyantly to the two. "Let us not lag. Once aboard the flitter and the girl is mine."
"Oh for God's sake shut up," said Webber.
4.
It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression. He looked sourly around.
He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he might be sleeping, too.
That was all--a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were, presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and darknesses lay outside.
"A flitter," Webber had informed him, "just doesn't have room for the complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you dispense with in a flitter. We'll see when we get to Sako."
After a moment he had added, "If we get to Sako."
Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When he had awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with his present hangover.
"At least," he told himself, "I can truthfully say that this one wasn't my fault. That blasted spray--"
He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then he reached and roughly shook her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then with resentment.
"You had no right to wake me up," she said.
Then, before Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake you up."
"Let's come back to that," said Kieran after a moment. "Why did you?"
Paula looked at him ruefully. "What I need now is a ten-volume history of the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since we don't have either--" She broke off, then after a pause asked, "Your date was 1981, wasn't it? It and your name were on the tag of your pressure-suit."
"That's right."
"Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out to the stars, wasn't it?"
Kieran nodded. "As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Several drives were being experimented with even then."
"One of them--the Flournoy principle--was finally made workable," she said. She frowned. "I'm trying to give you this briefly and I keep straying into details."
"Just tell me why you woke me up."
"I'm trying to tell you." She asked candidly, "Were you always so damned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?"
Kieran grinned. "All right. Go ahead."
* * * * *
"Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981," she said. "The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.
"There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe. No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are twenty-nine of them, now. It's expected to go on like that, till there are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine thousand--any number. But--"
Kieran had been listening closely. "But what? What upset this particular utopia?"
"Sako."
"This world we're going to?"
"Yes," she said soberly. "Men found something different about this world when they reached it. It had people--human people--on it, very low in the scale of civilization."
"Well, what was the problem? Couldn't you start teaching them as you had others?"
She shook her head. "It would take a long while. But that wasn't the real problem. It was-- You see, there's another race on Sako beside the human ones, and it's a fairly civilized race. The Sakae. The trouble is--the Sakae aren't human."
Kieran stared at her. "So what? If they're intelligent--"
"You talk as though it was the simplest thing in the world," she flashed.
"Isn't it? If your Sakae are intelligent and the humans of Sako aren't, then the Sakae have the rights on that world, don't they?"
She looked at him, not saying anything, and again she had that stricken look of one who has tried and failed. Then from up forward, without turning, Webber spoke.
"What do you think now of Vaillant's fine idea, Paula?"
"It can still work," she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
"If you don't mind," said Kieran, with an edge to his voice, "I'd still like to know what this Sako business has to do with reviving me."
* * * * *
"The Sakae rule the humans on that world," Paula answered. "There are some of us who don't believe they should. In the Council, we're known as the Humanity Party, because we believe that humans should not be ruled by non-humans."
Again, Kieran was distracted from his immediate question--this time by the phrase "Non-human".
"These Sakae--what are they like?"
"They're not monsters, if that's what you're thinking of," Paula said. "They're bipeds--lizardoid rather than humanoid--and are a fairly intelligent and law-abiding lot."
"If they're all that, and higher in development than the humans, why shouldn't they rule their own world?" demanded Kieran.
Webber uttered a sardonic laugh. Without turning he asked, "Shall I change course and go to Altair?"
"No!" she said. Her eyes flashed at Kieran and she spoke almost breathlessly. "You're very sure about things you just heard about, aren't you? You know what's right and you know what's wrong, even though you've only been in this time, this universe, for a few hours!"
Kieran looked at her closely. He thought he was beginning to get a glimmer of the shape of things now.
"You--all you who woke me up illegally--you belong to this Humanity Party, don't you? You did it for some reason connected with that?"
"Yes," she answered defiantly. "We need a symbol in this political struggle. We thought that one of the oldtime space pioneers, one of the humans who began the conquest of the stars, would be it. We--"
Kieran interrupted. "I think I get it. It was really considerate of you. You drag a man back from what amounts to death, for a party rally. 'Oldtime space hero condemns non-humans'--it would go something like that, wouldn't it?"
"Listen--," she began.
"Listen, hell," he said. He was hot with rage, shaking with it. "I am glad to say that you could not possibly have picked a worse symbol than me. I have no more use for the idea of the innate sacred superiority of one species over another than I had for that of one kind of man over another."
Her face changed. From an angry woman, she suddenly became a professional psychologist, coolly observing reactions.
"It's not the political question you really resent," she said. "You've wakened to a strange world and you're afraid of it, in spite of all the pre-awakening preparation we gave your subconscious. You're afraid, and so you're angry."
Kieran got a grip on himself. He shrugged. "What you say may be true. But it doesn't change the way I feel. I will not help you one damned bit."
Webber got up from his seat and came back toward them, his tall form stooping. He looked at Kieran and then at the woman.
"We have to settle this right now," he said. "We're getting near enough to Sako to go out of drive. Are we going to land or aren't we?"
"Yes," said Paula steadily. "We're landing."
Webber glanced again at Kieran's face. "But if that's the way he feels--"
"Go ahead and land," she said.
5.
It was nothing like landing in a rocket. First there was the business referred to as "going out of drive". Paula made Kieran strap in and she said, "You may find this unpleasant, but just sit tight. It doesn't last long." Kieran sat stiff and glowering, prepared for anything and determined not to show it no matter how he felt. Then Webber did something to the control board and the universe fell apart. Kieran's stomach came up and stuck in his throat. He was falling--up? Down? Sideways? He didn't know, but whichever it was not all the parts of him were falling at the same rate, or perhaps it was not all in the same direction, he didn't know that either, but it was an exceptionally hideous feeling. He opened his mouth to protest, and all of a sudden he was sitting normally in the chair in the normal cabin and screaming at the top of his lungs.
He shut up.
Paula said, "I told you it would be unpleasant."
"So you did," said Kieran. He sat, sweating. His hands and feet were cold.
Now for the first time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He wanted very much to start screaming again, but Paula was watching him.
In a few moments that desire became academic. A whistling shriek began faintly outside the hull and built swiftly to a point where nothing could have been heard above it. Atmosphere. And somewhere under the blind wall of the flitter a rock-hard world-face reeling and rushing, leaping to meet them--
* * * * *
The flitter slowed. It seemed to hang motionless, quivering faintly. Then it dropped. Express elevator in the world's tallest building, top to bottom--only the elevator is a bubble and the wind is tossing it from side to side as it drops and there is no bottom.
They hung again, bounding lightly on the unseen wind.
Then down.
And hang again.
And down.
Paula said suddenly, "Webber. Webber, I think he's dying." She began to unstrap.
Kieran said faintly, "Am I turning green?"
She looked at him, frowning. "Yes."
"A simple old malady. I'm seasick. Tell Webber to quit playing humming-bird and put this thing down."
Paula made an impatient gesture and tightened her belt again.
Hang and drop. Once more, twice more. A little rocking bounce, a light thump, motion ceased. Webber turned a series of switches. Silence.
Kieran said, "Air?"
* * * * *
Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid ground under him, he didn't care whose or where.
And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground underfoot. A very long time indeed--
His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.
He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.
He began to tremble.
Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn't hear her. He could only hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his shadow brushing across the stars. Webber's face was somewhere above him, looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head. They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold. Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.
Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his cheek and it came away red.
Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.
* * * * *
A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a sharp clack, and fell. Kieran's nervous relays finally connected. He jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him, trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran's thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.
"Who's doing it?" he demanded.
Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone's throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of trees that grew beside a river, apparently quite a wide one though he could not see much but a tawny sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that looked like spearheads.
Exotic or not, they made perfectly adequate cover. Stones came whistling out of the woods, but Kieran could not see anything where Paula was pointing but an occasional shaking of foliage.
"Sakae?" he asked.
Webber snorted. "You'll know it when the Sakae find us. They don't throw stones."
"These are the humans," Paula said. There was an indulgent softness in her voice that irritated Kieran.
"I thought they were our dear little friends," he said.
"You frightened them."
"I frightened them?"
"They've seen the flitter before. But they're extremely alert to modes of behavior, and they knew you weren't acting right. They thought you were sick."
"So they tried to kill me. Nice fellows."
"Self-preservation," Webber said. "They can't afford the luxury of too much kindness."
"They're very kind among themselves," Paula said defensively. To Kieran she added, "I doubt if they were trying to kill you. They just wanted to drive you away."
"Oh, well," said Kieran, "in that case I wouldn't dream of disappointing them. Let's go."
Paula glared at him and turned to Webber. "Talk to them."
"I hope there's time," Webber grunted, glancing at the sky. "We're sitting ducks here. Keep your patient quiet--any more of that moaning and flopping and we're sunk."
* * * * *
He picked up a large plastic container and moved closer to the door.
Paula looked at Kieran's cheek. "Let me fix that."
"Don't bother," he said. At this moment he hoped the Sakae, whoever and whatever they were, would come along and clap these two into some suitable place for the rest of their lives.
Webber began to "talk".
Kieran stared at him, fascinated. He had expected words--primitive words, perhaps resembling the click-speech of Earth's stone-age survivals, but words of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made the sound again.
On the third try the people came out of the woods.
In all there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They came slowly and furtively, moving a step or two at a time, then halting and peering, prepared to run. The able-bodied men came first, with one in the lead, a fine-looking chap in early middle age who was apparently the chief. The women, the old men, and the children followed, trickling gradually out of the shadow of the trees but remaining where they could disappear in a flash if alarmed. They were all perfectly naked, tall and slender and large-eyed, their muscles strung for speed and agility rather than massive strength. Their bodies gleamed a light bronze color in the sun, and Kieran noticed that the men were beardless and smooth-skinned. Both men and women had long hair, ranging in color from black to tawny, and very clean and glistening. They were a beautiful people, as deer are a beautiful people, graceful, innocent, and wild. The men came to the dried fruits which had been scattered for them. They picked them up and sniffed them, bit them, then began to eat, repeating the grunt-and-whuffle call. The women and children and old men decided everything was safe and joined them. Webber tossed out more fruit, and then got out himself, carrying the plastic box.
* * * * *
"What does he do next?" whispered Kieran to Paula. "Scratch their ears? I used to tame squirrels this way when I was a kid."
"Shut up," she warned him. Webber beckoned and she nudged him to move out of the flitter. "Slow and careful."
Kieran slid out of the flitter. Big glistening eyes swung to watch him. The eating stopped. Some of the little ones scuttled for the trees. Kieran froze. Webber hooted and whuffled some more and the tension relaxed. Kieran approached the group with Paula. There was suddenly no truth in what he was doing. He was an actor in a bad scene, mingling with impossible characters in an improbable setting. Webber making ridiculous noises and tossing his dried fruit around like a caricature of somebody sowing, Paula with her brisk professionalism all dissolved in misty-eyed fondness, himself an alien in this time and place, and these perfectly normal-appearing people behaving like orang-utans with their fur shaved off. He started to laugh and then thought better of it. Once started, he might not be able to stop.
"Let them get used to you," said Webber softly.
Paula obviously had been here before. She had begun to make noises too, a modified hooting more like a pigeon's call. Kieran just stood still. The people moved in around them, sniffing, touching. There was no conversation, no laughing or giggling even among the little girls. A particularly beautiful young woman stood just behind the chief, watching the strangers with big yellow cat-eyes. Kieran took her to be the man's daughter. He smiled at her. She continued to stare, deadpan and blank-eyed, with no answering flicker of a smile. It was as though she had never seen one before. Kieran shivered. All this silence and unresponsiveness became eerie.
"I'm happy to tell you," he murmured to Paula, "that I don't think much of your little pets?"
She could not allow herself to be sharply angry. She only said, in a whisper, "They are not pets, they are not animals. They--"
She broke off. Something had come over the naked people. Every head had lifted, every eye had turned away from the strangers. They were listening. Even the littlest ones were still.
Kieran could not hear anything except the wind in the trees.
"What--?" he started to ask.
Webber made an imperative gesture for silence. The tableau held for a brief second longer. Then the brown-haired man who seemed to be the leader made a short harsh noise. The people turned and vanished into the trees.
"The Sakae," Webber said. "Get out of sight." He ran toward the flitter. Paula grabbed Kieran's sleeve and pushed him toward the trees.
"What's going on?" he demanded as he ran.
"Their ears are better than ours. There's a patrol ship coming, I think."
* * * * *
The shadows took them in, orange-and-gold-splashed shadows under strange trees. Kieran looked back. Webber had been inside the flitter. Now he tumbled out of the hatch and ran toward them. Behind him the hatch closed and the flitter stirred and then took off all by itself, humming.
"They'll follow it for a while," Webber panted. "It may give us a chance to get away." He and Paula started after the running people.
Kieran balked. "I don't know why I'm running away from anybody."
Webber pulled out a snub-nosed instrument that looked enough like a gun to be very convincing. He pointed it at Kieran's middle.
"Reason one," he said. "If the Sakae catch Paula and me here we're in very big trouble. Reason two--this is a closed area, and you're with us, so you will be in very big trouble." He looked coldly at Kieran. "The first reason is the one that interests me most."
Kieran shrugged. "Well, now I know." He ran.
Only then did he hear the low heavy thrumming in the sky.
6.
The sound came rumbling very swiftly toward them. It was a completely different sound from the humming of the flitter, and it seemed to Kieran to hold a note of menace. He stopped in a small clearing where he might see up through the trees. He wanted a look at this ship or flier or whatever it was that had been built and was flown by non-humans.
But Webber shoved him roughly on into a clump of squat trees that were the color of sherry wine, with flat thick leaves.
"Don't move," he said.
Paula was hugging a tree beside him. She nodded to him to do as Webber said.
"They have very powerful scanners." She pointed with her chin. "Look. They've learned."
The harsh warning barks of the men sounded faintly, then were hushed. Nothing moved, except by the natural motion of the wind. The people crouched among the trees, so still that Kieran would not have seen them if he had not known they were there.
The patrol craft roared past, cranking up speed as it went. Webber grinned. "They'll be a couple of hours at least, overhauling and examining the flitter. By that time it'll be dark, and by morning we'll be in the mountains."
The people were already moving. They headed upstream, going at a steady, shuffling trot. Three of the women, Kieran noticed, had babies in their arms. The older children ran beside their mothers. Two of the men and several of the women were white-haired. They ran also.
"Do you like to see them run?" asked Paula, with a sharp note of passion in her voice. "Does it look good to you?"
"No," said Kieran, frowning. He looked in the direction in which the sound of the patrol craft was vanishing.
"Move along," Webber said. "They'll leave us far enough behind as it is."
* * * * *
Kieran followed the naked people through the woods, beside the tawny river. Paula and Webber jogged beside him. The shadows were long now, reaching out across the water.
Paula kept glancing at him anxiously, as though to detect any sign of weakness on his part. "You're doing fine," she said. "You should. Your body was brought back to normal strength and tone, before you ever were awakened."
"They'll slow down when it's dark, anyway," said Webber.
The old people and the little children ran strongly.
"Is their village there?" Kieran asked, indicating the distant mountains.
"They don't live in villages," Paula said. "But the mountains are safer. More places to hide."
"You said this was a closed area. What is it, a hunting preserve?"
"The Sakae don't hunt them any more."
"But they used to?"
"Well," Webber said, "a long time ago. Not for food, the Sakae are vegetarians, but--"
"But," said Paula, "they were the dominant race, and the people were simply beasts of the field. When they competed for land and food the people were hunted down or driven out." She swung an expressive hand toward the landscape beyond the trees. "Why do you think they live in this desert, scraping a miserable existence along the watercourses? It's land the Sakae didn't want. Now, of course, they have no objection to setting it aside as a sort of game preserve. The humans are protected, the Sakae tell us. They're living their natural life in their natural environment, and when we demand that a program be--"
She was out of breath and had to stop, panting. Webber finished for her.
"We want them taught, lifted out of this naked savagery. The Sakae say it's impossible."
"Is it true?" asked Kieran.
"No," said Paula fiercely. "It's a matter of pride. They want to keep their dominance, so they simply won't admit that the people are anything more than animals, and they won't give them a chance to be anything more."
There was no more talking after that, but even so the three outlanders grew more and more winded and the people gained on them. The sun went down in a blaze of blood-orange light that tinted the trees in even more impossible colors and set the river briefly on fire. Then night came, and just after the darkness shut down the patrol craft returned, beating up along the winding river bed. Kieran froze under the black trees and the hair lifted on his skin. For the first time he felt like a hunted thing. For the first time he felt a personal anger.
The patrol craft drummed away and vanished. "They won't come back until daylight," Webber said.
* * * * *
He handed out little flat packets of concentrated food from his pockets. They munched as they walked. Nobody said anything. The wind, which had dropped at sundown, picked up from a different quarter and began to blow again. It got cold. After a while they caught up with the people, who had stopped to rest and eat. The babies and old people for whom Kieran had felt a worried pity were in much better shape than he. He drank from the river and then sat down. Paula and Webber sat beside him, on the ground. The wind blew hard from the desert, dry and chill. The trees thrashed overhead. Against the pale glimmer of the water Kieran could see naked bodies moving along the river's edge, wading, bending, grubbing in the mud. Apparently they found things, for he could see that they were eating. Somewhere close by other people were stripping fruit or nuts from the trees. A man picked up a stone and pounded something with a cracking noise, then dropped the stone again. They moved easily in the dark, as though they were used to it. Kieran recognized the leader's yellow-eyed daughter, her beautiful slender height outlined against the pale-gleaming water. She stood up to her ankles in the soft mud, holding something tight in her two hands, eating.
The sweat dried on Kieran. He began to shiver.
"You're sure that patrol ship won't come back?" he asked.
"Not until they can see what they're looking for."
"Then I guess it's safe." He began to scramble around, feeling for dried sticks.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting some firewood."
"No." Paula was beside him in an instant, her hand on his arm, "No, you mustn't do that."
"But Webber said--"
"It isn't the patrol ship, Kieran. It's the people. They--"
"They what?"
"I told you they were low on the social scale. This is one of the basic things they have to be taught. Right now they still regard fire as a danger, something to run from."
"I see," Kieran said, and let the kindling fall. "Very well, if I can't have a fire, I'll have you. Your body will warm me." He pulled her into his arms.
* * * * *
She gasped, more in astonishment, he thought, than alarm. "What are you talking about?"
"That's a line from an old movie. From a number of old movies, in fact. Not bad, eh?"
He held her tight. She was definitely female. After a moment he pushed her away.
"That was a mistake. I want to be able to go on disliking you without any qualifying considerations."
She laughed, a curiously flat little sound. "Was everybody crazy in your day?" she asked. And then, "Reed--"
It was the first time she had used his given name. "What?"
"When they threw the stones, and we got back into the flitter, you pushed me ahead of you. You were guarding me. Why?"
He stared at her, or rather at the pale blur of her standing close to him. "Well, it's always been sort of the custom for the men to-- But now that I think of it, Webber didn't bother."
"No," said Paula. "Back in your day women were still taking advantage of the dual standard--demanding complete equality with men but clinging to their special status. We've got beyond that."
"Do you like it? Beyond, I mean."
"Yes," she said. "It was good of you to do that, but--"
Webber said, "They're moving again. Come on."
The people walked this time, strung out in a long line between the trees and the water, where the light was a little better and the way more open. The three outlanders tagged behind, clumsy in their boots and clothing. The long hair of the people blew in the wind and their bare feet padded softly, light and swift.
Kieran looked up at the sky. The trees obscured much of it so that all he could see was some scattered stars overhead. But he thought that somewhere a moon was rising.
He asked Paula and she said, "Wait. You'll see."
Night and the river rolled behind them. The moonlight became brighter, but it was not at all like the moonlight Kieran remembered from long ago and far away. That had had a cold tranquility to it, but this light was neither cold nor tranquil. It seemed somehow to shift color, too, which made it even less adequate for seeing than the white moonlight he was used to. Sometimes as it filtered through the trees it seemed, ice-green, and again it was reddish or amber, or blue.
They came to a place where the river made a wide bend and they cut across it, clear of the trees. Paula touched Kieran's arm and pointed. "Look."
Kieran looked, and then he stopped still. The light was not moonlight, and its source was not a moon. It was a globular cluster of stars, hung in the sky like a swarm of fiery bees, a burning and pulsing of many colors, diamond-white and gold, green and crimson, peacock blue and smoky umber. Kieran stared, and beside him Paula murmured, "I've been on a lot of planets, but none of them have anything like this."
The people moved swiftly on, paying no attention at all to the sky.
Reluctantly Kieran followed them into the obscuring woods. He kept looking at the open sky above the river, waiting for the cluster to rise high so he could see it.
It was some time after this, but before the cluster rose clear of the trees, that Kieran got the feeling that something, or someone, was following them.
7.
He had stopped to catch his breath and shake an accumulation of sand out of his boots. He was leaning against a tree with his back to the wind, which meant that he was facing their back-trail, and he thought he saw a shadow move where there was nothing to cast a shadow. He straightened up with the little trip-hammers of alarm beating all over him, but he could see nothing more. He thought he might have been mistaken. Just the same, he ran to catch up with the others.
The people were moving steadily. Kieran knew that their senses were far keener than his, and they were obviously not aware of any danger other than the basic one of the Sakae. He decided that he must have been seeing things.
But an uneasiness persisted. He dropped behind again, this time on purpose, after they had passed a clearing. He stayed hidden behind a tree-trunk and watched. The cluster-light was bright now but very confusing to the eye. He heard a rustling that he did not think was wind, and he thought that something started to cross the clearing and then stopped, as though it had caught his scent.
Then he thought that he heard rustlings at both sides of the clearing, stealthy sounds of stalking that closed in toward him. Only the wind, he told himself, but again he turned to run. This time he met Paula, coming back to look for him.
"Reed, are you all right?" she asked. He caught her arm and pulled her around and made her run. "What is it? What's the matter?"
"I don't know." He hurried with her until he could see Webber ahead, and beyond him the bare backs and blowing hair of the people. "Listen," he said, "are there any predators here?"
"Yes," Paula said, and Webber turned sharply around.
"Have you seen something?"
"I don't know. I thought I did. I'm not sure."
"Where?"
"Behind us."
Webber made the harsh barking danger call, and the people stopped. Webber stood looking back the way they had come. The women caught the children and the men fell back to where Webber stood. They looked and listened, sniffing the air. Kieran listened too, but now he did not hear any rustlings except the high thrashing of the branches. Nothing stirred visibly and the wind would carry away any warning scent.
The men turned away. The people moved on again. Webber shrugged.
"You must have been mistaken, Kieran."
"Maybe. Or maybe they just can't think beyond the elementary. If they don't smell it, it isn't there. If something is after us it's coming up-wind, the way any hunting animal works. A couple of the men ought to circle around and--"
"Come on," said Webber wearily.
* * * * *
They followed the people beside the river. The cluster was high now, a hive of suns reflected in the flowing water, a kaleidoscopic rippling of colors.
Now the women were carrying the smaller children. The ones too large to be carried were lagging behind a little. So were the aged. Not much, yet. Kieran, conscious that he was weaker than the weakest of these, looked ahead at the dim bulk of the mountains and thought that they ought to be able to make it. He was not at all sure that he would.
The river made another bend. The trail lay across the bend, clear of the trees. It was a wide bend, perhaps two miles across the neck. Ahead, where the trail joined the river again, there was a rocky hill. Something about the outlines of the hill seemed wrong to Kieran, but it was too far away to be sure of anything. Overhead the cluster burned gloriously. The people set out across the sand.
Webber looked back. "You see?" he said. "Nothing."
They went on. Kieran was beginning to feel very tired now, all the artificial strength that had been pumped into him before his awakening was running out. Webber and Paula walked with their heads down, striding determinedly but without joy.
"What do you think now?" she asked Kieran. "Is this any way for humans to live?"
The ragged line of women and children moved ahead of them, with the men in the lead. It was not natural, Kieran thought, for children to be able to travel so far, and then he remembered that the young of non-predacious species have to be strong and fleet at an early age.
Suddenly one of the women made a harsh, shrill cry.
Kieran looked where she was looking, off to the left, to the river and the curving line of trees. A large black shadow slipped across the sand. He looked behind him. There were other shadows, coming with long easy bounds out of the trees, fanning out in a shallow crescent. They reminded Kieran of some animal he had once seen in a zoo, a partly catlike, partly doglike beast, a cheetah he thought it had been called, only the cheetah was spotted like a leopard and these creatures were black, with stiff, upstanding ears. They bayed, and the coursing began.
"Nothing," said Kieran bitterly. "I count seven."
Webber said, "My God, I--"
* * * * *
The people ran. They tried to break back to the river and the trees that could be climbed to safety, but the hunters turned them. Then they fled blindly forward, toward the hill. They ran with all their strength, making no sound. Kieran and Webber ran with them, with Paula between them. Webber seemed absolutely appalled.
"Where's that gun you had?" Kieran panted.
"It's not a gun, only a short-range shocker," he said. "It wouldn't stop these things. Look at them!"
They bounded, sporting around them, howling with a sound like laughter. They were as large as leopards and their eyes glowed in the cluster-light. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, as though hunting was the most delightful game in the world. One of them ran up to within two feet of Kieran and snapped at him with its great jaws, dodging agilely when he raised his arm. They drove the people, faster and faster. At first the men had formed around the women and children. But the formation began to disintegrate as the weaker ones dropped behind, and no attempt was made to keep it. Panic was stronger than instinct now. Kieran looked ahead. "If we can make it to that hill--"
Paula screamed and he stumbled over a child, a girl about five, crawling on her hands and knees. He picked her up. She bit and thrashed and tore at him, her bare little body hard as whalebone and slippery with sweat. He could not hold onto her. She kicked herself free of his hands and rushed wildly out of reach, and one of the black hunters pounced in and bore her away, shrieking thinly like a fledgling bird in the jaws of a cat.
"Oh my God," said Paula, and covered her head with her arms, trying to shut out sight and sound. He caught her and said harshly, "Don't faint, because I can't carry you." The child's mother, whichever of the women it might have been, did not look back.
An old woman who strayed aside was pulled down and dragged off, and then one of the white-haired men. The hill was closer. Kieran saw now what was wrong with it. Part of it was a building. He was too tired and too sick to be interested, except as it offered a refuge. He spoke to Webber, with great difficulty because he was winded. And then he realized that Webber wasn't there.
* * * * *
Webber had stumbled and fallen. He had started to get up, but the hunters were on him. He was on his hands and knees facing them, screaming at them to get away from him. He had, obviously, had little or no experience with raw violence. Kieran ran back to him, with Paula close behind.
"Use your gun!" he yelled. He was afraid of the black hunters, but he was full of rage and the rage outweighed the fear. He yelled at them, cursing them. He hurled sand into their eyes, and one that was creeping up on Webber from the side he kicked. The creature drew off a little, not frightened but surprised. They were not used to this sort of thing from humans. "Your gun!" Kieran roared again, and Webber pulled the snub-nosed thing out of his pocket. He stood up and said unsteadily, "I told you, it's not a gun. It won't kill anything. I don't think--"
"Use it," said Kieran. "And get moving again. Slowly."
They started to move, and then across the sky a great iron voice spoke like thunder. "Lie down," it said, "please. Lie down flat."
Kieran turned his head, startled. From the direction of the building on the hill a vehicle was speeding toward them.
"The Sakae," said Webber with what was almost a sob of relief. "Lie down."
As he did so, Kieran saw a pale flash shoot out from the vehicle and knock over a hunter still hanging on the flanks of the fleeing people. He hugged the sand. Something went whining and whistling over him, there was a thunk and a screech. It was repeated, and then the iron voice spoke again.
"You may get up now. Please remain where you are." The vehicle was much closer. They were bathed in sudden light. The voice said, "Mr. Webber, you are holding a weapon. Please drop it."
"It's only a little shocker," Webber said, plaintively. He dropped it.
The vehicle had wide tracks that threw up clouds of sand. It came clanking to a halt. Kieran, shading his eyes, thought he distinguished two creatures inside, a driver and a passenger.
* * * * *
The passenger emerged, climbing with some difficulty over the steep step of the track, his tail rattling down behind him like a length of thick cable. Once on the ground he became quite agile, moving with a sort of oddly graceful prance on his powerful legs. He approached, his attention centered on Kieran. But he observed the amenities, placing one delicate hand on his breast and making a slight bow.
"Doctor Ray." His muzzle, shaped something like a duck's bill, nevertheless formed Paula's name tolerably well. "And you, I think, are Mr. Kieran."
Kieran said, "Yes." The star-cluster blazed overhead. The dead beasts lay behind him, the people with their flying hair had run on beyond his sight. He had been dead for a hundred years and now he was alive again. Now he was standing on alien soil, facing an alien form of life, communicating with it, and he was so dog-tired and every sensory nerve was so thoroughly flayed that he had nothing left to react with. He simply looked at the Saka as he might have looked at a fence-post, and said, "Yes."
The Saka made his formal little bow again. "I am Bregg." He shook his head. "I'm glad I was able to reach you in time. You people don't seem to have any notion of the amount of trouble you make for us--"
Paula, who had not spoken since the child was carried off, suddenly screamed at Bregg, "Murderer!"
She sprang at him, striking him in blind hysteria.
8.
Bregg sighed. He caught Paula in those fine small hands that seemed to have amazing strength and held her, at arm's length. "Doctor Ray," he said. He shook her. "Doctor Ray." She stopped screaming. "I don't wish to administer a sedative because then you will say that I drugged you. But I will if I must."
Kieran said, "I'll keep her quiet."
He took her from Bregg. She collapsed against him and began to cry. "Murderers," she whispered. "That little girl, those old people--"
Webber said, "You could exterminate those beasts. You don't have to let them hunt the people like that. It's--it's--"
"Unhuman is the word you want," said Bregg. His voice was exceedingly weary. "Please get into the car."
They climbed in. The car churned around and sped back toward the building. Paula shivered, and Kieran held her in his arms. Webber said after a moment or two, "How did you happen to be here, Bregg?"
"When we caught the flitter and found it empty, it was obvious that you were with the people, and it became imperative to find you before you came to harm. I remembered that the trail ran close by this old outpost building, so I had the patrol ship drop us here with an emergency vehicle."
Kieran said, "You knew the people were coming this way?"
"Of course." Bregg sounded surprised. "They migrate every year at the beginning of the dry season. How do you suppose Webber found them so easily?"
Kieran looked at Webber. He asked, "Then they weren't running from the Sakae?"
"Of course they were," Paula said. "You saw them yourself, cowering under the trees when the ship went over."
"The patrol ships frighten them," Bregg said. "Sometimes to the point of stampeding them, which is why we use them only in emergencies. The people do not connect the ships with us."
"That," said Paula flatly, "is a lie."
Bregg sighed. "Enthusiasts always believe what they want to believe. Come and see for yourself."
She straightened up. "What have you done to them?"
"We've caught them in a trap," said Bregg, "and we are presently going to stick needles into them--a procedure necessitated by your presence, Doctor Ray. They're highly susceptible to imported viruses, as you should remember--one of your little parties of do-gooders succeeded in wiping out a whole band of them not too many years ago. So--inoculations and quarantine."
* * * * *
Lights had blazed up in the area near the building. The car sped toward them.
Kieran said slowly, "Why don't you just exterminate the hunters and have done with them?"
"In your day, Mr. Kieran--yes, I've heard all about you--in your day, did you on Earth exterminate the predators so that their natural prey might live more happily?"
Bregg's long muzzle and sloping skull were profiled against the lights.
"No," said Kieran, "we didn't. But in that case, they were all animals."
"Exactly," said Bregg. "No, wait, Doctor Ray. Spare me the lecture. I can give you a much better reason than that, one even you can't quarrel with. It's a matter of ecology. The number of humans destroyed by these predators annually is negligible but they do themselves destroy an enormous number of small creatures with which the humans compete for their food. If we exterminated the hunters the small animals would multiply so rapidly that the humans would starve to death."
The car stopped beside the hill, at the edge of the lighted area. A sort of makeshift corral of wire fencing had been set up, with wide wings to funnel the people into the enclosure, where a gate was shut on them. Two Sakae were mounting guard as the party from the car approached the corral. Inside the fence Kieran could see the people, flopped around in positions of exhaustion. They did not seem to be afraid now. A few of them were drinking from a supply of water provided for them. There was food scattered for them on the ground.
Bregg said something in his own language to one of the guards, who looked surprised and questioned him, then departed, springing strongly on his powerful legs. "Wait," said Bregg.
They waited, and in a moment or two the guard came back leading one of the black hunting beasts on a chain. It was a female, somewhat smaller than the ones Kieran had fought with, and having a slash of white on the throat and chest. She howled and sprang up on Bregg, butting her great head into his shoulder, wriggling with delight. He petted her, talking to her, and she laughed doglike and licked his cheek.
"They domesticate well," he said. "We've had a tame breed for centuries."
* * * * *
He moved a little closer to the corral, holding tight to the animal's chain. Suddenly she became aware of the people. Instantly the good-natured pet turned into a snarling fury. She reared on her hind legs and screamed, and inside the corral the people roused up. They were not frightened now. They spat and chattered, clawing up sand and pebbles and bits of food to throw through the fence. Bregg handed the chain to the guard, who hauled the animal away by main force.
Paula said coldly, "If your point was that the people are not kind to animals, my answer is that you can hardly blame them."
"A year ago," Bregg said, "some of the people got hold of her two young ones. They were torn to pieces before they could be saved, and she saw it. I can't blame her, either."
He went on to the gate and opened it and went inside. The people drew back from him. They spat at him, too, and pelted him with food and pebbles. He spoke to them, sternly, in the tone of one speaking to unruly dogs, and he spoke words, in his own tongue. The people began to shuffle about uneasily. They stopped throwing things. He stood waiting.
The yellow-eyed girl came sidling forward and rubbed herself against his thigh, head, shoulder and flank. He reached down and stroked her, and she whimpered with pleasure and arched her back.
"Oh, for God's sake," said Kieran, "let's get out of here."
* * * * *
Later, they sat wearily on fallen blocks of cement inside a dusty, shadowy room of the old building. Only a hand-lamp dispelled the gloom, and the wind whispered coldly, and Bregg walked to and fro in his curious prance as he talked.
"It will be a little while before the necessary medical team can be picked up and brought here," he said. "We shall have to wait."
"And then?" asked Kieran.
"First to--" Bregg used a word that undoubtedly named a city of the Sakae but that meant nothing to Kieran, "--and then to Altair Two. This, of course, is a council matter."
He stopped and looked with bright, shrewd eyes at Kieran. "You are quite the sensation already, Mr. Kieran. The whole community of starworlds is already aware of the illegal resuscitation of one of the pioneer spacemen, and of course there is great interest." He paused. "You, yourself, have done nothing unlawful. You cannot very well be sent back to sleep, and undoubtedly the council will want to hear you. I am curious as to what you will say."
"About Sako?" said Kieran. "About--them?" He made a gesture toward a window through which the wind brought the sound of stirring, of the gruntings and whufflings of the corralled people.
"Yes. About them."
"I'll tell you how I feel," Kieran said flatly. He saw Paula and Webber lean forward in the shadows. "I'm a human man. The people out there may be savage, low as the beasts, good for nothing the way they are--but they're human. You Sakae may be intelligent, civilized, reasonable, but you're not human. When I see you ordering them around like beasts, I want to kill you. That's how I feel."
Bregg did not change his bearing, but he made a small sound that was almost a sigh.
"Yes," he said. "I feared it would be so. A man of your times--a man from a world where humans were all-dominant--would feel that way." He turned and looked at Paula and Webber. "It appears that your scheme, to this extent, was successful."
"No, I wouldn't say that," said Kieran.
Paula stood up. "But you just told us how you feel--"
"And it's the truth," said Kieran. "But there's something else." He looked thoughtfully at her. "It was a good idea. It was bound to work--a man of my time was bound to feel just this way you wanted him to feel, and would go away from here crying your party slogans and believing them. But you overlooked something--"
He paused, looking out the window into the sky, at the faint vari-colored radiance of the cluster.
* * * * *
"You overlooked the fact that when you awoke me, I would no longer be a man of my own time--or of any time. I was in darkness for a hundred years--with the stars my brothers, and no man touching me. Maybe that chills a man's feelings, maybe something deep in his mind lives and has time to think. I've told you how I feel, yes. But I haven't told you what I think--"
He stopped again, then said, "The people out there in the corral have my form, and my instinctive loyalty is to them. But instinct isn't enough. It would have kept us in the mud of Earth forever, if it could. Reason took us out to the wider universe. Instinct tells me that those out there are my people. Reason tells me that you--" he looked at Bregg, "--who are abhorrent to me, who would make my skin creep if I touched you, you who go by reason--that you are my real people. Instinct made a hell of Earth for millennia--I say we ought to leave it behind us there in the mud and not let it make a hell of the stars. For you'll run into this same problem over and over again as you go out into the wider universe, and the old parochial human loyalties must be altered, to solve it."
He looked at Paula and said, "I'm sorry, but if anyone asks me, that is what I'll say."
"I'm sorry, too," she said, rage and dejection ringing in her voice. "Sorry we woke you. I hope I never see you again."
Kieran shrugged. "After all, you did wake me. You're responsible for me. Here I am, facing a whole new universe, and I'll need you." He went over and patted her shoulder.
"Damn you," she said. But she did not move away from him.
THE END
IT'S A SMALL SOLAR SYSTEM
by ALLAN HOWARD
Soon the three representatives of Earth were walking shoulder to shoulder, the Captain first to touch soil.
Know him?
Well you might say I practically grew up with him. He was my hero in those days. I thought few wiser or greater men ever lived. In my eyes he was greater than Babe Ruth, Lindy, or the President.
Of course, time, and my growing up caused me to bring him into a perspective that I felt to be more consonant with his true position in his field of endeavor. When he died his friends mourned for fond remembrance of things past, but privately many of them felt that he had outlived his best days. Now with this glorious vindication, I wonder how many of them are still alive to feel the twinge of conscience....
Oh, we're delighted of course, but it seems incredible even today to us elated oldsters. Although we were always his staunchest admirers, in retrospect we can see now that no one believed more than we that he did it strictly for the dollar. It is likely there was always a small corps of starry-eyed adolescents who found the whole improbable saga entirely believable, or at least half believed it might be partly true. The attitude of the rest of us ranged from a patronizing disparagement that we thought was expected of us, through grudging admiration, to out-and-out enthusiasm.
Certainly if anybody had taken the trouble to consider it--and why should they have?--the landing of the first manned ship on our satellite seemed to render him as obsolete as a horde of other lesser and even greater lights. At any rate, it was inevitable that the conquest of the moon would be merely a stepping-stone to more distant points.
Oh, no, I had nothing to do with the selection of the Red Planet. Coming in as head of Project P-4 in its latter stages, as I did when Dr. Fredericks died, the selection had already been made. Yes, it's quite likely I may have been plugging for Mars below the conscious level. A combination of chance, expediency and popular demand made Mars the next target, rather than Venus, which was, in some ways, the more logical goal. I would have given anything to have gone, but the metaphorical stout heart that one reporter once credited me with is not the same as an old man's actual fatty heart.
And there were heartbreak years ahead before the Goddard was finally ready. During this time he slipped further into obscurity while big, important things were happening all around us. You're right, that one really big creation of his is bigger than ever. It has passed into the language, and meant employment for thousands of people. Too few of them have even heard of him. Of course, he was still known and welcomed by a small circle of acquaintances, but to the world at large he was truly a "forgotten man."
It is worthy of note that one of the oldest of these acquaintances was present at blast-off time. He happened to be the grandfather of a certain competent young crewman. The old man was a proud figure during the brief ceremonies and his eyes filled with tears as the mighty rocket climbed straight up on its fiery tail. He remained there gazing up at the sky long after it had vanished.
He was heard to murmur, "I am glad the kid could go, but it is just a lark to him. He never had a 'sense of wonder.' How could he--nobody reads anymore."
Afterward, his senile emotions betraying him, he broke down completely and had to be led from the field. It is rumored he did not live long after that.
The Goddard drove on until Mars filled the viz-screen. It was planned to make at least a half-dozen braking passes around the planet for observational purposes before the actual business of bringing the ship in for landfall began. As expected the atmosphere proved to be thin. The speculated dead-sea areas, oddly enough, turned out to be just that. To the surprise of some, it was soon evident that Mars possessed, or had possessed, a high civilization. The canali of Schiaparelli were indeed broad waterways stretching from pole to pole, too regular to be anything but the work of intelligence. But most wonderful of all were the scattered, but fairly numerous large, walled cities that dotted the world. Everybody was excited, eager to land and start exercising their specialties.
One of the largest of these cities was selected more or less at random. It was decided to set down just outside, yet far enough from the walls to avoid any possibility of damage from the landing jets in the event the city was inhabited. Even if deserted, the entire scientific personnel would have raised a howl that would have been heard back on Earth if just a section of wall was scorched. When planet-fall was completed and observers had time to scan the surroundings it was seen that the city was very much alive.
"What keeps them up!" marvelled Kopchainski, the aeronautics and rocketry authority.
The sky swarmed with ships of strange design. The walls were crowded with inhabitants, too far away for detailed observation. Even as they looked an enormous gate opened and a procession of mounted figures emerged. In the event the place was deserted, the Captain would have had the honor of being the first to touch Martian soil. While atmospheric and other checks were being run, he gave orders for the previously decided alternative. Captain, semanticist and anthropologist would make the First Contact.
With all checks agreeing that it was safe to open locks, soon the three representatives of Earth were walking shoulder to shoulder down the ramp. It was apparent that the two scientists purposely missed stride inches from the end, so that it was the Captain's foot that actually touched ground first.
The cavalcade--though these beasties were certainly not horses--was now near enough to the ship for details to be seen. Surprise and wonderment filled the crew, for while the multi-legged steeds were as alien as anyone might expect to find on an alien world, the riders were very definitely humanoid. Briefly, brightly and barbarically trapped as they were by earthly standards, they seemed to be little distinguishable from homegrown homo saps.
The approaching company appeared to be armed mainly with swords and lances, but also in evidence were some tubular affairs that could very well be some sort of projectile-discharging device. The Captain suddenly felt unaccountably warm. It was a heavy responsibility--he hoped these Martians wouldn't be the type of madmen who believed in the "shoot first, inquire later" theory.
Even as he stood there, outwardly calm but jittering internally, the Martian riders pulled up ten feet from the Earthmen. Their leader, tall, dark-haired, and subtly lighter in hue than his companions, dismounted and approached the Captain. With outstretched hand he took the Captain's in a firm grip.
Let it be recorded here, to the shame of an Earth where reading for pleasure is virtually a lost pastime, that not one man on the Goddard realized the significance of what followed.
"How do you do?" he said in perfect English, with an unmistakable trace of Southern accent.
"Welcome to Barsoom! My name is John Carter."
MEX
By Laurence Mark Janifer
What they called me, that was what started it. I'm as good an American as the next fellow, and maybe a little bit better than men like that, big men drinking in a bar who can't find anything better to do than to spit on a man and call him Mex. As if a Mexican is something to hide or to be ashamed of. We have our own heroes and our own strength and we don't have to bend down to men like that, or any other men. But when they called me that I saw red and called them names back.
"Mex kid," one of the men said, a big red-haired bully with his sleeves rolled back and muscles like ropes on the big hairy arms. "Snot-nosed little Mex brat."
I called him a name. He only laughed back at me and turned his back, waving a hand for the bartender. Maybe in a big city in the North it would be different and probably it would not: this toleration we hear about is no more good than an open fight, and there must be understanding instead. But here near the border, just on the American side of the border, a Mexican is called fair game, and a seventeen-year-old like me is less than nothing to them, to the white ones who go to the big bars.
I thought carefully about what to do, and finally when I had made my mind up I went for him and tried to hit him. But other men held me back, and I was kicking and shouting with my legs off the ground. When I stopped they put me down, so I started for the big red-haired man again and they had to stop me again. The red-haired man was laughing all this time. I wanted to run, back to my own family in their little house, and yet running would have been wrong; I was too angry to run, so I stayed.
"My sister," I said. "My sister is a witch and I will get her to put a curse on you." I was very angry, you must understand this.
And of course they had no idea that my sister is a real witch, and her curses are real, and only last year Manuel Valdez had died from the effects of her curse. Of all people, sometimes I wish I were my sister most of all, to curse people and see them shrivel and sicken and choke and die.
"Go ahead, half-pint," one of the other men yelled. "Get your sister to put a curse on me. I bet she knows who I am; I been with every Mex girl this side of the border."
This made me see red; my sister is pure and must be pure, since she is a witch. And she is not like some of the others even aside from that. I have heard her talk about them and I know.
I called him a name and ran up to him and hit him; my fist against his solid side felt good, but some other men pulled me off again. Yet it was impossible to leave. This was wrong for me, and I had to make it right. "I shall get my father to fight you, since he is a giant ten feet tall."
The men laughed at me, not knowing, of course, that my father is a giant ten feet tall in truth, and my mother a sweet siren like those in the books, the old books, with spells in her eyes and a strange power. They did not know I was not a daydreaming child but a man who told truth.
And they laughed; I grew angry again and told them many things, calling them names in Spanish, which they did not understand. That only made them laugh the more.
Finally I left; it was necessary for me to leave, since I was not wanted. But it was necessary, too, for me to make things right. Nights later they were dead for what they had said and done.
For I tell the truth always, and I had told them about my sister and my father and my mother. But one thing I had not told them.
I am sorry they could never know I was the winged thing that frightened and killed them, one by one....
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
By FRITZ LEIBER
CHAPTER 1
Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail.
--The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by Herbert Best
I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.
I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or cattle.
She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style of the old buckaroos.
We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be.
Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have been Sirius or Jupiter.
The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody bronze of evening.
The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the direction of their canting--they must have been only a few miles from blast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the blast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostly smoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely melted and run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark blobs up there that might be vultures perching.
From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vultures pass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.
Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the on-blast side.
None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea of where Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in a general way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter County and Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.
* * * * *
It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If a time traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across the few intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of it, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort of disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, paper tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying names in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to nothingness.
To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To the west, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--and there he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where three of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valley to the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'd find Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together near the Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the southwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inching up the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of the Fisher Sheriffs.
Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise him--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to hang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very slowly and very jealously extend it.
But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all those swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding most of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see the great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly pointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names like Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few nervous months or weeks.
As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.
* * * * *
The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The black topping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told myself.
In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun, pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an oddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing, I guessed.
I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special in its open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (who knows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The one I'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me.
She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weapon it held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She was hiding her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. We Deathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness.
Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was. She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump.
I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, I think, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowing for sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology.
Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'd have to keep that in mind.
* * * * *
The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoiding swung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to the satchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that almost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinking whether I should attach any special significance to her carrying a Geiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interfered in any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kind of thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else.
It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers can visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area more reliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it, though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate in unfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to do if they could feel heat blind.
But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance some citizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher's unfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted out beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard such places, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they call themselves civilized, those cultural queers!
No, she looked like she belonged in the Deathlands. But then why the counter?
Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her boot an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.
Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back up knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met the super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.
Maybe she was testing the counter, planning to use it some other way or trade it for something.
Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter made good sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?
Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hoped that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And wouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise gambit?
Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!
She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started to edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my whole mind to watchfulness.
Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lunging range without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn't spoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd had to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheral vision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or six seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes in the trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one of the "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'd been able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass for his exclusive pleasure.
* * * * *
The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up and metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical pale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of her forehead.
I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time.
I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue. It's a color you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are few blue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very far away from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, and water reflects the sky.
Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes and that jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, and we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer, still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and I realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over, that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up, and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, back with the problem of the two urges.
I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.
* * * * *
I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly our imaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a great noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders. Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murders for gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire or outraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other "rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake of murder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wiping out one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of us with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long since done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, a person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us Deathlanders. They can think of us in no other way.
I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply don't understand, though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much of the history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially the mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs, the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the Black Mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the new witchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactive blue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupings clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been as unpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages or the Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same.
But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, I suppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite their laughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actually believe--each howlingly different community of them--that they're the new Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether or not they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hours a day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost.
* * * * *
Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxical admission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge to murder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has of his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene surgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill the ultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; we sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one man or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly to ourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, but only each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.
But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only feel it.
At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to grow in us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like a puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted commission.
Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarch through the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girl with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar.
The problem of the two urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, is one that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler) would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if they understand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the only release (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and even more rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a brief one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urge to kill.
To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes even briefly to love, briefly to shelter in--that was good, that was a relief and release to be treasured.
But it couldn't last. You could draw it out, prop it up perhaps for a few days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a single night)--you might even start to talk to each other a little, after a while--but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else.
Murder was the only final solution, the only permanent release. Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels. But then after the kill the loneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meet another hateful human ...
Our problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging along parallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her of course, I wondered how she was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgy scars on my cheeks half revealed by my scarf?--to me they have a pleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked without the black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinking mostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and dragging me down?
I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to.
* * * * *
For that matter, I asked myself, how was I feeling the two urges?--how was I feeling them as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed, and the slender throat?--and I realized that there was no way to describe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges grow in me, side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply be too big for my taut body and one of them would have to get out fast.
I don't know which one of us started to slow down first, it happened so gradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground of the Deathlands under even the lightest treading became smaller and smaller around our steps and finally vanished altogether, and we were standing still. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for our stopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. The shoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that the pavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a good three feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From where I'd stopped I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edged smooth-topped concrete. So could she.
We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of them towered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-old blast but their metal looking sound enough until you became aware of the red light showing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization or later erosion had been complete. Almost but not quite lace-work. Just ahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-storey skeletal structure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers away from the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges and smooth gobbets of dust.
* * * * *
The light was getting redder and smokier every minute.
With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is always some sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growing faster in me. But that was all right, I told myself--this was the crisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear the urges a little longer without explosion.
I was the first to start to turn my head. For the first time I looked straight into her eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at such times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong as the other two--the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But even as I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat lumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that was forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with the impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts. And as it always does, the third urge died.
I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I could see her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift and her shoulders go back as she swallowed hard.
She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewise steps toward the freeway and reached her whole left arm further across her body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her hand from it about six inches. At the same time looking at me hard--fiercely angrily, you'd say--across her left shoulder. She had the experienced duelist's trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focussing on my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself--it's tiring to look straight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard.
My left side was nearest the wall so I didn't for the moment have the problem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps she had and using just two fingers, very gingerly--disarmingly, I hoped--I lifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concrete and drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again, or should be. Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, but we needn't come to it right away.
She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her left side and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped and her look told me plainly that it was up to me.
* * * * *
Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying one perfect knife--otherwise, I know for a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end up by weighing yourself down with dozens, literally. So I am naturally very reluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a little rusty along the sides but made of the toughest and most sharpenable alloy steel I've ever run across.
Still, I was most curious to find out what she'd do about that hook, so I finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the .38 and rested my hands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself--at least I hoped I gave that impression.
She smiled, it was almost a nice smile--by now we'd let our scarves drop since we weren't raising any more dust--and then she took hold of the hook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from the leather-and-metal base fitting over her stump.
Of course, I told myself. And her second knife, the one without a grip, must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base when she wanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to have guessed.
I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity and immediately unhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thought occurred to me. I opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and very openly so she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanket and, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I were performing some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the ground between us.
She unsnapped the straps on her satchel that fastened it to her belt and laid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowly drawing it through the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfully at my belt.
I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours, can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously each belt joined its corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings.
She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingers into the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon, then looked at me questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied--I hadn't seen anything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my black skullcap and she raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with a spice of mocking anticipation.
In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do with Mother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining--if the rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and I'm sure that the patches of lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lot more practical protection. But I was getting real attracted to this girl by now and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of his vanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile and dared her to laugh at my shiny egg top.
Strangely she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tongue along the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wide one, and she saw my plates flash.
* * * * *
My plates are something rather special though they are by no means unique. Back toward the end of the Last War, when it was obvious to any realist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangely terrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerked and replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. My plates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth continuous ones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looks closely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, I offer him will be puzzled by the smoothly curved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted on the arm of a compass. Magnetic powder buried in my gums makes for a real nice fit.
This sacrifice was worse than my hat and Mother combined, but I could see the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes, and in this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment, because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razor sharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips but I figure it's worth it. With my dental scimitars I can in a wink bite out a chunk of throat and windpipe or jugular, though I've never had occasion to do so yet.
For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real dodderer, but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. I carefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack.
In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wide and showed me what was left of her own teeth--about two-thirds of them, a patchwork of tartar and gold.
We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching very suspiciously--I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife.
Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am about my baldness, I felt no sensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest and in fact a sort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that have replaced it, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiest sort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia--one-man and one-woman tribes of course. No question but that the scar on the girl's forehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it still added to my interest.
By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other's clothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should--I know I wasn't. It was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and the other interest was simply becoming too great.
* * * * *
We were still automatically careful about how we did things. For instance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneously crouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out of its sheath in one movement, all ready to jump without tripping ourselves if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning down the left pants-leg with a movement almost as swift.
But as I say it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in fact for any kind of effective watchfulness at all. The complexion of the whole situation was changing in a rush. The possibilities of dealing or receiving death--along with the chance of the minor indignity of cannibalism, which some of us practice--were suddenly gone, all gone. It was going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was the time it would be different, this was the time love would last, this was the time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust, this time there would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would be home for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustibly exciting home, and mine for her, for always.
As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me another smooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdle that has slipped down a little on one side.
CHAPTER 2
Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
--Hamlet
When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no flesh against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over and there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from me, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'd screwed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump.
She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to her knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned.
She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamily but with a faint, easy smile.
I smiled back at her.
It was lovely.
Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it.
There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worth noticing really.
But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating, like one mosquito.
When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back, revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her forehead scar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swift though not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and to the left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightened out.
I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it was something we had in common, something that brought us closer. And she shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realize I loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her, that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?
Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, her contemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare, critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to know about the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece of information worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to cover up, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up so that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There were lots of things wrong with her manners.
Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just had some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd been some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized my irritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling that it was.
Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was a reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity for me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or at least being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly.
But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands than a hot breakfast.
Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast, I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds with.
But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you frightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for cultural queers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to make a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can't talk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything (most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to be doubly careful and explicit about everything you do.
* * * * *
This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her other gaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly if not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.
Understand, please, I wasn't showing any of these negative reactions of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stopping smiling. In fact I hadn't stopped smiling, I was playing the game to the hilt.
But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come back and presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, you know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's fine while it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with Urge Number One and you have nothing left to balance it with.
Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously think of killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would be there and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course there were things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, in fact--I was pretty experienced at this business.
* * * * *
For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For a catchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five other buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in that situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep and wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly big the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down together and amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why, at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read some books. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off, we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a bugger named Jerry--at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting, and I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have.
And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set of girlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was.
After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors and speculations about local, national and world events. Was it true that Atlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe? Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla or only nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? Had Manteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still tolerating Zen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped out by plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robot guards they'd left behind--metal guards eight feet tall who tramped across the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love in Pacific Palisades? Did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought by expeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the loot of Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off that principality. Had she rooted out any "observers" lately?--some of the "civilized" communities, the more "scientific" ones, try to maintain a few weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging them elaborately and manning them with one or two impudent characters to whom we give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that was going around that South America and the French Riviera had survived the Last War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider that they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start of the Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, some said) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solely of atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? How many green sunsets had she seen in the last year?
* * * * *
After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, and incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if we felt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well, even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how things were before the Last War (though she was almost too young for that)--about the little things we remembered--the big things were much too dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the little memories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye.
But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anything you'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long we talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the other anything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day, about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at least functional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much against the grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone, about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as a woman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and then circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games I played with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-looking powder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fat chance of my revealing things like that!
And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Our minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better kept buried--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured" communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concrete form. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffused background for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. Oh yes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, of phantom security, but those we could have--almost as many of them, at any rate--without talking.
For instance things were smoothing over already between her and me again and I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with an inoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair with the metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in a way I was. I'd still made no move to get dressed.
She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face was a little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it just the fillip it needed.
But what was going on behind that forehead right now, I asked myself? I felt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottle of White Rock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answers to the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly.
* * * * *
She was telling herself she'd got herself a man again, a man who was adequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), and that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by that kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while.
She was lightly playing around with ideas about how she'd found a home and a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the most gimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same.
She was sizing me up, deciding in detail just what I went for in a woman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused as long as seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation.
She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn't taken any precautions--because we who've escaped hot death against all reasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to the ills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility too. If she should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a real sticky business ahead of her where no man could be trusted for a second.
And because she was thinking of this and because she was obviously a realistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman is basically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and so had always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would be thinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able to understand her predicament quite clearly--and because of that a much sooner danger to her. She was feeling Old Number One Urge starting to grow in her again and wondering whether it mightn't be wisest to give it the hot-house treatment.
That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail. People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimed era, aren't much bothered by it--there must be some sort of blinkers they hand you out along with the key to the city--but in the Deathlands it's a fairly common phenomenon and there's no hiding from it.
* * * * *
Me and my clear mind!--once again it had done me out of days of fun, changed a thoroughly-explored love affair into a one night stand. Oh, there was no question about it, this girl and I were finished, right this minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was this morning and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking.
With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed I swung into a crouch. She was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hovering over the little set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'd lined up neatly on the edge of the blanket--the hook, the comb, a long telescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed a handful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. She'd seen that I'd grabbed it. Our gazes dueled.
There was a high-pitched whine over our heads! Quite loud from the start, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. It swiftly dropped in pitch and volume.
The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed with St. Elmo's fire! Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could see the violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amber daylight.
The whine died away but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed to be coming closer!
This shared threat--for any unexpected event is a threat in the Deathlands and a mysterious event doubly so--put a stop to our murder game. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in a pinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so or to reassure each other of the fact in any way, it was taken for granted. Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us in getting ready for whatever was coming.
First I grabbed up Mother. Then I relieved myself--fear made it easy. Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust the blanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of the freeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised from any quarter.
Meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewed the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarf so it made a sling for the maimed arm--I wondered why but had no time to waste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dull silver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of the haze beyond the cracking plant and came silently drifting down toward us.
The girl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dart gun. I caught her idea and tucked Mother into my pants behind my back.
I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled--I guess it was its silence that gave me the idea. This theory was confirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a corner pillar of the cracking plant. The plane was moving in too slow a glide to be wrecked, in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would have believed possible--but then it's many years since I have seen a plane in flight.
It wasn't wrecked but the little collision spun it around twice in a lazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fifty feet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayed at an odd tilt. It looked crippled all right.
An oval door in the plane opened and a man dropped lightly out on the concrete. And what a man! He was nearer seven feet tall than six, close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of him covered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed as much as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscular yet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly intelligent and even-tempered and kind.
Yes, kind!--damn him! It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glow with a health and vitality that was an insult to our seared skins and stringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrested cancers, he had to look kind too--the sort of man who would put you to bed and take care of you, as if you were some sort of interesting sick fox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you, and all manner of other abominations.
* * * * *
I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still. Fortunately there was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours, the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the man from the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it would be harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to make it obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters.
We didn't run though we covered the ground as fast as we dared--running would have been too much of a give-away too, and the Pilot, which was how I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his right hand. In fact the way we moved was part of our act--I dragged one leg as if it were crippled and the girl faked another sort of limp, one that made her approach a series of half curtsies. Her arm in the sling was all twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showing her breasts--I remember thinking you won't distract this breed bull that way, sister, he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers. I had my head thrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly. Meanwhile the both of us were babbling a blue streak. I was rapidly croaking something like, "Mister for God's sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n I am not a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst his tongue's black'n all swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister dyin'--" and she was singsonging an even worse rigamarole about how "they" were after us from Porter and going to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'd already impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more of the same.
It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense, the babble had a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, which was all that counted. He pointed his gun at me and then I could see him hesitate and I thought exultingly it's a lot of healthy meat you got there, mister, but it's tame meat, mister, tame!
He compromised by taking a step back and sort of hooting at us and waving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs.
It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, and I don't think we'd have been able to do that except that we'd been all set to kill each other when he dropped in. Our muscles and nerves and minds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. And some "civilized" people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute to self-preservation!
* * * * *
We were almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot and I remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you, and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stop dead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took note of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to her she'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot and then try to make my halt even more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. We worked it perfectly, our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners, though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu.
Still, I honestly don't think we'd ever have got to him if it hadn't been for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell, you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quite close enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me for Mother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when there came this sick scream.
I don't know how else to describe it briefly. It was a scream, feminine for choice, it came from some distance and the direction of the old cracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the same time it was weak and almost faltering you might say and squeaky at the end, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked with phlegm. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them.
And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray for in the act of shooting me down he started to turn and look over his shoulder.
Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partly covered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what his gun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just went dead and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like a highschool kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with the knife slipping uselessly away from my fingers.
But in the blessed meanwhile the girl had lunged too, not with a slow slash, thank God, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straight for a point just under his ear.
She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face.
I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet, and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happened to come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh like nothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped would shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata and prevent any dying reprisals on his part.
I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun, and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on the concrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushes the bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck.
Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously not being directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may have had its good points.
* * * * *
The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gun where he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. She snatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of pain, anger, and surprise.
Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tiny incandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around his head and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled up.
Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner dying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowder or ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated on other principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More to the point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culture that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets falling into the hands of strangers.
But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gaze from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like the blood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, we saw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be) his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches from which threads of black smoke were twisting upward.
Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years of learning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (the girl jumped too, I may say)--a voice said, "Done a murder, hey?"
Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the direction of the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-baked Deathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, the rest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried by the sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his boots and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives.
Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went on brightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the hell did you have to set the guy afire?"
CHAPTER 3
We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow.
--The Undiscovered Self, by Carl Jung
Ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until the killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they deserve--wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once. Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn't all been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they will do it, trusting I suppose to the irresistible glamor of their personalities. There were several reasons why we didn't at once give Pop this treatment.
In the first place we didn't neither of us have our distance weapons. My revolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the cave back at the edge of the freeway. And there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happy he lugs them around by the carload--he's generally good at tossing them. With his dozen or so knives Pop definitely outgunned us.
Second, we were both of us without the use of an arm. That's right, the both of us. My right arm still dangled like a string of sausages and I couldn't yet feel any signs of it coming undead. While she'd burned her fingers badly grabbing at the gun--I could see their red-splotched tips now as she pulled them out of her mouth for a second to wipe the Pilot's blood out of her eyes. All she had was her stump with the knife screwed to it. Me, I can throw a knife left-handed if I have to, but you bet I wasn't going to risk Mother that way.
Then I'd no sooner heard Pop's voice, breathy and a little high like an old man's will get, than it occurred to me that he must have been the one who had given the funny scream that had distracted the Pilot's attention and let us get him. Which incidentally made Pop a quick thinker and imaginative to boot, and meant that he'd helped on the killing.
* * * * *
Besides all that, Pop did not come in fawning and full of extravagant praise, as most scroungers will. He just assumed equality with us right from the start and he talked in an absolutely matter-of-fact way, neither praising nor criticizing one bit--too damn matter-of-fact and open, for that matter, to suit my taste, but then I have heard other buggers say that some old men are apt to get talkative, though I had never worked with or run into one myself. Old people are very rare in the Deathlands, as you might imagine.
So the girl and me just scowled at him but did nothing to stop him as he came along. Near us, his extra knives would be no advantage to him.
"Hum," he said, "looks a lot like a guy I murdered five years back down Los Alamos way. Same silver monkey suit and almost as tall. Nice chap too--was trying to give me something for a fever I'd faked. That his gun melted? My man didn't smoke after I gave him his quietus, but then it turned out he didn't have any metal on him. I wonder if this chap--" He started to kneel down by the body.
"Hands off, Pop!" I gritted at him. That was how we started calling him Pop.
"Why sure, sure," he said, staying there on one knee. "I won't lay a finger on him. It's just that I've heard the Alamosers have it rigged so that any metal they're carrying melts when they die, and I was wondering about this boy. But he's all yours, friend. By the way, what's your name, friend?"
"Ray," I snarled. "Ray Baker." I think the main reason I told him was that I didn't want him calling me "friend" again. "You talk too much, Pop."
"I suppose I do, Ray," he agreed. "What's your name, lady?"
The girl just sort of hissed at him and he grinned at me as if to say, "Oh, women!" Then he said, "Why don't you go through his pockets, Ray? I'm real curious."
"Shut up," I said, but I felt that he'd put me on the spot just the same. I was curious about the guy's pockets myself, of course, but I was also wondering if Pop was alone or if he had somebody with him, and whether there was anybody else in the plane or not--things like that, too many things. At the same time I didn't want to let on to Pop how useless my right arm was--if I'd just get a twinge of feeling in that arm, I knew I'd feel a lot more confident fast. I knelt down across the body from him, started to lay Mother aside and then hesitated.
* * * * *
The girl gave me an encouraging look, as if to say, "I'll take care of the old geezer." On the strength of her look I put down Mother and started to pry open the Pilot's left hand, which was clenched in a fist that looked a mite too big to have nothing inside it.
The girl started to edge behind Pop, but he caught the movement right away and looked at her with a grin that was so knowing and yet so friendly, and yet so pitying at the same time--with the pity of the old pro for even the seasoned amateur--that in her place I think I'd have blushed myself, as she did now ... through the streaks of the Pilot's blood.
"You don't have to worry none about me, lady," he said, running a hand through his white hair and incidentally touching the pommel of one of the two knives strapped high on the back of his jacket so he could reach one over either shoulder. "I quit murdering some years back. It got to be too much of a strain on my nerves."
"Oh yeah?" I couldn't help saying as I pried up the Pilot's index finger and started on the next. "Then why the stab-factory, Pop?"
"Oh you mean those," he said, glancing down at his knives. "Well, the fact is, Ray, I carry them to impress buggers dumber than you and the lady here. Anybody wants to think I'm still a practicing murderer I got no objections. Matter of sentiment, too, I just hate to part with them--they bring back important memories. And then--you won't believe this, Ray, but I'm going to tell you just the same--guys just up and give me their knives and I doubly hate to part with a gift."
I wasn't going to say "Oh yeah?" again or "Shut up!" either, though I certainly wished I could turn off Pop's spigot, or thought I did. Then I felt a painful tingling shoot down my right arm. I smiled at Pop and said, "Any other reasons?"
"Yep," he said. "Got to shave and I might as well do it in style. A new blade every day in the fortnight is twice as good as the old ads. You know, it makes you keep a knife in fine shape if you shave with it. What you got there, Ray?"
"You were wrong, Pop," I said. "He did have some metal on him that didn't melt."
I held up for them to see the object I'd extracted from his left fist: a bright steel cube measuring about an inch across each side, but it felt lighter than if it were solid metal. Five of the faces looked absolutely bare. The sixth had a round button recessed in it.
From the way they looked at it neither Pop nor the girl had the faintest idea of what it was. I certainly hadn't.
"Had he pushed the button?" the girl asked. Her voice was throaty but unexpectedly refined, as if she'd done no talking at all, not even to herself, since coming to the Deathlands and so retained the cultured intonations she'd had earlier, whenever and wherever that had been. It gave me a funny feeling, of course, because they were the first words I'd heard her speak.
"Not from the way he was holding it," I told her. "The button was pointed up toward his thumb but the thumb was on the outside of his fingers." I felt an unexpected satisfaction at having expressed myself so clearly and I told myself not to get childish.
The girl slitted her eyes. "Don't you push it, Ray," she said.
"Think I'm nuts?" I told her, meanwhile sliding the cube into the smaller pocket of my pants, where it fit tight and wouldn't turn sideways and the button maybe get pressed by accident. The tingling in my right arm was almost unbearable now, but I was getting control over the muscles again.
"Pushing that button," I added, "might melt what's left of the plane, or blow us all up." It never hurts to emphasize that you may have another weapon in your possession, even if it's just a suicide bomb.
"There was a man pushed another button once," Pop said softly and reflectively. His gaze went far out over the Deathlands and took in a good half of the horizon and he slowly shook his head. Then his face brightened. "Did you know, Ray," he said, "that I actually met that man? Long afterwards. You don't believe me, I know, but I actually did. Tell you about it some other time."
I almost said, "Thanks, Pop, for sparing me at least for a while," but I was afraid that would set him off again. Besides, it wouldn't have been quite true. I've heard other buggers tell the yarn of how they met (and invariably rubbed out) the actual guy who pushed the button or buttons that set the fusion missiles blasting toward their targets, but I felt a sudden curiosity as to what Pop's version of the yarn would be. Oh well, I could ask him some other time, if we both lived that long. I started to check the Pilot's pockets. My right hand could help a little now.
* * * * *
"Those look like mean burns you got there, lady," I heard Pop tell the girl. He was right. There were blisters easy to see on three of the fingertips. "I've got some salve that's pretty good," he went on, "and some clean cloth. I could put on a bandage for you if you wanted. If your hand started to feel poisoned you could always tell Ray here to slip a knife in me."
Pop was a cute gasser, you had to admit. I reminded myself that it was Pop's business to play up to the both of us, charm being the secret weapon of all scroungers.
The girl gave a harsh little laugh. "Very well," she said, "but we will use my salve, I know it works for me." And she started to lead Pop to where we'd hidden our things.
"I'll go with you," I told them, standing up.
It didn't look like we were going to have any more murders today--Pop had got through the preliminary ingratiations pretty well and the girl and me had had our catharsis--but that would be no excuse for any such stupidity as letting the two of them get near my .38.
Strolling to the cave and back I eased the situation a bit more by saying, "That scream you let off, Pop, really helped. I don't know what gave you the idea, but thanks."
"Oh that," he said. "Forget about it."
"I won't," I told him. "You may say you've quit killing, but helped on a do-in today."
"Ray," he said a little solemnly, "if it'll make you feel any happier, I'll take a bit of the responsibility for every murder that's been done since the beginning of time."
I looked at him for a while. Then, "Pop, you're not by any chance the religious type?" I asked suddenly.
"Lord, no," he told us.
That struck me as a satisfactory answer. God preserve me from the religious type! We have quite a few of those in the Deathlands. It generally means that they try to convert you to something before they kill you. Or sometimes afterwards.
We completed our errands. I felt a lot more secure with Old Financier's Friend strapped to my middle. Mother is wonderful but she is not enough.
I dawdled over inspecting the Pilot's pockets, partly to give my right hand time to come back all the way. And to tell the truth I didn't much enjoy the job--a corpse, especially such a handsome cadaver as this, just didn't go with Pop's brand of light patter.
* * * * *
Pop did up the girl's hand in high style, bandaging each finger separately and then persuading her to put on a big left-hand work glove he took out of his small pack.
"Lost the right," he explained, "which was the only one I ever used anyway. Never knew until now why I kept this. How does it feel, Alice?"
I might have known he'd worm her name out of her. It occurred to me that Pop's ideas of scrounging might extend to Alice's favors. The urge doesn't die out when you get old, they tell me. Not completely.
He'd also helped her replace the knife on her stump with the hook.
By that time I'd poked into all the Pilot's pockets I could get at without stripping him and found nothing but three irregularly shaped blobs of metal, still hot to the touch. Under the charred spots, of course.
I didn't want the job of stripping him. Somebody else could do a little work, I told myself. I've been bothered by bodies before (as who hasn't, I suppose?) but this one was really beginning to make me sick. Maybe I was cracking up, it occurred to me. Murder is a very wearing business, as all Deathlanders know, and although some crack earlier than others, all crack in the end.
I must have been showing how I was feeling because, "Cheer up, Ray," Pop said. "You and Alice have done a big murder--I'd say the subject was six foot ten--so you ought to be happy. You've drawn a blank on his pockets but there's still the plane."
"Yeah, that's right," I said, brightening a little. "There's still the stuff in the plane." I knew there were some items I couldn't hope for, like .38 shells, but there'd be food and other things.
"Nuh-uh," Pop corrected me. "I said the plane. You may have thought it's wrecked, but I don't. Have you taken a real gander at it? It's worth doing, believe me."
I jumped up. My heart was suddenly pounding. I was glad of an excuse to get away from the body, but there was a lot more in my feelings than that. I was filled with an excitement to which I didn't want to give a name because it would make the let-down too great.
One of the wide stubby wings of the plane, raking downward so that its tip almost touched the concrete, had hidden the undercarriage of the fuselage from our view. Now, coming around the wing, I saw that there was no undercarriage.
I had to drop to my hands and knees and scan around with my cheek next to the concrete before I'd believe it. The "wrecked" plane was at all points at least six inches off the ground.
* * * * *
I got to my feet again. I was shaking. I wanted to talk but I couldn't. I grabbed the leading edge of the wing to stop from falling. The whole body of the plane gave a fraction of an inch and then resisted my leaning weight with lazy power, just like a gyroscope.
"Antigravity," I croaked, though you couldn't have heard me two feet. Then my voice came back. "Pop, Alice! They got antigravity! Antigravity--and it's working!"
Alice had just come around the wing and was facing me. She was shaking too and her face was white like I knew mine was. Pop was politely standing off a little to one side, watching us curiously. "Told you you'd won a real prize," he said in his matter-of-fact way.
Alice wet her lips. "Ray," she said, "we can get away."
Just those four words, but they did it. Something in me unlocked--no, exploded describes it better.
"We can go places!" I almost shouted.
"Beyond the dust," she said. "Mexico City. South America!" She was forgetting the Deathlander's cynical article of belief that the dust never ends, but then so was I. It makes a difference whether or not you've got a means of doing something.
"Rio!" I topped her with. "The Indies. Hong Kong. Bombay. Egypt. Bermuda. The French Riviera!"
"Bullfights and clean beds," she burst out with. "Restaurants. Swimming pools. Bathrooms!"
"Skindiving," I took it up with, as hysterical as she was. "Road races and roulette tables."
"Bentleys and Porsches!"
"Aircoups and DC4s and Comets!"
"Martinis and hashish and ice cream sodas!"
"Hot food! Fresh coffee! Gambling, smoking, dancing, music, drinks!" I was going to add women, but then I thought of how hard-bitten little Alice would look beside the dream creatures I had in mind. I tactfully suppressed the word but I filed the idea away.
I don't think either of us knew exactly what we were saying. Alice in particular I don't believe was old enough to have experienced almost any of the things the words referred to. They were mysterious symbols of long-interdicted delights spewing out of us.
"Ray," Alice said, hurrying to me, "let's get aboard."
"Yes," I said eagerly and then I saw a little problem. The door to the plane was a couple of feet above our heads. Whoever hoisted himself up first--or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with Alice on account of her hand--would be momentarily at the other's mercy. I guess it occurred to Alice too because she stopped and looked at me. It was a little like the old teaser about the fox, the goose, and the corn.
Maybe, too, we were both a little scared the plane was booby-trapped.
* * * * *
Pop solved the problem in the direct way I might have expected of him by stepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catching hold of the curving sill, chinning himself on it, and scrambling up into the plane so quickly that we'd hardly have had time to do anything about it if we'd wanted to. Pop couldn't be much more than a bantamweight, even with all his knives. The plane sagged an inch and then swung up again.
As Pop disappeared from view I backed off, reaching for my .38, but a moment later he stuck out his head and grinned down at us, resting his elbows on the sill.
"Come on up," he said. "It's quite a place. I promise not to push any buttons 'til you get here, though there's whole regiments of them."
I grinned back at Pop and gave Alice a boost up. She didn't like it, but she could see it had to be her next. She hooked onto the sill and Pop caught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved.
Then it was my turn. I didn't like it. I didn't like the idea of those two buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on the sill. But I thought Pop's a nut. You can trust a nut, at least a little ways, though you can't trust nobody else. I heaved myself up. It was strange to feel the plane giving and then bracing itself like something alive. It seemed to have no trouble accepting our combined weight, which after all was hardly more than half again the Pilot's.
* * * * *
Inside the cabin was pretty small but as Pop had implied, oh my! Everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine your insides being, and almost everything was a restfully dull silver. The general shape of it was something like the inside of an egg. Forward, which was the larger end, were a couple of screens and a wide viewport and some small dials and the button brigades Pop had mentioned, lined up like blank typewriter keys but enough for writing Chinese.
Just aft of the instrument panel were two very comfortable-looking strange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realized they were meant to be knelt into. The occupant, I could see, would sort of sprawl forward, his hands free for button-pushing and such. There were spongy chinrests.
Aft was a tiny instrument panel and a kind of sideways seat, not nearly so fancy. The door by which we'd entered was to the side, a little aft.
I didn't see any indications of cabinets or fixed storage spaces of any kinds, but somehow stuck to the walls here and there were quite a few smooth blobby packages, mostly dull silver too, some large, some small--valises and handbags, you might say.
All in all, it was a lovely cabin and, more than that, it seemed lived in. It looked as if it had been shaped for, and maybe by one man. It had a personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own.
Then I realized whose personality it was. I almost got sick--so close to it I started telling myself it must be something antigravity did to your stomach.
But it was all too interesting to let you get sick right away. Pop was poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting loose and open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One had a folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. The second had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes such as I'd pried out of the Pilot's hand, all neatly stacked in a cubical box inside the soft outer bag. You could see the one-cube gap where he'd taken the one.
I decided to take the rest of the bags off the walls and open them, if I could figure out how. The others had the same idea, but Alice had to take off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress. Pop helped her. There was room enough for us to do these things without crowding each other too closely.
By the time Alice was set to go I'd discovered the trick of getting the bags off. You couldn't pull them away from the wall no matter what force you used, at least I couldn't, and you couldn't even slide them straight along the walls, but if you just gave them a gentle counterclockwise twist they came off like nothing. Twisting them clockwise glued them back on. It was very strange, but I told myself that if these boys could generate antigravity fields they could create screwy fields of other sorts.
It also occurred to me to wonder if "these boys" came from Earth. The Pilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn't--not by my standards for human achievement in the Age of the Deaders. At any rate I had to admit to myself that my pet term "cultural queer" did not describe to my own satisfaction members of a culture which could create things like this cabin. Not that I liked making the admission. It's hard to admit an exception to a pet gripe against things.
The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages saved me from speculating too much along these or any other lines.
I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, a catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a saw-tooth back edge that made my affection for Mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact water-filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe Deathlands Survival Kit.
There were some goggles in the kit I didn't savvy until I put them on and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knew to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow! Those specs had Geiger counters beat a mile and I privately bet myself they worked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick.
* * * * *
We found bunches of tiny electronics parts--I think they were; spools of magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrow film with frames much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about three thousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty--we lit up quick, using my new lighter; a picture book that didn't make much sense because the views might have been of tissue sections or starfields, we couldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin book with ricepaper pages covered with Chinese characters--that was a puzzler; a thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who'd make a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item--I might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect "Turkey in the Straw" at odd moments.
Alice found a whole bag of what were women's things judging from the frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packs and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise against herself when she thought we weren't looking; it was for a girl maybe six sizes bigger.
* * * * *
And we found food. Cans of food that was heated up inside by the time you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool to the touch. Cans of boneless steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes--they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too--in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them.
At that point as you can imagine we let the rest of the packages go and had ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It was real hard for me not to gorge.
Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee I happened to look out the viewport and see the Pilot's body and the darkening puddle around it and the coffee began to taste, well, not bad, but sickening. I don't think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those if they ever have them to start with; loners don't keep consciences--it takes cultures to give you those and make them work. Artistic inappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what bothered me. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute.
About the same time Alice did an odd thing with the last of her coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guess she'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn't eat any more after that either. Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder and appreciative.
To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel and right away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me. They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the World. The first one was a whole lot like the map I'd been imagining earlier--faint colors marked the small "civilized" areas including one in Eastern Canada and another in Upper Michigan that must be "countries" I didn't know about, and the Deathlands were real dark just as I'd always maintained they should be!
South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be where we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areas representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter than the others--they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue, Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I expected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole lot bigger than I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along the coast, though its red didn't have the extra glow. But its growth-pattern reeked of imperialism.
* * * * *
The World screen showed dim color patches too, but for the moment I was more interested in the other.
The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screens and right away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots on the map. Push the button for a certain spot and the plane would go there! Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around it (or else my eyes were going bad) as if to say, "Push me and we go to Atlantic Highlands."
A crazy notion as I say and no sensible way to handle a plane's navigation according to any standards I could imagine, but then as I've also said this plane didn't seem to be designed according to any standards but rather in line with one man's ideas, including his whims.
At any rate that was my hunch about the buttons and the screens. It tantalized rather than helped, for the only button that seemed to be marked in any way was the one (guessing by color) for Atlantic Highlands, and I certainly didn't want to go there. Like Alamos, Atla-Hi has the reputation for being a mysteriously dangerous place. Not openly mean and death-on-Deathlanders like Walla Walla or Porter, but buggers who swing too close to Atla-Hi have a way of never turning up again. You never expect to see again two out of three buggers who pass in the night, but for three out of three to keep disappearing is against statistics.
Alice was beside me now, scanning things over too, and from the way she frowned and what not I gathered she had caught my hunch and also shared my puzzlement.
Now was the time, all right, when we needed an instruction manual and not one in Chinese neither!
Pop swallowed a mouthful and said, "Yep, now'd be a good time to have him back for a minute, to explain things a bit. Oh, don't take offense, Ray, I know how it was for you and for you too, Alice. I know the both of you had to murder him, it wasn't a matter of free choice, it's the way us Deathlanders are built. Just the same, it'd be nice to have a way of killing 'em and keeping them on hand at the same time. I remember feeling that way after murdering the Alamoser I told you about. You see, I come down with the very fever I'd faked and almost died of it, while the man who could have cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume the landscape with the help of a gang of anaerobic bacteria. Stubborn single-minded cuss!"
* * * * *
The first part of that oration started up my sickness again and irked me not a little. Dammit, what right had Pop to talk about how all us Deathlanders had to kill (which was true enough and by itself would have made me cotton to him) if as he'd claimed earlier he'd been able to quit killing? Pop was, an old hypocrite, I told myself--he'd helped murder the Pilot, he'd admitted as much--and Alice and me'd be better off if we bedded the both of them down together. But then the second part of what Pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for myself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer. Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanity about it.
So it was Alice who said, "Shut up, Pop"--and rather casually at that--and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which buttons we ought to push, if any and in what order.
"Why not just start anywhere and keep pushing 'em one after another?--you're going to have to eventually, may as well start now," was Pop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion. "Got to take some chances in this life." He was sitting in the back seat and still nibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel.
Of course Alice and me knew more than that. We kept making guesses as to how the buttons worked and then backing up our guesses with hot language. It was a little like two savages trying to decide how to play chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradise theme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on the World screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest accommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen too there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to take in old Mexico City and Acapulco too.
"Quit talking and start pushing," Pop prodded us. "This way you're getting nowhere fast. I can't stand hesitation, it riles my nerves."
Alice thought you ought to push ten buttons at once, using both hands, and she was working out patterns for me to try. But I was off on a kick about how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttons glowed beside the one with the Atla-Hi violet.
"Look here, you killed a big man to get this plane," Pop broke in, coming up behind me. "Are you going to use it for discussion groups or are you going to fly it?"
"Quiet," I told him. I'd got a new hunch and was using the dark glasses to scan the instrument panel. They didn't show anything.
"Dammit, I can't stand this any more," Pop said and reached a hand and arm between us and brought it down on about fifty buttons, I'd judge.
The other buttons just went down and up, but the Atla-Hi button went down and stayed down.
The violet blob of Atla-Hi on the screen got even brighter in the next few moments.
The door closed with a tiny thud.
We took off.
CHAPTER 4
Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles.
--Thomas de Quincey in Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
For that matter we took off fast with the plane swinging to beat hell. Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, but Pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while--and serve him right!
On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks, looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orange haze and getting rapidly smaller as they hazed out.
After a while the plane levelled off and quit swinging, and a while after that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. Once again I just managed to stave off the vomits, this time the vomits from natural causes. Alice looked very pale around the gills and kept her face buried in the chinrest of her chair.
Pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagled against the instrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced his hands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed that none of them went down a fraction. They were locked. It had probably happened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed.
I'd have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with the ultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happy just not to be smelling him so close.
I still wasn't taking too great an interest in things as I idly watched the old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that got misplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it--a small almond-shaped can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. He fitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!
"Nothing like a few nuts to top off with," he said cheerfully.
I could have cut his throat even more cheerfully, but the damage had been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarters when you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body. How did I know I'd be able to open the door? I remember philosophizing that Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he'd be as badly off as Alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recovered now) but he was all in one piece. There's no justice in events, that's for sure.
The plane ploughed along silently through the orange soup, though there was really no way to tell it was moving now--until a skewy spindle shape loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a vulture. I don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which ought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. It shot past fast.
Alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuff and began to study the buttons again. I heaved myself up and around a little and said, "Pop, Alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. This time we don't want no interference." I didn't say a word more about what he'd done. It never does to hash over stupidities.
"That's perfectly fine, go right ahead," he told me. "I feel calm as a kitten now we're going somewheres. That's all that ever matters with me." He chuckled a bit and added, "You got to admit I gave you and Alice something to work with," but then he had the sense to shut up tight.
* * * * *
We weren't so chary of pushing buttons this time, but ten minutes or so convinced us that you couldn't push any of the buttons any more, they were all locked down--all locked except for maybe one, which we didn't try at first for a special reason.
We looked for other controls--sticks, levers, pedals, finger-holes and the like. There weren't any. Alice went back and tried the buttons on Pop's minor console. They were locked too. Pop looked interested but didn't say a word.
We realized in a general way what had happened, of course. Pushing the Atla-Hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. I couldn't imagine the why of gimmicking a plane's controls like that, unless maybe to keep loose children or prisoners from being able to mess things up while the pilot took a snooze, but there were a lot of whys to this plane that didn't seem to have any standard answers.
The business of taking off on irreversible automatic had happened so neatly that I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more about navigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the seemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a shrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been acting he'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances of breaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could think about later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked through the more obvious stuff.
The reason we hadn't tried the one button yet was that it showed a green nimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now there was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star that I had figured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to go where we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place not shown on the screens, you bet we weren't going to be too quick about deciding to go there. It might not be on Earth.
Alice expressed it by saying, "My namesake was always a little too quick at responding to those DRINK ME cues."
I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "Alice in Wonderland?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at all like one of the EAT ME smiles she'd given me last evening.
It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual past like that can make you feel--and how horribly uncomfortable a moment later.
We both started to study the North America screen again and almost at once we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The green star had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light there were now two, very close together like the double star in the handle of the Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the two stars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer, considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the more westerly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was moving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began to make sense.
* * * * *
I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, the other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For some reason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognized as a marked locality by the screen. Why I don't know. It reminded me of the old "X Marks the Spot" of newspaper murders, but that would be getting very fancy. Anyway the spot we'd just taken off from was so marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus ...
"Hold tight, everybody," I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in my warning. "I got to try it."
I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the green button. It pushed.
The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the stomach much, and steadied out again.
I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the green stars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer," and a little while later I said, "Yeah, for sure."
I scanned the board. The green button--the cracking-plant button, to call it that--was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up, glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and locked up--I tried them all again.
* * * * *
It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or we could go back where we'd started from. There was no third possibility.
It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, as something that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go, especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than if you'd stayed on the ground--at least that was the way it was happening to us.
But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn't help to wail. We were up against another of those "two" problems, the problem of two destinations, and we had to choose ours.
If we go back, I thought, we can trek on somewhere--anywhere--richer by the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on with some loot we'll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that we are leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from an unknown adventure.
Also if we go back there's something else we'll have to face, something we'll have to live with for a little while at least that won't be nice to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn't bother me at all but, dammit, it does.
Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she was thinking about the same thing as me.
"I don't want to have to smell him, Ray," she said. "I am not going back to keep company with that filthy corpse. I'd rather anything than that." And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started to swing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I'd reverse the course again over her dead body.
"Don't tense up," I told her. "I want a new shake of the dice myself."
"You know, Alice," Pop said reflectively, "it was the smell of my Alamoser got to me too. I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't get away from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left for me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My mind died, though not my memory. By the time I'd got my strength back I'd started to be a new bugger. I didn't know no more about living than a newborn babe, except I knew I couldn't go back--go back to murdering and all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a blank. It was all very funny."
"And then I suppose," Alice cut in, her voice corrosive with sarcasm, "you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit who lived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!"
"Why no, Alice," Pop said. "I told you I don't go for religion. As it happens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse cases then myself but who'd wanted to quit because it wasn't getting them nowhere and who'd found, I'd heard, a way of quitting, and the three of us had a long talk together."
"And they told you the great secret of how to live in the Deathlands without killing," Alice continued acidly. "Drop the nonsense, Pop. It can't be done."
"It's hard, I'll grant you," Pop said. "You have to go crazy or something almost as bad--in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way. But it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder."
* * * * *
I decided to interrupt this idle chatter. Since we were now definitely headed for Atla-Hi and there was nothing to do until we got there, unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time to start on the less obvious stuff I'd tabled in my mind.
"Why are you on this plane, Pop?" I asked sharply. "What do you figure on getting out of Alice and me?--and I don't mean the free meals."
He grinned. His teeth were white and even--plates, of course. "Why, Ray," he said, "I was just giving Alice the reason. I like to talk to murderers, practicing murderers preferred. I need to--have to talk to 'em, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing again and I'm not up to that any more."
"Oh, so you get your kicks at second hand, you old peeper," Alice put in but, "Quit lying, Pop," I said. "About having quit killing, for one thing. In my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, the accomplice is every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. You helped us kill the Pilot by giving that funny scream and you know it."
"Who says I did?" Pop countered, rearing up a little. "I never said so. I just said, 'Forget it.'" He hesitated a moment, studying me. Then he said, "I wasn't the one gave that scream. In fact, I'd have stopped it if I'd been able."
"Who did then?"
Again he studied me as he hesitated. "I'm not telling," he said, settling back.
"Pop!" I said, sharp again. "Buggers who pad together tell everything."
"Oh yeah," he agreed, smiling. "I remember saying that to quite a few guys in my day. It's a very restful comradely sentiment. I killed every last one of 'em, too."
"You may have, Pop," I granted, "but we're two to one."
"So you are," he agreed softly, looking the both of us over. I knew what he was thinking--that Alice still had just her pliers on and that in these close quarters his knives were as good as my gun.
"Give me your right hand, Alice," I said. Without taking my eyes off Pop I reached the knife without a handle out of her belt and then I started to unscrew the pliers out of her stump.
"Pop," I said as I did so, "you may have quit killing for all I know. I mean you may have quit killing clean decent Deathland style. But I don't believe one bit of that guff about having to talk to murderers to keep your mind sweet. Furthermore--"
"It's true though," he interrupted. "I got to keep myself reminded of how lousy it feels to be a murderer."
"So?" I said. "Well, here's one person who believes you've got a more practical reason for being on this plane. Pop, what's the bounty Atla-Hi gives you for every Deathlander you bring in? What would it be for two live Deathlanders? And what sort of reward would they pay for a lost plane brought in? Seems to me they might very well make you a citizen for that."
"Yes, even give you your own church," Alice added with a sort of wicked gaiety. I squeezed her stump gently to tell her let me handle it.
"Why, I guess you can believe that if you want to," Pop said and let out a soft breath. "Seems to me you need a lot of coincidences and happenstances to make that theory hold water, but you sure can believe it if you want to. I got no way, Ray, to prove to you I'm telling the truth except to say I am."
"Right," I said and then I threw the next one at him real fast. "What's more, Pop, weren't you traveling in this plane to begin with? That cuts a happenstance. Didn't you hop out while we were too busy with the Pilot to notice and just pretend to be coming from the cracking plant? Weren't the buttons locked because you were the Pilot's prisoner?"
* * * * *
Pop creased his brow thoughtfully. "It could have been that way," he said at last. "Could have been--according to the evidence as you saw it. It's quite a bright idea, Ray. I can almost see myself skulking in this cabin, while you and Alice--"
"You were skulking somewhere," I said. I finished screwing in the knife and gave Alice back her hand. "I'll repeat it, Pop," I said. "We're two to one. You'd better talk."
"Yes," Alice added, disregarding my previous hint. "You may have given up fighting, Pop, but I haven't. Not fighting, nor killing, nor anything in between those two. Any least thing." My girl was being her most pantherish.
"Now who says I've given up fighting?" Pop demanded, rearing a little again. "You people assume too much, it's a dangerous habit. Before we have any trouble and somebody squawks about me cheating, let's get one thing straight. If anybody jumps me I'll try to disable them, I'll try to hurt them in any way short of killing, and that means hamstringing and rabbit-punching and everything else. Every least thing, Alice. And if they happen to die while I'm honestly just trying to hurt them in a way short of killing, then I won't grieve too much. My conscience will be reasonably clear. Is that understood?"
I had to admit that it was. Pop might be lying about a lot of things, but I just didn't believe he was lying about this. And I already knew Pop was quick for his age and strong enough. If Alice and me jumped him now there'd be blood let six different ways. You can't jump a man who has a dozen knives easy to hand and not expect that to happen, two to one or not. We'd get him in the end but it would be gory.
* * * * *
"And now," Pop said quietly, "I will talk a little if you don't mind. Look here, Ray ... Alice ... the two of you are confirmed murderers, I know you wouldn't tell me nothing different, and being such you both know that there's nothing in murder in the long run. It satisfies a hunger and maybe gets you a little loot and it lets you get on to the next killing. But that's all, absolutely all. Yet you got to do it because it's the way you're built. The urge is there, it's an overpowering urge, and you got nothing to oppose it with. You feel the Big Grief and the Big Resentment, the dust is eating at your bones, you can't stand the city squares--the Porterites and Mantenors and such--because you know they're whistling in the dark and it's a dirty tune, so you go on killing. But if there were a decent practical way to quit, you'd take it. At least I think you would. When you still thought this plane could take you to Rio or Europe you felt that way, didn't you? You weren't planning to go there as murderers, were you? You were going to leave your trade behind."
It was pretty quiet in the cabin for a couple of seconds. Then Alice's thin laugh sliced the silence. "We were dreaming then," she said. "We were out of our heads. But now you're talking about practical things, as you say. What do you expect us to do if we quit our trade, as you call it--go into Walla Walla or Ouachita and give ourselves up? I might lose more than my right hand at Ouachita this time--that was just on suspicion."
"Or Atla-Hi," I added meaningfully. "Are you expecting us to admit we're murderers when we get to Atla-Hi, Pop?"
The old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes. "Now that wouldn't accomplish much, would it? Most places they'd just string you up, maybe after tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was Manteno they might put you in a cage and feed you slops and pray over you, and would that help you or anybody else? If a man or woman quits killing there's a lot of things he's got to straighten out--first his own mind and feelings, next he's got to do what he can to make up for the murders he's done--help the next of kin if any and so on--then he's got to carry the news to other killers who haven't heard it yet. He's got no time to waste being hanged. Believe me, he's got work lined up for him, work that's got to be done mostly in the Deathlands, and it's the sort of work the city squares can't help him with one bit, because they just don't understand us murderers and what makes us tick. We have to do it ourselves."
* * * * *
"Hey, Pop," I cut in, getting a little interested in the argument (there wasn't anything else to get interested in until we got to Atla-Hi or Pop let down his guard), "I dig you on the city squares (I call 'em cultural queers) and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the same for a man to quit killing he's got to quit lone-wolfing it. He's got to belong to a community, he's got to have a culture of some sort, no matter how disgusting or nutsy."
"Well," Pop said, "don't us Deathlanders have a culture? With customs and folkways and all the rest? A very tight little culture, in fact. Nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it."
"Oh sure," I granted him, "but it's a culture based on murder and devoted wholly to murder. Murder is our way of life. That gets your argument nowhere, Pop."
"Correction," he said. "Or rather, re-interpretation." And now for a little while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, as if it were more than just Pop talking. "Every culture," he said, "is a way of growth as well as a way of life, because the first law of life is growth. Our Deathland culture is devoted to growing through murder away from murder. That's my thought. It's about the toughest way of growth anybody was ever asked to face up to, but it's a way of growth just the same. A lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure out the answer to the problem of war and killing--we know that, all right, we inhabit their grandest failure. Maybe us Deathlanders, working with murder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of every one of us, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do--maybe us Deathlanders are the ones to do that little job."
"But hell, Pop," I objected, getting excited in spite of myself, "even if we got a culture here in the Deathlands, a culture that can grow, it ain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. In a real culture a murderer feels guilty and confesses and then he gets hanged or imprisoned a long time and that squares things for him and everybody. You need religion and courts and hangmen and screws and all the rest of it. I don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry and go around glad-handing other killers--that isn't going to be enough to wipe out his sense of guilt."
Pop squared his eyes at mine. "Are you so fancy that you have to have a sense of guilt, Ray?" he demanded. "Can't you just see when something's lousy? A sense of guilt's a luxury. Of course it's not enough to say you're sorry--you're going to have to spend a good part of the rest of your life making up for what you've done ... and what you will do, too! But about hanging and prisons--was it ever proved those were the right thing for murderers? As for religion now--some of us who've quit killing are religious and a lot of us (me included) aren't; and some of the ones that are religious figure (maybe because there's no way for them to get hanged) that they're damned eternally--but that doesn't stop them doing good work. I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?"
That did it, somehow. That last statement of Pop's appealed so much to me and was completely crazy at the same time, that I couldn't help warming up to him. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really fall for his line of chatter at all, but I found it fun to go along with it--so long as the plane was in this shuttle situation and we had nothing better to do.
Alice seemed to feel the same way. I guess any bugger that could kid religion the way Pop could got a little silver star in her books. Bronze, anyway.
* * * * *
Right away the atmosphere got easier. To start with we asked Pop to tell us about this "us" he kept mentioning and he said it was some dozens (or hundreds--nobody had accurate figures) of killers who'd quit and went nomading around the Deathlands trying to recruit others and help those who wanted to be helped. They had semi-permanent meeting places where they tried to get together at pre-arranged dates, but mostly they kept on the go, by twos and threes or--more rarely--alone. They were all men so far, at least Pop hadn't heard of any women members, but--he assured Alice earnestly--he would personally guarantee that there would be no objections to a girl joining up. They had recently taken to calling themselves Murderers Anonymous, after some pre-war organization Pop didn't know the original purpose of. Quite a few of them had slipped and gone back to murdering again, but some of these had come back after a while, more determined than ever to make a go of it.
"We welcomed 'em, of course," Pop said. "We welcome everybody. Everybody that's a genuine murderer, that is, and says he wants to quit. Guys that aren't blooded yet we draw the line at, no matter how fine they are."
Also, "We have a lot of fun at our meetings," Pop assured us. "You never saw such high times. Nobody's got a right to go glooming around or pull a long face just because he's done a killing or two. Religion or no religion, pride's a sin."
Alice and me ate it all up like we was a couple of kids and Pop was telling us fairy tales. That's what it all was, of course, a fairy tale--a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. Alice and me knew there could be no fellowship of Deathlanders like Pop was describing--it was impossible as blue sky--but it gave us a kick to pretend to ourselves for a while to believe in it.
* * * * *
Pop could talk forever, apparently, about murder and murderers and he had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and character vignettes--the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to understand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as little kings with divine rights of dispensing death, the ones who insisted on laying down (chastely) beside their finished victims and playing dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, the ones who could only do their killings when they were dressed a certain way (and the troubles they had with their murder costumes), the ones who could only kill people with certain traits or of a certain appearance (red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn't carry tunes, or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder and the ones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath of sex, the sticklers and the Sloppy Joes, the artists and the butchers, the ax- and stiletto-types, the compulsives and the repulsives--honestly, Pop's portraits from life added up to a Dance of Death as good as anything the Middle Ages ever produced and they ought to have been illustrated like those by some great artist. Pop told us a lot about his own killings too. Alice and me was interested, but neither of us wasn't tempted into making parallel revelations about ourselves. Your private life's your own business, I felt, as close as your guts, and no joke's good enough to justify revealing a knot of it.
Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulleting along toward Atla-Hi. The conversation was free-wheeling and we got onto all sorts of topics. For instance, we got to talking about the plane and how it flew itself--or levitated itself, rather. I said it must generate an antigravity field that was keyed to the body of the plane but nothing else, so that we didn't feel lighter, nor any of the objects in the cabin--it just worked on the dull silvery metal--and I proved my point by using Mother to shave a little wisp of metal off the edge of the control board. The curlicue stayed in the air wherever you put it and when you moved it you could feel the faintest sort of gyroscopic resistance. It was very strange.
Pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism. A germ riding on an iron filing that was traveling toward the pole of a big magnet wouldn't feel the magnetic pull--it wouldn't be operating on him, only on the iron--but just the same the germ'd be carried along with the filing and feel its acceleration and all, provided he could hold on--but for that purpose you could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing. "That's what we are," Pop added. "Three germs, jumbo size."
Alice wanted to know why an antigravity plane should have even the stubbiest wings or a jet for that matter, for we remembered now we'd noticed the tubes, and I said it was maybe just a reserve system in case the antigravity failed and Pop guessed it might be for extra-fast battle maneuvering or even for operating outside the atmosphere (which hardly made sense, as I proved to him).
"If we're a battle plane, where's our guns?" Alice asked. None of us had an answer.
We remembered the noise the plane had made before we saw it. It must have been using its jets then. "And do you suppose," Pop asked, "that it was something from the antigravity that made electricity flare out of the top of the cracking plant? Like to have scared the pants off me!" No answer to that either.
Now was a logical time, of course, to ask Pop what he knew about the cracking plant and just who had done the scream if not him, but I figured he still wouldn't talk; as long as we were acting friendly there was no point in spoiling it.
* * * * *
We guessed around a little, though, about where the plane came from. Pop said Alamos, I said Atla-Hi, Alice said why not from both, why couldn't Alamos and Atla-Hi have some sort of treaty and the plane be traveling from the one to the other. We agreed it might be. At least it fitted with the Atla-Hi violet and the Alamos blue being brighter than the other colors.
"I just hope we got some sort of anti-collision radar," I said. I guessed we had, because twice we'd jogged in our course a little, maybe to clear the Alleghenies. The easterly green star was by now getting pretty close to the violet blot of Atla-Hi. I looked out at the orange soup, which was one thing that hadn't changed a bit so far, and I got to wishing like a baby that it wasn't there and to thinking how it blanketed the whole Earth (stars over the Riviera?--don't make me laugh!) and I heard myself asking, "Pop, did you rub out that guy that pushed the buttons for all this?"
"Nope," Pop answered without hesitation, just as if it hadn't been four hours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "Nope, Ray. Fact is I welcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. This is his knife here, this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killed with it. He claimed he'd been tortured for years by the thought of the millions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation, but now he was finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with the murderers, and could start to do something about it. Several of the boys didn't want to let him in. They claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doing it by remote control, no matter how many he bumped off."
"I'd have been on their side," Alice said, thinning her lips.
"Yep," Pop continued, "they got real hot about it. He got hot too and all excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his bare hands right off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he had to do to join. We argued it over, I pointed out that we let ex-soldiers count the killings they'd done in service, and that we counted poisonings and booby traps and such too--which are remote-control killings in a way--so eventually we let him in. He's doing good work. We're fortunate to have him."
"Do you think he's really the guy who pushed the buttons?" I asked Pop.
"How should I know?" Pop replied. "He claims to be."
I was going to say something about people who faked confessions to get a little easy glory, as compared to the guys who were really guilty and would sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment a fourth voice started talking in the plane. It seemed to be coming out of the violet patch on the North America screen. That is, it came from the general direction of the screen at any rate and my mind instantly tied it to the violet patch at Atla-Hi. It gave us a fright, I can tell you. Alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder than she'd intended, I suppose, though I didn't let out a yip--I was too defensively frozen.
* * * * *
The voice was talking a language I didn't understand at all that went up and down the scale like atonal music.
"Sounds like Chinese," Pop whispered, giving me a nudge.
"It is Chinese. Mandarin," the screen responded instantly in the purest English--at least that was how I'd describe it. Practically Boston. "Who are you? And where is Grayl? Come in, Grayl."
I knew well enough who Grayl must be--or rather, have been. I looked at Pop and Alice. Pop grinned, maybe a mite feebly this time, I thought, and gave me a look as if to say, "You want to handle it?"
I cleared my throat. Then, "We've taken over for Grayl," I said to the screen.
"Oh." The screen hesitated, just barely. Then, "Do any of 'you' speak Mandarin?"
I hardly bothered to look at Pop and Alice. "No," I said.
"Oh." Again a tiny pause. "Is Grayl aboard the plane?"
"No." I said.
"Oh. Incapacitated in some way, I suppose?"
"Yes," I said, grateful for the screen's tactfulness, unintentional or not.
"But you have taken over for him?" the screen pressed.
"Yes," I said, swallowing. I didn't know what I was getting us into, things were moving too fast, but it seemed the merest sense to act cooperative.
"I'm very glad of that," the screen said with something in its tone that made me feel funny--I guess it was sincerity. Then it said, "Is the--" and hesitated, and started again with "Are the blocks aboard?"
I thought. Alice pointed at the stuff she dumped out of the other seat. I said. "There's a box with a thousand or so one-inch underweight steel cubes in it. Like a child's blocks, but with buttons in them. Alongside a box with a parachute."
"That's what I mean," the screen said and somehow, maybe because whoever was talking was trying to hide it, I caught a note of great relief.
"Look," the screen said, more rapidly now, "I don't know how much you know, but we may have to work very fast. You aren't going to be able to deliver the steel cubes to us directly. In fact you aren't going to be able to land in Atlantic Highlands at all. We're sieged in by planes and ground forces of Savannah Fortress. All our aircraft, such as haven't been destroyed, are pinned down. You're going to have to parachute the blocks to a point as near as possible to one of our ground parties that's made a sortie. We'll give you a signal. I hope it will be later--nearer here, that is--but it may be sooner. Do you know how to fight the plane you're in? Operate its armament?"
"No," I said, wetting my lip.
"Then that's the first thing I'd best teach you. Anything you see in the haze from now on will be from Savannah. You must shoot it down."
CHAPTER 5
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold
I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened the next half hour because there was too much of it and it involved all three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'm still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of vastly greater scope--and probably intelligence too--than ourselves.
And that was just the basic confusion, to give it a name. After a while the situation got more difficult, as I'll try to tell in due course.
* * * * *
To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurely confab about a fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers into a shooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowy fluorescent map. The voice didn't throw any great shining lights on this topic, because after the first--and perhaps unguarded--revelation, we learned little more of the war between Atla-Hi and Savannah Fortress and nothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor, reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham, but even that was just a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me; there were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thing with what I'd read long ago about the Civil War: Savannah was Lee, Atla-Hi was Grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of the second Battle of the Wilderness.
Apparently the Savannah planes had some sort of needle ray as part of their armament--at any rate I was warned to watch out for "swinging lines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars" and later told to aim at the sources of such lines. And naturally I guessed that the steel cubes must be some crucial weapon for Atla-Hi, or ammunition for a weapon, or parts for some essential instrument like a giant computer, but the voice ignored my questions on that point and didn't fall into the couple of crude conversational traps I tried to set. We were to drop the cubes when told, that was all. Pop had the box of them closed again and rigged to the parachute--he took over that job because Alice and me were busy with other things when the instructions on that came through--and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop (you just held your hand steadily on a point beside the door), but, as I say, that was all.
Naturally it occurred to me that once we had made the drop, Atla-Hi would have no more use for us and might simply let us be destroyed by Savannah or otherwise--perhaps want us to be destroyed--so that it might be wisest for us to refuse to make the drop when the signal came and hang onto those myriad steel cubes as our only bargaining point. Still, I could see no advantage to refusing before the signal came. I'd have liked to discuss the point with Alice and maybe Pop too, but apparently everything we said, even whispered, could be overheard by Atla-Hi. (We never did determine, incidentally, whether Atla-Hi could see into the cabin of the plane also. I don't believe they could, though they sure had it bugged for sound.)
All in all, we found out almost nothing about Atla-Hi. In fact, three witless germs traveling in a cabin in an iron filing wasn't a bad description of us at all. As I often say of my deductive faculties--think--shmink! But Atla-Hi (always meaning, of course, the personality behind the voice from the screen) found out all it wanted about us--and apparently knew a good deal to start with. For one thing, they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because they guessed it was on automatic and that we could reverse its course but nothing else. Though they seemed under the impression that we could reverse its course to Los Alamos, not the cracking plant. Here obviously I did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one. For a moment the voice from the screen got real unguarded--anxious as it asked, "Do you know if it is true that they have stopped dying at Los Alamos, or are they merely broadcasting that to cheer us up?"
I answered, "Oh yes, they're all fine," to that, but I couldn't have made it very convincing, because the next thing I knew the voice was getting me to admit that we'd only boarded the plane somewhere in the Central Deathlands. I even had to describe the cracking plant and freeway and gas tanks--I couldn't think of a lie that mightn't get us into as much trouble as the truth--and the voice said, "Oh, did Grayl stay there?" and I said, "Yes," and braced myself to do some more admitting, or some heavy lying, as the inspiration took me.
But the voice continued to skirt around the question of what exactly had happened to Grayl. I guess they knew well enough we'd bumped him off, but didn't bring it up because they needed our cooperation--they were handling us like children or savages, you see.
* * * * *
One pretty amazing point--Atla-Hi apparently knew something about Pop's fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because when he had to speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing the stuff for the drop, the voice said, "Excuse me, but you sound like one of those M. A. boys."
Murderers Anonymous, Pop had said some of their boys called their unorganized organization.
"Yep, I am," Pop admitted uncomfortably.
"Well, a word of advice then, or perhaps I only mean gossip," the screen said, for once getting on a side track. "Most of our people do not believe you are serious about it, although you may think that you are. Our skeptics (which includes all but a very few of us) split quite evenly between those who think that the M. A. spirit is a terminal psychotic illusion and those who believe it is an elaborate ruse in preparation for some concerted attack on cities by Deathlanders."
"Can't say that I blame the either of them," was Pop's only comment. "I think I'm nuts myself and a murderer forever." Alice glared at him for that admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. Pop really did seem out of his depth though during this part of our adventure, more out of his depth than even Alice and me--I mean, as if he could only really function in the Deathland with Deathlanders and wanted to get anything else over quickly.
* * * * *
I think one reason Pop was that way was that he was feeling very intensely something I was feeling myself: a sort of sadness and bewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen sounded should still be fighting wars. Murder, as you must know by now, I can understand and sympathize with deeply, but war?--no!
Oh, I can understand cultural queers fighting city squares and even get a kick out of it and whoop 'em on, but these Atla-Hi and Alamos folk seemed a different sort of cat altogether (though I'd only come to that point of view today)--the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war or thought its way around it. Maybe Savannah Fortress had simply forced the war on them and they had to defend themselves. I hadn't contacted any Savannans--they might be as blood-simple as the Porterites. Still, I don't know that it's always a good excuse that somebody else forced you into war. That sort of justification can keep on until the end of time. But who's a germ to judge?
A minute later I was feeling doubly like a germ and a very lowly one, because the situation had just got more difficult and depressing too--the thing had happened that I said I'd tell you about in due course.
The voice was just repeating its instructions to Pop on making the drop, when it broke off of a sudden and a second voice came in, a deep voice with a sort of European accent (not Chinese, oddly)--not talking to us, I think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring that we could hear.
"Also tell them," the second voice said, "that we will blow them out of the sky the instant they stop obeying us! If they should hesitate to make the drop or if they should put a finger on the button that reverses their course, then--pouf! Such brutes understand only the language of force. Also warn them that the blocks are atomic grenades that will blow them out of the sky too if--"
"Dr. Kovalsky, will you permit me to point out--" the first voice interrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as I imagine it ever allowed itself to do. Then both voices cut off abruptly and the screen was silent for ten seconds or so. I guess the first voice thought it wasn't nice for us to overhear Atla-Hi bickering with itself, even if the second voice didn't give a damn (any more than a farmer would mind the pigs overhearing him squabble with his hired man; of course this guy seemed to overlook that we were killer-pigs, but there wasn't anything we could do in that line just now except get burned up).
When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking once more, but it had something to say that was probably the result of a rapid conference and compromise.
"Attention, everyone! I wish to inform you that the plane in which you are traveling can be exploded--melted in the air, rather--if we activate a certain control at this end. We will not do so, now or subsequently, if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when you told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion in full faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?"
We all told him "Yes," though I don't imagine we sounded very happy about it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that the voice was being really sincere--an illusion, I supposed, but still a comforting one.
Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and while the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze--which hadn't shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let alone "straight strings of pink stars"--I was receiving a cram course in gunnery! (Do you wonder I don't try to tell this part of my story consecutively?)
* * * * *
It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: if you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five they unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five keys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the viewport and let you aim and fire the plane's main gun in any forward direction. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed by changing over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn't get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special talents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner's control over the main gun, and I wouldn't have managed even that except that Alice, from the thinking she'd been doing about patterns of five, was quick at understanding from the voice's descriptions which buttons were meant. She couldn't work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnt hand, but she could point them out for me.
After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If something showed up in it I'd be able to make a stab at getting a shot in. Not that I knew what my gun fired--the voice wasn't giving away any unnecessary data.
Naturally I had asked why didn't the voice teach me to fly the plane so that I could maneuver in case of attack, and naturally the voice had told me it was out of the question--much too difficult and besides they wanted us on a known course so they could plan better for the drop and recovery. (I think maybe the voice would have given me some hints--and maybe even told me more about the steel cubes too and how much danger we were in from them--if it hadn't been for the second voice, which presumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sure among other things that the first voice didn't get soft-hearted.)
So there I was being a front gunner. Actually a part of me was getting a big bang out of it--from antique Banker's Special to needle cannon (or whatever it was)--but at the same time another part of me was disgusted with the idea of acting like I belonged to a live culture (even a smart, unqueer one) and working in a war (even just so as to get out of it fast), while a third part of me--one that I normally keep down--was very simply horrified.
Pop was back by the door with the box and 'chute, ready to make the drop.
Alice had no duties for the moment, but she'd suddenly started gathering up food cans and packing them in one bag--I couldn't figure out at first what she had in mind. Orderly housewife wouldn't be exactly my description of her occupational personality.
Then of course everything had to happen at once.
The voice said, "Make the drop!"
Alice crossed to Pop and thrust out the bag of cans toward him, writhing her lips in silent "talk" to tell him something. She had a knife in her burnt hand too.
* * * * *
But I didn't have time to do any lip-reading, because just then a glittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead--a whole half dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot, as if a super-fast gigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web.
Wind whistled as the door of the plane started to open.
I fought to center my sight on the blank central spot, which drifted toward the left.
One of the straight lines grew dazzlingly bright.
I heard Alice whisper fiercely, "Drop these!" and the part of my mind that couldn't be applied to gunnery instantly deduced that she'd had some last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead of the steel cubes.
I got the sight centered and held down the firing combo. The thought flashed to me: it's a city you're firing at, not a plane, and I flinched.
The dazzlingly pink line dipped down toward me.
Behind me, the sound of a struggle. Alice snarling and Pop giving a grunt.
Then all at once a scream from Alice, a big whoosh of wind, a flash way ahead (where I'd aimed), a spatter of hot metal inside the cabin, a blinding spot in the middle of the World Screen, a searing beam inches from my neck, an electric shock that lifted me from my seat and ripped at my consciousness!
* * * * *
When I came to (if I really ever was out--seconds later, at most) there were no more pink lines. The haze was just its disgustingly tawny evening self with black spots that were only after-images. The cabin stunk of ozone, but wind funneling through a hole in the one-time World Screen was blowing it out fast enough--Savannah had gotten in one lick, all right. And we were falling, the plane was swinging down like a crippled bird--I could feel it and there was no use kidding myself.
But staring at the control panel wouldn't keep us from crashing if that was in the cards. I looked around and there were Pop and Alice glaring at each other across the closing door. He looked mean. She looked agonized and was pressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow as if he'd stamped on the hand, maybe. I didn't see any blood though. I didn't see the box and 'chute either, though I did see Alice's bag of groceries. I guessed Pop had made the drop.
Now, it occurred to me, was a bully time for Voice Two to melt the plane--if he hadn't already tried. My first thought had been that the spatter of hot metal had come from the Savannah craft spitting us, but there was no way to be sure.
I looked around at the viewport in time to see rocks and stunted trees jump out of the haze. Good old Ray, I thought, always in at the death. But just then the plane took a sickening bounce, as if its antigravity had only started to operate within yards of the ground. Another lurching fall and another bounce, less violent. A couple of repetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and then we were sort of bumping along on an even keel with the rocks and such sliding past fast about a hundred feet below, I judged. We'd been spoiled for altitude work, it seemed, but we could still cripple along in some sort of low-power repulsion field.
I looked at the North America screen and the buttons, wondering if I should start us back west again or leave us set on Atla-Hi and see what the hell happened--at the moment I hardly cared what else Savannah did to us. I needn't have wasted the mental energy. The decision was made for me. As I watched, the Atla-Hi button jumped up by itself and the button for the cracking plant went down and there was some extra bumping as we swung around.
Also, the violet patch of Atla-Hi went real dim and the button for it no longer had a violet nimbus. The Los Alamos blue went dull too. The cracking-plant dot glowed a brighter green--that was all.
All except for one thing. As the violet dimmed I thought I heard Voice One very faintly (not as if speaking directly but as if the screen had heard and remembered--not a voice but the fluorescent ghost of one): "Thank you and good luck!"
CHAPTER 6
Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
--Thomas de Quincey
"And a long merry siege to you, sir, and roast rat for Christmas!" I responded, very out loud and rather to my surprise.
"War! How I hate war!"--that was what Pop exploded with. He didn't exactly dance in senile rage--he was still keeping too sharp a watch on Alice--but his voice sounded that way.
"Damn you, Pop!" Alice contributed. "And you too, Ray! We might have pulled something, but you had to go obedience-happy." Then her anger got the better of her grammar, or maybe Pop and me was corrupting it. "Damn the both of you!" she finished.
It didn't make much sense, any of it. We were just cutting loose, I guess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour.
I said to Alice, "I don't know what you could have pulled, except the chain on us." To Pop I remarked, "You may hate war, but you sure helped that one along. Those grenades you dropped will probably take care of a few hundred Savannans."
"That's what you always say about me, isn't it?" he snapped back. "But I don't suppose I should expect any kinder interpretation of my motives." To Alice he said, "I'm sorry I had to slap your burnt fingers, sister, but you can't say I didn't warn you about my low-down tactics." Then to me again: "I do hate war, Ray. It's just murder on a bigger scale, though some of the boys give me an argument there."
"Then why don't you go preach against war in Atla-Hi and Savannah?" Alice demanded, still very hot but not quite so bitter.
"Yeah, Pop, how about it?" I seconded.
"Maybe I should," he said, thoughtful all at once. "They sure need it." Then he grinned. "Hey, how'd this sound: HEAR THE WORLD-FAMOUS MURDERER POP TRUMBULL TALK AGAINST WAR. WEAR YOUR STEEL THROAT PROTECTORS. Pretty good, hey?"
We all laughed at that, grudgingly at first, then with a touch of wholeheartedness. I think we all recognized that things weren't going to be very cheerful from here on in and we'd better not turn up our noses at the feeblest fun.
"I guess I didn't have anything very bright in mind," Alice admitted to me, while to Pop she said, "All right, I forgive you for the present."
"Don't!" Pop said with a shudder. "I hate to think of what happened to the last bugger made the mistake of forgiving me."
We looked around and took stock of our resources. It was time we did. It was getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun, and there weren't any cabin lights coming on and we sure didn't know of any way of getting any.
We wadded a couple of satchels into the hole in the World Screen without trying to probe it. After a while it got warmer again in the cabin and the air a little less dusty. Presently it started to get too smoky from the cigarettes we were burning, but that came later.
We screwed off the walls the few storage bags we hadn't inspected. They didn't contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight.
I had one last go at the buttons, though there weren't any left with nimbuses on them--the darker it got, the clearer that was. Even the Atla-Hi button wouldn't push now that it had lost its violet halo. I tried the gunnery patterns, figuring to put in a little time taking pot shots at any mountains that turned up, but the buttons that had been responding so well a few minutes ago refused to budge. Alice suggested different patterns, but none of them worked. That console was really locked--maybe the shot from Savannah was partly responsible, though Atla-Hi remote-locking things was explanation enough.
"The buggers!" I said. "They didn't have to tie us up this tight. Going east we at least had a choice--forward or back. Now we got none."
"Maybe we're just as well off," Pop said. "If Atla-Hi had been able to do anything more for us--that is, if they hadn't been sieged in, I mean--they'd sure as anything have pulled us in. Pull the plane in, I mean, and picked us out of it--with a big pair of tweezers, likely as not. And contrary to your flattering opinion of my preaching (which by the way none of the religious boys in my outfit share--they call me 'that misguided old atheist'), I don't think none of us would go over big at Atla-Hi."
* * * * *
We had to agree with him there. I couldn't imagine Pop or Alice or even me cutting much of a figure (even if we weren't murder-pariahs) with the pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Atla-Alamos crowd. The Double-A Republics, to give them a name, might have their small-brain types, but somehow I didn't think so. There must be more than one Edison-Einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and all the wonders in this plane and the other things we'd gotten hints of. Also, Grayl had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us small mammals had cooked his goose. And none of the modern "countries" had more than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and that hardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of a memory I'd been reaching for the last hour--how when I was a kid I'd read about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks. I told Alice and Pop.
"And if that's the average Atla-Alamoser's idea of mental recreation," I said, "well, you can see what I mean."
"I'll grant you they got a monopoly of brains," Pop agreed. "Not sense, though," he added doggedly.
"Intellectual snobs," was Alice's comment. "I know the type and I detest it." ("You are sort of intellectual, aren't you?" Pop told her, which fortunately didn't start a riot.)
Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new slant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries" of the modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks.)
I said, "We've always figured in a general way that Alamos was the remains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know the same's true of the Atla-Hi group. They're the Brookhaven survivors."
"Manhattan Project, don't you mean?" Alice corrected.
"Nope, that was in Colorado Springs," Pop said with finality.
* * * * *
I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate for technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group picked for high I. Q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress. You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a wonder world in a couple of generations.
"They got their troubles though," Pop reminded me and that led us to speculating about the war we'd dipped into. Savannah Fortress, we knew, was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river down that way, but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient than Atla-Alamos. Before we knew it we were, musing almost romantically about the plight of Atla-Hi, besieged by superior and (it was easy to suppose) barbaric forces, and maybe distant Los Alamos in a similar predicament--Alice reminded me how the voice had asked if they were still dying out there. For a moment I found myself fiercely proud that I had been able to strike a blow against evil aggressors. At once, of course, then, the revulsion came.
"This is a hell of a way," I said, "for three so-called realists to be mooning about things."
"Yes, especially when your heroes kicked us out," Alice agreed.
Pop chuckled. "Yep," he said, "they even took Ray's artillery away from him."
"You're wrong there, Pop," I said, sitting up. "I still got one of the grenades--the one the pilot had in his fist." To tell the truth I'd forgotten all about it and it bothered me a little now to feel it snugged up in my pocket against my hip bone where the skin is thin.
"You believe what that old Dutchman said about the steel cubes being atomic grenades?" Pop asked me.
"I don't know," I said, "He sure didn't sound enthusiastic about telling us the truth about anything. But for that matter he sounded mean enough to tell the truth figuring we'd think it was a lie. Maybe this is some sort of baby A-bomb with a fuse timed like a grenade." I got it out and hefted it. "How about I press the button and drop it out the door? Then we'll know." I really felt like doing it--restless, I guess.
"Don't be a fool, Ray," Alice said.
"Don't tense up, I won't," I told her. At the same time I made myself the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and bad, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened--sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, you might say.
"What makes you so sure it's a weapon?" Pop asked.
"What else would it be," I asked him, "that they'd be so hot on getting them in the middle of a war?"
"I don't know for sure," Pop said. "I've made a guess, but I don't want to tell it now. What I'm getting at, Ray, is that your first thought about anything you find--in the world outside or in your own mind--is that it's a weapon."
"Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!" Alice interjected with surprising intensity.
"You see?" Pop said. "That's what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking's been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock and right away asks himself, 'Who can I brain with this?' Doesn't occur to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a hospital."
"You know, Pop," I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket, "you are sort of preachy at times."
"Guess I am," he said. "How about some grub?"
* * * * *
It was a good idea. Another few minutes and we wouldn't have been able to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents I guess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonder plane we didn't even know how to turn on the light--and a good measure of our general helplessness.
* * * * *
We had our little feed and lit up again and settled ourselves. I judged it would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant--we weren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop was sitting in back again and Alice and I lay half hitched around on the kneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it got so dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips of the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took a deep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes--kept us from having ideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife in his hand.
The North America screen still glowed dimly and we could watch our green dot trying to make progress. The viewport was dead black at first, then there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shifted forward and down. The Old Moon, of course, going west ahead of us.
After a while I realized what it was like--an old Pullman car (I'd traveled in one once as a kid) or especially the smoker of an old Pullman, very late at night. Our crippled antigravity, working on the irregularities of the ground as they came along below, made the ride rhythmically bumpy, you see. I remembered how lonely and strange that old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I kept waiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness that settles in your bones and keeps working at you.
"I recall the first man I ever killed--" Pop started to reminisce softly.
"Shut up!" Alice told him. "Don't you ever talk about anything but murder, Pop?"
"Guess not," he said. "After all, it's the only really interesting topic there is. Do you know of another?"
It was silent in the cabin for a long time after that. Then Alice said, "It was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they came into the kitchen and killed my father. He'd been wise, in a way, and had us living at a spot where the bombs didn't touch us or the worst fallout. But he hadn't counted on the local werewolf gang. He'd just been slicing some bread--homemade from our own wheat (Dad was great on back to nature and all)--but he laid down the knife.
"Dad couldn't see any object or idea as a weapon, you see--that was his great weakness. Dad couldn't even see weapons as weapons. Dad had a philosophy of cooperation, that was his name for it, that he was going to explain to people. Sometimes I think he was glad of the Last War, because he believed it would give him his chance.
"But the werewolves weren't interested in philosophy and although their knives weren't as sharp as Dad's they didn't lay them down. Afterwards they had themselves a meal, with me for dessert. I remember one of them used a slice of bread to sop up blood like gravy. And another washed his hands and face in the cold coffee ..."
She didn't say anything else for a bit. Pop said softly, "That was the afternoon, wasn't it, that the fallen angels ..." and then just said, "My big mouth."
"You were going to say 'the afternoon they killed God?'" Alice asked him. "You're right, it was. They killed God in the kitchen that afternoon. That's how I know he's dead. Afterwards they would have killed me too, eventually, except--"
* * * * *
Again she broke off, this time to say, "Pop, do you suppose I can have been thinking about myself as the Daughter of God all these years? That that's why everything seems so intense?"
"I don't know," Pop said. "The religious boys say we're all children of God. I don't put much stock in it--or else God sure has some lousy children. Go on with your story."
"Well, they would have killed me too, except the leader took a fancy to me and got the idea of training me up for a Weregirl or She-wolf Deb or whatever they called it."
"That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea about me and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for my opportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death the same way as Dad."
"Hum," Pop commented after a bit, "that was a chiller, all right. I got to remember to tell it to Bill--it was somebody killing his mother that got him started. Alice, you had about as good a justification for your first murder as any I remember hearing."
"Yet," Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice, "I don't suppose you think I was right to do it?"
"Right? Wrong? Who knows?" Pop said almost blusteringly. "Sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody'd sympathize with you. A man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits. But as you must know, it's not that the first murder's always so bad in itself as that it's apt to start you on a killing spree. Your sense of values gets shifted a tiny bit and never shifts back. But you know all that and who am I to tell you anything, anyway? I've killed men because I didn't like the way they spit. And may very well do it again if I don't keep watching myself and my mind ventilated."
"Well, Pop," Alice said, "I didn't always have such dandy justification for my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist--he fixed me the Geiger counter I carry. A silly old geek--I don't know how he survived so long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myself to the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop."
Pop nodded. "It's good to know yourself," he said.
* * * * *
There was a third pause and then, although I hadn't exactly been intending to, I said, "Alice had justification for her first murder, personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personal justification at all for mine, yet I killed about a million people at a modest estimate. You see, I was the boss of the crew that took care of the hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow, and when the ticket was finally taken up I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firing button, I mean."
I went on, "Yeah, Pop, I was one of the button-pushers. There were really quite a few of us, of course--that's why I get such a laugh out of stories about being or rubbing out the one guy who pushed all the buttons."
"That so?" Pop said with only mild-sounding interest. "In that case you ought to know--"
We didn't get to hear right then who I ought to know because I had a fit of coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just too thick. Pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while the atmosphere got reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonely whistling sound.
"Yeah," I continued, "I was the boss of the missile crew and I wore a very handsome uniform with impressive insignia--not the bully old stripes I got on my chest now--and I was very young and handsome myself. We were all very young in that line of service, though a few of the men under me were a little older. Young and dedicated. I remember feeling a very deep and grim--and clean--responsibility. But I wonder sometimes just how deep it went or how clean it really was.
"I had an uncle flew in the war they fought to lick fascism, bombardier on a Flying Fortress or something, and once when he got drunk he told me how some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany; the buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kid sets up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun as poking an anthill.
"I didn't even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to be aiming at. Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at a certain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying, 'Pow!'--and then giving a little conventional shudder and folding up the map quick.
"Naturally we told ourselves we'd never have to do it, fire the thing, I mean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we'd all be given jobs as museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. But naturally it didn't work out that way. There came the day when our side of the world got hit and the orders started cascading down from Defense Coordinator Bigelow--"
"Bigelow?" Pop interrupted. "Not Joe Bigelow?"
"Joseph A., I believe," I told him, a little annoyed.
"Why he's my boy then, the one I was telling you about--the skinny runt had this horn-handle! Can you beat that?" Pop sounded startlingly happy. "Him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together."
I wasn't so sure of that myself, in fact my first reaction was that the opposite would be true. To be honest I was for the first moment more than a little annoyed at Pop interrupting my story of my Big Grief--for it was that to me, make no mistake. Here my story had finally been teased out of me, against all expectation, after decades of repression and in spite of dozens of assorted psychological blocks--and here was Pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizational gossip about Joes and Bills and Georges we'd never heard of and what they'd say or think!
But then all of a sudden I realized that I didn't really care, that it didn't feel like a Big Grief any more, that just starting to tell about it after hearing Pop and Alice tell their stories had purged it of that unnecessary weight of feeling that had made it a millstone around my neck. It seemed to me now that I could look down at Ray Baker from a considerable height (but not an angelic or contemptuously superior height) and ask myself not why he had grieved so much--that was understandable and even desirable--but why he had grieved so uselessly in such a stuffy little private hell.
And it would be interesting to find out how Joseph A. Bigelow had felt.
"How does it feel, Ray, to kill a million people?"
* * * * *
I realized that Alice had asked me the question several seconds back and it was hanging in the air.
"That's just what I've been trying to tell you," I told her and started to explain it all over again--the words poured out of me now. I won't put them down here--it would take too long--but they were honest words as far as I knew and they eased me.
I couldn't get over it: here were us three murderers feeling a trust and understanding and sharing a communion that I wouldn't have believed possible between any two or three people in the Age of the Deaders--or in any age, to tell the truth. It was against everything I knew of Deathland psychology, but it was happening just the same. Oh, our strange isolation had something to do with it, I knew, and that Pullman-car memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voices and violence of Atla-Alamos, but in spite of all that I ranked it as a wonder. I felt an inward freedom and easiness that I never would have believed possible. Pop's little disorganized organization had really got hold of something, I couldn't deny it.
* * * * *
Three treacherous killers talking from the bottoms of their hearts and believing each other!--for it never occurred to me to doubt that Pop and Alice were feeling exactly like I was. In fact, we were all so sure of it that we didn't even mention our communion to each other. Perhaps we were a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it.
We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a couple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking little catnaps--we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first time I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother--and then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what had happened, and relaxing again with a smile.
Of all things, Pop was saying, "Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds me of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys ..."
Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were times when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up, after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and Alice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one of his knives out.
He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. He was rubbing butter into it.
"Another day, another pack of troubles," he said cheerfully.
The tone of his remark jangled my nerves, as that tone generally does early in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. "Where are we?" I asked.
He poked his elbow toward the North America screen. The two green dots were almost one.
"My God, we're practically there," Alice said for me. She'd waked fast, Deathlands style.
"I know," Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing, "but I aim to be shaved before they commence landing maneuvers."
"You think automatic will land us?" Alice asked. "What if we just start circling around?"
"We can figure out what to do when it happens," Pop said, whittling away at his chin. "Until then, I'm not interested. There's still a couple of bottles of coffee in the sack. I've had mine."
I didn't join in this chit-chat because the green dots and Alice's first remark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nerves than Pop's cheerfulness. Night was gone, with its shielding cloak and its feeling of being able to talk forever, and the naked day was here, with its demands for action. It is not so difficult to change your whole view of life when you are flying, or even bumping along above the ground with friends who understand, but soon, I knew, I'd be down in the dust with something I never wanted to see again.
"Coffee, Ray?"
"Yeah, I guess so." I took the bottle from Alice and wondered whether my face looked as glum as hers.
"They shouldn't salt butter," Pop asserted. "It makes it lousy for shaving."
"It was the best butter," Alice said.
"Yeah," I said. "The Dormouse, when they buttered the watch."
It may be true that feeble humor is better than none. I don't know.
"What are you two yakking about?" Pop demanded.
"A book we both read," I told him.
"Either of you writers?" Pop asked with sudden interest. "Some of the boys think we should have a book about us. I say it's too soon, but they say we might all die off or something. Whoa, Jenny! Easy does it. Gently, please!"
That last remark was by way of recognizing that the plane had started an authoritative turn to the left. I got a sick and cold feeling. This was it.
Pop sheathed his knife and gave his face a final rub. Alice belted on her satchel. I reached for my knapsack, but I was staring through the viewport, dead ahead.
The haze lightened faintly, three times. I remembered the St. Elmo's fire that had flamed from the cracking plant.
"Pop," I said--almost whined, to be truthful, "why'd the bugger ever have to land here in the first place? He was rushing stuff they needed bad at Atla-Hi--why'd he have to break his trip?"
"That's easy," Pop said. "He was being a bad boy. At least that's my theory. He was supposed to go straight to Atla-Hi, but there was somebody he wanted to check up on first. He stopped here to see his girlfriend. Yep, his girlfriend. She tried to warn him off--that's my explanation of the juice that flared out of the cracking plant and interfered with his landing, though I'm sure she didn't intend the last. By the way, whatever she turned on to give him the warning must still be turned on. But Grayl came on down in spite of it."
* * * * *
Before I could assimilate that, the seven deformed gas tanks materialized in the haze. We got the freeway in our sights and steadied and slowed and kept slowing. The plane didn't graze the cracking plant this time, though I'd have sworn it was going to hit it head on. When I saw we weren't going to hit it, I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn't.
The stain was black now and the Pilot's body was thicker than I remembered--bloated. But that wouldn't last long. Three or four vultures were working on it.
CHAPTER 7
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
--A Forsaken Garden, by Charles Swinburne
Pop was first down. Between us we helped Alice. Before joining them I took a last look at the control panel. The cracking plant button was up again and there was a blue nimbus on another button. For Los Alamos, I supposed. I was tempted to push it and get away solo, but then I thought, nope, there's nothing for me at the other end and the loneliness will be worse than what I got to face here. I climbed out.
I didn't look at the body, although we were practically on top of it. I saw a little patch of silver off to one side and remembered the gun that had melted. The vultures had waddled off but only a few yards.
"We could kill them," Alice said to Pop.
"Why?" he responded. "Didn't some Hindus use them to take care of dead bodies? Not a bad idea, either."
"Parsees," Alice amplified.
"Yep, Parsees, that's what I meant. Give you a nice clean skeleton in a matter of days."
Pop was leading us past the body toward the cracking plant. I heard the flies buzzing loudly. I felt terrible. I wanted to be dead myself. Just walking along after Pop was an awful effort.
"His girl was running a hidden observation tower here," Pop was saying now. "Weather and all that, I suppose. Or maybe setting up a robot station of some kind. I couldn't tell you about her before, because you were both in a mood to try to rub out anybody remotely connected with the Pilot. In fact, I did my best to lead you astray, letting you think I'd been the one to scream and all. Even now, to be honest about it, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing telling and showing you all this, but a man's got to take some risks whatever he does."
"Say, Pop," I said dully, "isn't she apt to take a shot at us or something?" Not that I'd have minded on my own account. "Or are you and her that good friends?"
"Nope, Ray," he said, "she doesn't even know me. But I don't think she's in a position to do any shooting. You'll see why. Hey, she hasn't even shut the door. That's bad."
He seemed to be referring to a kind of manhole cover standing on its edge just inside the open-walled first story of the cracking plant. He knelt and looked down the hole the cover was designed to close off.
"Well, at least she didn't collapse at the bottom of the shaft," he said. "Come on, let's see what happened." And he climbed into the shaft.
We followed him like zombies. At least that's how I felt. The shaft was about twenty feet deep. There were foot- and hand-holds. It got stuffy right away, and warmer, in spite of the shaft being open at the top.
At the bottom there was a short horizontal passage. We had to duck to get through it. When we could straighten up we were in a large and luxurious bomb-resistant dugout, to give it a name. And it was stuffier and hotter than ever.
There was a lot of scientific equipment around and several small control panels reminding me of the one in the back of the plane. Some of them, I supposed, connected with instruments, weather and otherwise, hidden up in the skeletal structure of the cracking plant. And there were signs of occupancy, a young woman's occupancy--clothes scattered around in a frivolous way, and some small objects of art, and a slightly more than life-size head in clay that I guessed the occupant must have been sculpting. I didn't give that last more than the most fleeting look, strictly unintentional to begin with, because although it wasn't finished I could tell whose head it was supposed to be--the Pilot's.
* * * * *
The whole place was finished in dull silver like the cabin of the plane, and likewise it instantly struck me as having a living personality, partly the Pilot's and partly someone else's--the personality of a marriage. Which wasn't a bit nice, because the whole place smelt of death.
But to tell the truth I didn't give the place more than the quickest look-over, because my attention was rivetted almost at once on a long wide couch with the covers kicked off it and on the body there.
The woman was about six feet tall and built like a goddess. Her hair was blonde and her skin tanned. She was lying on her stomach and she was naked.
She didn't come anywhere near my libido, though. She looked sick to death. Her face, twisted towards us, was hollow-cheeked and flushed. Her eyes, closed, were sunken and dark-circled. She was breathing shallowly and rapidly through her open mouth, gasping now and then.
I got the crazy impression that all the heat in the place was coming from her body, radiating from her fever.
And the whole place stunk of death. Honestly it seemed to me that this dugout was Death's underground temple, the bed Death's altar, and the woman Death's sacrifice. (Had I unconsciously come to worship Death as a god in the Deathlands? I don't really know. There it gets too deep for me.)
No, she didn't come within a million miles of my libido, but there was another part of me that she was eating at ...
If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat.
... eating at until I was an empty shell, until I had no props left, until I wanted to die then and there, until I figured I had to die ...
There was a faint sharp hiss right at my elbow. I looked and found that, unbeknownst to myself, I'd taken the steel cube out of my pocket and holding it snuggled between my first and second fingers I'd punched the button with my thumb just as I'd promised myself I would if I got to really feeling bad.
It goes to show you that you should never give your mind any kind of instructions even half in fun, unless you're prepared to have them carried out whether you approve later or not.
Pop saw what I'd done and looked at me strangely. "So you had to die after all, Ray," he said softly. "Most of us find out we have to, one way or another."
We waited. Nothing happened. I noticed a very faint milky cloud a few inches across hanging in the air by the cube.
Thinking right away of poison gas, I jerked away a little, dispersing the cloud.
"What's that?" I demanded of no one in particular.
"I'd say," said Pop, "that that's something that squirted out of a tiny hole in the side of the cube opposite the button. A hole so nearly microscopic you wouldn't see it unless you looked for it hard. Ray, I don't think you're going to get your baby A-blast, and what's more I'm afraid you've wasted something that's damn valuable. But don't let it worry you. Before I dropped those cubes for Atla-Hi I snagged one."
And darn if he didn't pull the brother of my cube out of his pocket.
"Alice," he said, "I noticed a half pint of whiskey in your satchel when we got the salve. Would you put some on a rag and hand it to me."
Alice looked at him like he was nuts, but while her eyes were looking her pliers and her gloved hand were doing what he told her.
Pop took the rag and swabbed a spot on the sick woman's nearest buttock and jammed the cube against the spot and pushed the button.
"It's a jet hypodermic, folks," he said.
He took the cube away and there was the welt to substantiate his statement.
"Hope we got to her in time," he said. "The plague is tough. Now I guess there's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while."
I felt shaken beyond all recognition.
* * * * *
"Pop, you old caveman detective!" I burst out. "When did you get that idea for a steel hospital?" Don't think I was feeling anywhere near that gay. It was reaction, close to hysterical.
Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. "I had a couple of clues that you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've had a lot of trouble with it, I believe--some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust--and now it seems to have been carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into this gal."
After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly. Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been working for years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with mutations and ET tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they'd found a promising treatment (cure, we hoped) and prepared it for rush shipment to Atla-Hi, where the plague was raging too and they were sieged in by Savannah as well. Grayl was picked to fly the serum, or drug or whatever it was. But he knew or guessed that this lone woman observer (because she'd fallen out of radio communication or something) had come down with the plague too and he decided to land some serum for her, probably without authorization.
"How do we know she's his girlfriend?" I asked.
"Or wife," Pop said tolerantly. "Why, there was that bag of woman's stuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for a woman. Who else'd he be apt to make a special stop for?
"Another thing," Pop said. "He must have been using jets to hurry his trip. We heard them, you know."
That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get. Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out what goes on inside a "country" like Atla-Alamos and why are sort of like foxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothic migrations. Of course we're all human beings, but that doesn't mean as much as it sounds.
* * * * *
Then Pop told us how he'd happened to be on the scene. He'd been doing a "tour of duty", as he called it, when he spotted this woman's observatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her for a few days and maybe help protect her from some dangerous characters that he knew were in the neighborhood.
"Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me," I objected. "Risky, I mean. Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would be the surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thing for me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run."
"You probably should," he agreed. "For now, anyway. It's all a matter of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to give myself these little jobs. And the essence of 'em is that the other person shouldn't know I'm helping."
It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all over again--for murderers. Well, why not?
Pop had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times and look around and then go back down and he'd got the impression she was sick and troubled. He'd even guessed she might be coming down with Alamos fever. He'd seen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him. Then when the plane landed she'd come up again, acting out of her head, but when she'd seen the Pilot and us going for him she'd given that scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. He'd figured the only thing he could do for her was keep us occupied. Besides, now that he knew for sure we were murderers he'd started to burn with the desire to talk to us and maybe help us quit killing if we seemed to want to. It was only much later, in the middle of our trip, that he began to suspect that the steel cubes were jet hypodermics.
While Pop had been telling us all this, we hadn't been watching the woman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin was covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds.
"That's a good sign," Pop said and Alice started to wipe her off. While she was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of way and Pop fed her some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off to sleep.
Alice said, "Any other time I would be wild to kill another woman that beautiful. But she has been so close to death that I would feel I was robbing another murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change in my feelings than that, though."
"Yeah, a little, I suppose," Pop said.
I didn't have anything to say about my own feelings. Certainly not out loud. I knew that they had changed and that they were still changing. It was complicated.
After a while it occurred to me and Alice to worry whether we mightn't catch this woman's sickness. It would serve us right, of course, but plague is plague. But Pop reassured us. "Actually I snagged three cubes," he said. "That should take care of you two. I figure I'm immune."
Time wore on. Pop dragged out the harmonica, as I'd been afraid he would, but his playing wasn't too bad. "Tenting Tonight," "When Johnnie Comes Marching Home," and such. We had a meal.
The Pilot's woman woke up again, in her full mind this time or something like it. We were clustered around the bed, smiling a little I suppose and looking inquiring. Being even assistant nurses makes you all concerned about the patient's health and state of mind.
Pop helped her sit up a little. She looked around. She saw me and Alice. Recognition came into her eyes. She drew away from us with a look of loathing. She didn't say a word, but the look stayed.
Pop drew me aside and whispered, "I think it would be a nice gesture if you and Alice took a blanket and went up and sewed him into it. I noticed a big needle and some thread in her satchel." He looked me in the eye and added, "You can't expect this woman to feel any other way toward you, you know. Now or ever."
He was right of course. I gave Alice the high sign and we got out.
No point in dwelling on the next scene. Alice and me sewed up in a blanket a big guy who'd been dead a day and worked over by vultures. That's all.
About the time we'd finished, Pop came up.
"She chased me out," he explained. "She's getting dressed. When I told her about the plane, she said she was going back to Los Alamos. She's not fit to travel, of course, but she's giving herself injections. It's none of our business. Incidentally, she wants to take the body back with her. I told her how we'd dropped the serum and how you and Alice had helped and she listened."
The Pilot's woman wasn't long after Pop. She must have had trouble getting up the shaft, she had a little trouble even walking straight, but she held her head high. She was wearing a dull silver tunic and sandals and cloak. As she passed me and Alice I could see the look of loathing come back into her eyes, and her chin went a little higher. I thought, why shouldn't she want us dead? Right now she probably wants to be dead herself.
Pop nodded to us and we hoisted up the body and followed her. It was almost too heavy a load even for the three of us.
As she reached the plane a silver ladder telescoped down to her from below the door. I thought, the Pilot must have had it keyed to her some way, so it would let down for her but nobody else. A very lovely gesture.
The ladder went up after her and we managed to lift the body above our heads, our arms straight, and we walked it through the door of the plane that way, she receiving it.
The door closed and we stood back and the plane took off into the orange haze, us watching it until it was swallowed.
Pop said, "Right now, I imagine you two feel pretty good in a screwed-up sort of way. I know I do. But take it from me, it won't last. A day or two and we're going to start feeling another way, the old way, if we don't get busy."
I knew he was right. You don't shake Old Urge Number One anything like that easy.
"So," said Pop, "I got places I want to show you. Guys I want you to meet. And there's things to do, a lot of them. Let's get moving."
So there's my story. Alice is still with me (Urge Number Two is even harder to shake, supposing you wanted to) and we haven't killed anybody lately. (Not since the Pilot, in fact, but it doesn't do to boast.) We're making a stab (my language!) at doing the sort of work Pop does in the Deathlands. It's tough but interesting. I still carry a knife, but I've given Mother to Pop. He has it strapped to him alongside Alice's screw-in blade.
Atla-Hi and Alamos still seem to be in existence, so I guess the serum worked for them generally as it did for the Pilot's Woman; they haven't sent us any medals, but they haven't sent a hangman's squad after us either--which is more than fair, you'll admit. But Savannah, turned back from Atla-Hi, is still going strong: there's a rumor they have an army at the gates of Ouachita right now. We tell Pop he'd better start preaching fast--it's one of our standard jokes.
There's also a rumor that a certain fellowship of Deathlanders is doing surprisingly well, a rumor that there's a new America growing in the Deathlands--an America that never need kill again. But don't put too much stock in it. Not too much.
THE END
MORALE
by Murray Leinster
PART I
"... The profound influence of civilian morale upon the course of modern war is nowhere more clearly shown than in the case of that monstrous war-engine popularly known as a 'Wabbly.' It landed in New Jersey Aug. 16, 1942, and threw the whole Eastern Coast into a frenzy. In six hours the population of three States was in a panic. Industry was paralyzed. The military effect was comparable only to a huge modern army landed in our rear...." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. Pp. 79-80.)
Sergeant Walpole made his daily report at 2:15. He used a dinky telephone that should have been in a museum, and a rural Central put him on the Area Officer's tight beam. The Area Officer listened drearily as the Sergeant said in a military manner:
"Sergeant Walpole, sir, Post Fourteen, reports that he has nothing of importance to report."
The Area Officer's acknowledgment was curt; embittered. For he was an energetic young man, and he loathed his job. He wanted to be in the west, where fighting of a highly unconventional nature was taking place daily. He did not enjoy this business of watching an unthreatened coast-line simply for the maintenance of civilian confidence and morale. He preferred fighting.
Sergeant Walpole, though, exhaled a lungful of smoke at the telephone transmitter and waited. Presently the rural Central said:
"All through?"
"Sure, sweetie," said Sergeant Walpole. "How about the talkies tonight?"
That was at 2:20 P. M. There was coy conversation, while the civilian telephone-service suffered. Then Sergeant Walpole went back to his post of duty with a date for the evening. He never kept that date, as it turned out. The rural Central was dead an hour after the first and only Wabbly landed, and as everybody knows, that happened at 2:45.
* * * * *
But Sergeant Walpole had no premonitions as he went back to his hammock on the porch. This was Post Number Fourteen, Sixth Area, Eastern Coast Observation Force. There was a war on, to be sure. There had been a war on since the fall of 1941, but it was two thousand miles away. Even lone-wolf bombing planes, flying forty thousand feet up, never came this far to drop their eggs upon inviting targets or upon those utterly blank, innocent-seeming places where munitions of war were now manufactured underground.
Here was peace and quiet and good rations and a paradise for gold-brickers. Here was a summer bungalow taken over for military purposes, quartering six men who watched a certain section of coast-line for a quite impossible enemy. Three miles to the south there was another post. Three miles to the north another one still. They stretched all along the Atlantic Coast, those observation-posts, and the men in them watched the sea, languidly observed the television broadcasts, and slept in the sun. That was all they were supposed to do. In doing it they helped to maintain civilian morale. And therefore the Eastern Coast Observation Force was enviously said to be "just attached to the Army for rations," by the other services, and its members rated with M. P.'s and other low forms of animal life.
Sergeant Walpole reclined in his hammock, inhaling comfortably. The ocean glittered blue before him in the sun. There was a plume of smoke out at sea indicating an old-style coal-burner, its hull down below the horizon. Anything that would float was being used since the war began, though a coal-burning ship was almost a museum piece. A trim Diesel tramp was lazing northward well inshore. A pack of gulls were squabbling noisily over some unpleasantness floating a hundred yards from the beach. The Diesel tramp edged closer inshore still. It was all very peaceful and placid. There are few softer jobs on earth than being a member of a "force in being" for the sake of civilian morale.
* * * * *
But at 2:32 P. M. the softness of that job departed, as far as Sergeant Walpole was concerned. At that moment he heard a thin wailing sound high aloft. It was well enough known nearer the front, but the Eastern Coast Observation Force had had no need to become unduly familiar with it. With incredible swiftness the wailing rose to the shrillest of shrieks, descending as lightning might be imagined to descend. Then there was a shattering concussion. It was monstrous. It was ear-splitting. Windows crashed in the cottage and tinkled to the sandy earth outside. There was a pause of seconds' duration only, during which Sergeant Walpole stared blankly and gasped, "What the hell?" Then there was a second thin wailing which rose to a scream....
Sergeant Walpole was in motion before the second explosion came. He was diving off the veranda of Post Number Fourteen. He saw someone else coming through a window. He had a photographic glimpse of one of his men emerging through a doorway. Then he struck earth and began to run. Like everybody else in America, he knew what the explosions and the screamings meant.
But he had covered no more than fifty yards when the third bomb fell from that plane so far aloft that it was not even a mote in the sky. Up there the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of the thinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flight bomber could see the ground only as a mass of vaguely blending colors. They were aiming their bombs by filtered light, through telescopes which used infra-red rays only, as aerial cameras did back in the 1920's. And they were sighting their eggs with beautifully exact knowledge of their velocity and height. By the time the bombs had dropped eight miles they were traveling faster than the sound of their coming. The first two had wiped out Posts Thirteen and Fifteen. The third made no sound before it landed, except to an observer at a distance. Sergeant Walpole heard neither the scream of fall nor the sound of its explosion.
* * * * *
He was running madly, and suddenly the earth bucked violently beneath his feet, and he had a momentary sensation of things flying madly by over his head, and then he knew nothing at all for a very long time. Then his head ached horribly and someone was popping at something valorously with a rifle, and he heard the nasty sharp explosions of the hexynitrate bullets which have remodeled older ideas of warfare, and Sergeant Walpole was aware of an urgent necessity to do something, but he could not at all imagine what it was. Then a shell went off, the earth-concussion banged his nose against the sand, and the rifle-fire stopped.
"For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole dizzily.
He staggered to his feet and looked behind him. Where the cottage had been there was a hole. Quite a large hole. It was probably a hundred yards across and all of twenty deep, but sea-water was seeping in to fill it through the sand. Its edge was forty or fifty feet from where he stood. He had been knocked down by the heaving earth, and the sand and mud blown out of the crater had gone clean over him. Twenty feet back, the top part of his body would have been cut neatly off by the blast. As it was....
* * * * *
He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He was still rather dazed, and he still had the feeling that there was something extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on his feet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunes behind the beach. One of them carried two automatic rifles. The other was trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They saw the Sergeant and ran to him.
"Hell, Sarge, I thought y'were blown to little egg-shells."
"I ain't," said Sergeant Walpole. He looked again at the hole in the ground and swore painedly.
"Look at that," said the man with the flapping arm. "Hell's goin' to pop around here, Sarge."
The sergeant swung around. Then his mouth dropped open. Just half a mile away and hardly more than two hundred yards from the shore-line, the Diesel tramp was ramming the beach. A wake still foamed behind it. A monstrous bow-wave spread out on either hand, over-topping even the combers that came rolling in. It was being deliberately run ashore. It struck, and its fore-mast crumpled up and fell forward, carrying its derrick-booms with it. There was the squeal of crumpled metal plates.
"Flyin' a yeller flag just now," panted one of the two privates. "We started poppin' hexynitrate bullets at her an' she flung a shell at us. She's a enemy ship. But what the hell?"
Smoke spurted up from the beached ship. Her stern broke off and settled in the deeper water out from the shore. More smoke spurted out. Her bow split wide. There were the deep rumbles of black-powder explosions. Sergeant Walpole and his two followers stared blankly. More explosions, and the ship was hidden in smoke, and when it blew away her funnel was down and half or more of her upper works was sliding into the sea, and she had listed suddenly.
* * * * *
Sergeant Walpole gazed upward. Futilely, of course; there was nothing in sight overhead. But these explosions did look like the hexynitrate stuff they put in small-arm bullets nowadays. A thirty-caliber bullet had the explosive effect of an old-style six-pound T.N.T. shell. Only, hexynitrate goes off with a crack instead of a boom. It wasn't an American plane opening up with a machine-gun.
Then the beached ship seemed to blow up. A mass of thick smoke covered her from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through the air, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpole suddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn't seen anybody diving overboard to try to get ashore. He half-started forward....
Then the sea-breeze blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage. And the tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its place--so that Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a non-existent something that came up instantly into his throat again, and remembered the urgent thing he had to do.
"Pete," he said calmly, "you hunt up the Area Officer an' tell him what you seen. Here! I'll give you a report that'll keep 'em from slammin' you in clink for bein' drunk. Grab a monocycle somewheres. It's faster than a car, the way you'll be travelin'. First telephone you come to that's workin', make Central put you in the tight beam to head-quarters. Then go on an' report, y'self. See?"
Pete started, and automatically fumbled with his limp and useless arm. Then he carefully tucked the unmanageable hand in the pocket of his uniform blouse.
"That don't matter now," he said absurdly.
He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as Sergeant Walpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the Eastern Coast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upset anybody.
* * * * *
Where the tramp had been there was a single bit of bow-plating sticking up out of the surf, and a bunch of miscellaneous floating wreckage drifting sluggishly toward the beach. And there was a solid, rounded, metallic shape apparently quite as long as the original tramp had been. There was a huge armored tube across its upper part, with vision-slits in two bulbous sections at its end. There were gun-ports visible here and there, and already a monstrous protuberance was coming into view midway along its back, as if forced into position from within. Where the bow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads now visible. There was a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim. There was a ghastly steel beak. The thing was a war-machine of monstrous size. It emitted a sudden roaring sound, as of internal-combustion engines operating at full power, and lurched heavily. The steel plates of the tramp still visible above water, crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. The thing came toward the shore. It slithered through the shallow sea, with waves breaking against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach, its wet sides glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it looked somehow like a gigantic centipede.
It was a tank, of sorts, but like no tank ever seen on earth before. It was the great-grandfather of all tanks. It was so monstrous that for its conveyance a ship's hull and superstructure had been built about it, and its own engines had been the engines of that ship. It was so huge that it could only be landed by blasting away a beached ship from about itself, so it could run under its own power over the fragments to the shore.
Now it stopped smoothly on the sandy beach, in which its eight-foot-wide steel treads sank almost a yard. Men dropped down from ports in its swelling sides. They made swift, careful inspections of predetermined points. They darted back up the ladders again. The thing roared once more. Then it swung about, headed for the sand-dunes, and with an extraordinary smoothness and celerity disappeared inland.
PART II
"... The Wabbly was meant for one purpose, the
undermining of civilian morale. To accomplish that purpose it set systematically about the establishment of a reign of terror; and so complete was its success that half the population of a state was in headlong flight within two hours. It was, first, mysterious; secondly, deadly, and within a very few hours it had built up a reputation for invincibility. Judged on the basis of its first twelve hours' work alone, it was the most successful experiment of the war. Its effect on civilian morale was incalculable." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. Pp. 80-81.)
Two of the members of Observation-Post Fourteen gaped after the retreating monster. Sergeant Walpole scribbled on the official form. Just as the monstrous thing dipped down out of sight there was a vicious, crashing report from its hinder part. Something shrieked....
Sergeant Walpole got up, spitting sand. There was blood on the report-form in his hand. He folded it painstakingly. Of the two men who had been with him, one was struggling out of the sand as Sergeant Walpole had had to do. The other was scattered over a good many square yards of sandy beach.
"Um. They seen us," said Sergeant Walpole, "an' they got Pete. You'll have to take this report. I'm goin' after the damn thing."
"What for?" asked the other man blankly.
"To keep it in sight," said Sergeant Walpole. "That's tactics. If somebody springs somethin' you ain't able to fight, run away but keep it in sight an' report to the nearest commissioned officer. Remember that. Now get on. There's monocycles in the village. Get there an' beat that damn Wabbly thing with the news."
He saw his follower start off, sprinting. That particular soldier, by the way, was identified by his dog-tag some days later. As nearly as could be discovered, he had died of gas. But Sergeant Walpole picked up one of the two rifles, blew sand out of the breech-mechanism, and started off after the metal monster. He walked in the eight-foot track of one of its treads. As he went, he continued the cleaning of sand from the rifle in his hands. The rifle was useless against such a monster, of course, but it is quaint to reflect that in that automatic rifle, firing hexynitrate bullets, each equivalent to a six-pounder T.N.T. shell in destructiveness, Sergeant Walpole carried greater "fire-power" than Napoleon ever disposed in battle.
The tread of the Wabbly made a perfect roadway. Presently Sergeant Walpole looked up to find himself scrutinizing somebody's dining-room table, set for lunch. The Wabbly had crossed a house in its path without swerving. Walls, chimneys, timbers and planks, all had gone beneath its treads. But they had been pressed so smoothly flat that until Sergeant Walpole looked down at his footing, he would not have known he was walking on the wreckage of a building.
It was half an hour before he reached the village. The Wabbly had gone from end to end, backed up, and gone over the rest of it again. There was the taint of gas in the air. Sergeant Walpole halted outside the debris. His gas-mask had been blown to atoms with Observation-Post Fourteen.
"They're tryin' to beat the news o' their comin'," he reflected aloud, "which is why they smashed up the village. The telephone exchange was there.... Tillie's under there somewheres...."
He fumbled with the rifle, suddenly swearing queerly hate-distorted oaths. Tillie had not been the great love of Sergeant Walpole's life. She was merely a country telephone operator, reasonably pretty, and flattered by his uniform. But she was under a mass of splintered wood and crushed brick-work, killed while trying to connect with the tight beam to Area Headquarters to report the monster rushing upon the village. That monster had destroyed the little settlement. There was nothing left at all but wreckage and the eight-foot tracks of monster treads. Sometimes those tracks crossed each other. Between them wreckage survived to a height of as much as four feet, which was the clearance of the Wabbly's body.
Something roared low overhead. Sergeant Walpole swore bitterly, looked upward, and waited to die. But the small plane was American, and old. It was a training-plane, useless for front-line work. It dived to earth, the pilot waved impatiently, and Walpole plunged to a place beside him. Instantly thereafter the plane took off.
"What was it?" shouted the pilot, sliding off at panic-stricken speed across the tree-tops. "They heard the bombs go off all the way to Philly. Sent me. What in hell was it?"
* * * * *
A thin, high, wailing sound coming down as lightning might be imagined to descend.... The pilot dived madly and got behind a pine forest before the explosion and the concussion that followed it. Sergeant Walpole saw the pine-trees shiver. The sheer explosion-wave of that egg, if it hit an old ship like this in mid-air, would have stripped the fabric from its wings.
"Set me down," said Sergeant Walpole. "They're watchin' us from aloft. I sent a man on a monocycle to report." But he told luridly of the thing that had come ashore, and of its destructiveness. "Now set me down. Gimme a gas-mask an' clear out. You ain't got a burglar's chance of gettin' back."
The pilot set him down, and began ticking away on a code sender even as he landed. Then he climbed swiftly away from the Sergeant, headed in a weaving, crazy line to westward. Then things screamed downward and the Sergeant clapped hands over his ears once more. The ground quivered underfoot, though the eggs landed a good three-quarters of a mile away. The training-plane dropped like a plummet. The sharpness of a hexynitrate explosion carries its effect to quite incredible distances. The fabric of its wings split to ribbons. The ship landed somewhere and smoke rose from it.
"He shouldn't ha' gone up so high," said Sergeant Walpole.
He struck across country for the treads of the Wabbly once more. He saw a school-house. The Wabbly had passed within a hundred yards of it. The school-house seemed deserted. Then the Sergeant saw the hole in its roof. Then he caught the infinitely faint taint of gas.
"Mighty anxious," said Sergeant Walpole woodenly, "not to let news get ahead of 'em. Yeah.... If it busts on places without warnin', it'll have that much easier work. I hope I'm in on the party when we get this damn thing."
There was no use in approaching the school-house, though he had a gas-mask now. Sergeant Walpole went on.
PART III
"... The Wabbly made no attempt to do purely military
damage. The Enemy command realized that the destruction of civilian morale was even more important than the destruction of munitions factories. In this, the Enemy displayed the same acumen that makes the war a fruitful subject of study to the strategic student." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. Pp. 81-82.)
At nightfall the monster swerved suddenly and moved with greater speed. It showed no lights. It did not even make very much noise. Then the second flight of home-defense planes made their attack. Sergeant Walpole heard them droning overhead. He lit a fire instantly. A little helicopter dropped from the blackness above him and he began to heap dirt desperately on the blaze.
"Who's there?" demanded a voice.
"Sergeant Walpole, Post Fourteen, Eastern Coast Observation," said the Sergeant in a military manner. "Beg to report, sir, that the dinkus that brought down the other ships is housed in that big bulge on top of the Wabbly."
"Get in," said the voice.
The Sergeant obeyed. With a purring noise the helicopter shot upward. Then something went off in mid-sky, miles ahead, where a faint humming noise had announced the flight of attack-planes. A lurid, crackling detonation lit up the sky. One of the ships of the night-flying squadron. From the helicopter they could see the rest of the flight limned clearly in the flash of the explosion. Instantly thereafter there was another such flash. Then another.
"Three," said the voice beside Sergeant Walpole. Another flash. "Four...." The invisible operator of the screw-lifted ship was very calm about it. "Five. Six." The explosions lit the sky. Presently he said grimly. "That's all of them. I'd better report it."
* * * * *
He was silent for a while. Sergeant Walpole saw his hand flicking a key up and down in the faint light of radio bulbs.
"Now shoot the works," said the helicopter man evenly. "All the ships that attacked this afternoon went down. One of them started to report, but didn't get but two words through. What did that damned thing use on them?"
"A dinkus on top, sir," said Sergeant Walpole formally. "I'd found a monocycle, sir, and was trailing the thing. I'd come to the top of a hill and seen it moving through a pine-wood, crashing down the trees in front of it like they wasn't there. Then a egg came down from Gawd-knows-where up aloft. I stopped up my ears, thinkin' it was aimin' for me. Then I seen the ships. Two of 'em were fallin'. They landed, an' I heard a coupla other explosions. Little ones, they sounded like."
The helicopter man's wrist was flicking up and down.
"Little ones!" he said sardonically. "Those ships were carrying five-hundred-pound bombs! It was those you heard going off!"
"Maybe," conceded Sergeant Walpole. "There was twenty or thirty ships flyin' in formation, goin' hell-for-leather for the Wabbly. They were trailin' it from the air. They were comin', natural, for me, because I was between them an' it. Then my pants caught on fire--"
"What?"
"My pants caught on fire," said Sergeant Walpole, woodenly. "I was sittin' on the monocycle, tryin' to figure out which way to duck. An' my pants caught on fire. The bike was gettin' hot. I climbed off it an' it blew up. My rifle was hot, too, an' I chucked it away. Then I saw a ship go down, on fire. The Wabbly'd stopped still an' it didn't fire a shot. I'll swear to that. Just my monocycle got hot an' caught on fire, an' then a ship busted out in flames an' went down. A couple more eggs come down an' three ships dropped. Didn't hit 'em. The concussion blew the fabric off 'em. Another one caught fire an' crashed. Then another one. I looked, an' saw the next one catch. Then the next. It was like a searchlight beam hittin' 'em. They flamed up, blew up, an' that was that. The last two tried to get away, but they lit up an' crashed."
* * * * *
The pilot's hand flicked up and down, interminably. There was the steady fierce down-beat of the slip-stream from the vertical propellers. The helicopter swept forward in a swooping dash.
"The whole east coast's gone crazy," said the 'copter man drily. "Crazy fools trying to run away. Roads jammed. Work stopped. It leaked out about the planes being wiped out to-day, and everybody in three states has heard those eggs going off. You're the only living man who's seen that crawling thing and lived to tell about it. I've sent your stuff back. What's that about the thing on top?"
"I hid," said Sergeant Walpole, woodenly. "The Wabbly sent over gas-shells where the ships landed. Then it went on. Headin' west. It's got a crazy-lookin' dinkus on top like a searchlight. That moved, while the ships were catchin' fire an' crashin'. Just like a searchlight, it moved an' the ships went down. But the Wabbly didn't fire a shot."
The helicopter man's wrist flexed swiftly....
"Gawd!" said Sergeant Walpole in sudden agony. "Drop! Quick!"
The helicopter went down like a stone. A propeller shrieked away into space. Metalwork up aloft glowed dully red. Then there were whipping, lashing branches closing swiftly all around the helicopter. A jerk. A crash. Stillness. The smell of growing things all about.
"Well?" said the 'copter pilot.
"They turned it on us--whatever it is," said Sergeant Walpole. "They near got us, too."
* * * * *
A match scratched. A cigarette glowed. The Sergeant fumbled for a smoke for himself.
"I'm waiting for that metal to cool off," said the helicopter pilot. "Maybe we can take off again. They located us with a loop while I was sending your stuff. Damn! I see what they've got!"
"What?"
"A way of transmitting real power in a radio beam," said the 'copter man. "You've seen eddy-current stoves. Everybody cooks with 'em nowadays. A coil with a high-frequency current. You can stick your hand in it and nothing happens. But you stick an iron pan down in the coil and it gets hot and cooks things. Hysteresis. The same thing that used to make transformer-cores get hot. The same thing happens near any beam transmitter, only you have to measure the heating effect with a thermo-couple. The iron absorbs the radio waves and gets hot. The chaps in the Wabbly can probably put ten thousand horsepower in a damned beam. We can't. But any iron in the way will get hot. It blows up a ship at once. Your monocycle and your rifle too. Damn!"
He knocked the ash off his cigarette.
"Scientific, those chaps. I'll see if that metal's cool."
Something whined overhead, rising swiftly to a shriek as it descended. Sergeant Walpole cowered, with his hands to his ears. But it was not an earth-shaking concussion. It was an explosion, yes, but subtly different from the rending snap of hexynitrate.
"Gas," said the Sergeant dully, and fumbled for his mask.
"No good," said the 'copter man briefly. "Vesicatory. Smell it? I guess they've got us. No sag-suits. Not even sag-paste."
The Sergeant lit a match. The flame bent a little from the vertical.
"There's a wind. We got a chance."
"Get going, then," said the 'copter man. "Run upwind."
* * * * *
Sergeant Walpole slid over the side and ran. A hundred yards. Two hundred. Pine-woods have little undergrowth. He heard the helicopter's engines start. The ship tried to lift. He redoubled his speed. Presently he broke out into open ploughed land.
In the starlight he saw a barn, and he raced toward that. Someone else plunged out of the woods toward him. The helicopter-engine was still roaring faintly in the distance. Then a thin whine came down from aloft....
When the echoes of the explosion died away the pilot was grinning queerly. The helicopter's engine was still.
"I said it could be done! Pack of fat-heads at Headquarters!"
"Huh?"
"Picking up a ship by its spark-plugs, with a loop. They're doing that up aloft. There's a ship up there, forty thousand feet or so. Maybe half a dozen ships. Refueling in air, I guess, and working with the thing you call a Wabbly. When I started the 'copter's engine they got the spark-impulses and sighted on them. We'd better get away from here."
"Horses in here," said Sergeant Walpole. "The Wabbly came by. No people left."
They brought the animals out. The horses reared and plunged as there were other infinitely sharp, deadly explosions of the eggs coming down eight miles through darkness.
"Let's go. After the Wabbly?" said the 'copter man.
"O' course," said Sergeant Walpole. "Somebody's got to find out how to lick it."
They went clattering through darkness. It was extraordinary what desolation, what utter lack of human life they moved through. They came to a town, and there was a taint of gas in the air. No lights burned in that town. It was dead. The Wabbly had killed it.
PART IV
"... which panic was enhanced by the destruction of a
second flight of fighting planes. However, the destruction of Bendsboro completed civilian demoralization.... A newscasting company re-broadcast a private television contact with the town at the moment the Wabbly entered it. Practically all the inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast heard and saw the annihilation of the town--hearing the cries of 'Gas!' and the screams of the people, and hearing the crashings as the Wabbly crushed its way inexorably across the city, spreading terror everywhere.... Frenzied demands were made upon the Government for the recall of troops from the front to offer battle to the Wabbly.... It is considered that at that time the one Wabbly had a military effect equal to at least half a million men." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. Pp. 83-84.)
They did not enter the town. There was just enough of starlight to show that the Wabbly had gone through it, and then crashed back and forth ruthlessly. There was a great gash through the center of the buildings nearest the edge, and there were other gashes visible here and there. Everything was crushed down utterly flat in two eight-foot paths; and there was a mass of crumbled debris four feet high at its highest in between the tread-marks.
They looked, silently, and went on. They reached a railroad track, the quadruple track of a branch-line from New York to Philadelphia. The Wabbly was going along that right-of-way. There was no right-of-way left where it had been. Rails were crushed flat. Culverts were broken through. But the horses raced along the smoothed tread-trails. Once a broken, twisted rail tore at Sergeant Walpole's sleeve. Somehow the last great plate of a tread had bent it upward. Presently they saw a mass of something dark off to the left. Flames were licking meditatively at one of the wrecked cars.
Then they heard explosions far ahead. Flames lighted the sky.
"Our men in action!" said Sergeant Walpole hungrily.
He flogged his mount mercilessly. Then the sky became bright in the distance. The horses, going down the crushed-smooth trail of the treads, gained upon the din. Then they saw the cause of it, miles distant. A train was burning luridly. Its forepart was wreckage, pure and simple. The rest was going up in flames and detonations. Munitions, of course. The Wabbly was off at one side, flame-lit and monstrous, sliding smoothly out of sight.
* * * * *
"Ten miles of railroad," said the 'copter pilot calmly, "mashed out of existence. That's going to scare our people into fits. They can drop eggs till the cows come home, and every egg'll smash up a hundred yards of right-of-way, and we can build it back up again in four hours with mobile track-layers. But ten miles to be regraded and laid is different. Half of America will be imagining all our railroads smashed and starvation ahead."
A piercing light fell upon them.
"Shut it off!" roared Sergeant Walpole. "D'y'want to get us killed?"
He and the 'copter pilot swerved. There was a car there, a huge two-wheeled car, whose gyroscopes hummed softly while its driver tried to extract it from something it was tangled in.
"I commandeer this car," said the 'copter pilot. "Military necessity. We have to trail that Wabbly."
Someone grunted. Lights flashed on within. The 'copter pilot and Sergeant Walpole stiffened to attention. The stars of a major-general shone on the collar of the stout man within.
"Beg pardon, sir," said the pilot, and was still.
"Umph," said the major-general. "There seem to be just four of us alive, who've seen the thing clearly. I hit on it by accident, I'll admit. What do you know about it?"
"It come on a tramp-steamer--" began Sergeant Walpole.
"Hm. You're Sergeant Walpole. Mentioned in dispatches to-morrow, Sergeant. You, sir?"
"Its weapon against our planes, sir," said the 'copter man precisely, "is a radio beam carrying several thousand horsepower of energy. When it hits iron, sir, the energy is absorbed and the iron heats up and blows up the ship. The Wabbly's working with a bomber well aloft, sir, which spots planes from below by picking up their spark-plug flashes in a directional loop. The bomber aloft, sir, drops eggs when the Wabbly's attacked. Sergeant Walpole reports several planes disabled by their fabric being blown off their wings."
* * * * *
"I know," said the major-general. "Dammit, the front takes every ship that's fit to go aloft. We have only wrecks back here. You're sure about that spark-plug affair?"
"Yes, sir," said the 'copter pilot. "My ship crashed, sir. I started the motors again, trying to take off. Eggs began to drop about me instantly."
"Nasty!" said the major-general. "I was going to join my men. We've flung a line of artillery ahead of the thing. Motor-driven, of course. But if they can pick up motors by the spark-waves, the bomber knows all about it. Nasty!"
He lit a cigar, calmly. The gyrocar shifted suddenly and backed away from the thing it had been tangled in.
"Why ain't the bombers been shot down?" demanded Sergeant Walpole angrily. "Dammit, sir, if it wasn't for them bombers--"
"Up to an hour ago," said the major-general, "we had lost sixty-eight planes trying to get those bombers. You see, it works both ways. The bombers drop eggs to help the Wabbly defend itself. And the Wabbly uses that power-beam you spoke of to wipe the sky clean about the bombers. I wondered how it was done, before you explained, sir. Do you men want to come with me? Get on the running-board if you like. We shall probably be killed."
The gyrocar purred softly away, with two horses left wandering and two men clinging fast in a sweep of wind. They found a ribbon of concrete road and the wind sang as the car picked up speed. Then, suddenly, it bucked madly and went out of control, and, as suddenly, was passing along the road again. The Wabbly had passed over the roadway here.
* * * * *
And then they heard gunfire ahead. Honest, malevolent gunfire. Flashes lit the horizon. The gyrocar speeded up until it fairly hummed, and the wind rushed into the nostrils and mouths of the men on the running-boards. The cannonade increased. It reached really respectable proportions, until it became a titanic din. As the road rose up a long incline, a shell burst in mid-air in plain view, and the driver of the gyrocar jammed on the brakes and looked down upon the strangest of sights below.
There were other hills yet ahead, and from behind them came that faint, indefinite glow which is the glow of the lights of a city. At the bottom of a valley, a mile and a half distant, there was the Wabbly. Star-shells flared near it, casting it into intolerable brightness and clear relief. And other shells were breaking upon it and all about it. From beyond the rim of hills came the flashes of guns. The air was full of screamings and many crashes.
The Wabbly was motionless. It looked more than ever like a monstrous, deadly centipede. It was under a rain of fire that would have shattered a dreadnaught of the 1920's. Its monstrous treads were motionless. It seemed queerly quiescent, abstracted; it seemed less defiant of the shell-fire that broke upon it like the hail of hell, than indifferent to it. Yes, it seemed indifferent!
Only the queer excrescence on its top moved, and that stirred vaguely. Star-shells floated overhead and bathed it in pitiless light. And it remained motionless.... Sergeant Walpole had a vague impression of colossal detonations taking place miles above his head, but the sound was lost in the drumfire of artillery nearer at hand.
* * * * *
Then a gun on the Wabbly moved. It spouted a flash of bluish flame, and then another and another. It seemed to fire gas-shells into the town, at this moment, ignoring the batteries playing upon it. It was still again, while the queer excrescence on its back moved vaguely and shells burst about it in a very inferno.
Then the treads moved, and with a swift celerity the Wabbly moved smoothly forward and up the incline toward the cannonading guns. It went over the top of the incline, and those in the gyrocar saw its reception. Guns opened on it at point-blank range. Now the Wabbly itself went into action. In the light of star-shells and explosions they saw its guns begin to bellow. It went swiftly and malevolently forward, moving with centipedean smoothness.
It dipped out of sight. The cannonade lessened. Two guns stopped. Three.... Half a dozen guns were out of action. A dozen guns ceased to fire.... One last weapon boomed desperately at its maximum rate of fire....
That stopped. The night became strangely, terribly still. The major-general put aside his radivision receiver. Though neither the helicopter pilot nor Sergeant Walpole had noticed it, he had opened communication the instant the gyrocar came to a stop. Now the major-general was desperately, terribly white.
"The artillery is wiped out," he observed detachedly. "The Wabbly, it seems, is going on into the town."
They did not want to listen, those men who waited futilely by the gyrocar which had witnessed the invulnerability of the Wabbly to all attack. They did not want to listen at all. But they heard the noises as the Wabbly crashed across the town, and back and forth.
"Morale effect," said the major-general, through stiff lips. "That's what it's for. To break down the morale behind the lines. Good God! What hellish things mere words can mean!"
PART V
"... The only weak spot in the Wabbly's design,
apparently, was the necessity of using its entire engine-power in the power-beam with which it protected itself and its attendant bombers from aerial attack. For a time, before New Brunswick, it was forced to remain still, under fire, while it fought off and destroyed an attacking fleet eight miles above it. With sufficiently powerful artillery, it might have been destroyed at that moment. But it was invulnerable to the artillery available.... Deliberately false statements were broadcast to reassure the public, but the public was already skeptical, as it later became incredulous, of official reports of victories. The destruction of New Brunswick became known despite official denials, and colossal riots broke out among the inhabitants of the larger cities, intent upon escape from defenseless towns.... Orders were actually issued withdrawing a quarter of a million men from the front-line reserve, with artillery in proportion to their force." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. P. 92.)
The major-general left them at the town, now quite still and silent. Sergeant Walpole said detachedly:
"We'll prob'ly find a portable sender, sir, an' trail the Wabbly. That's about all we can do, sir."
"It looks," said the major-general rather desperately, "as if that is all anybody can do. I'm going on to take command ahead."
The 'copter pilot said politely:
"Sir, if you're going to sow mines for the Wabbly--"
"Of course!"
"That power-beam can explode them, sir, before the Wabbly gets to them. May I suggest, sir, that mine-cases with no metal in them at all would be worth trying?"
"Thank you," said the major-general grimly. "I'll have concrete ones made."
Sergeant Walpole grunted suddenly.
"Look here, sir! The Wabbly stops when it uses that dinkus on top. This guy here says it uses a lotta power--four or five thousan' horsepower."
"More likely ten or twenty," said the 'copter pilot.
"Maybe," said Sergeant Walpole profoundly, "it takes all the power they got to work that dinkus. They were workin' it just now when the artillery was slammin' 'em. So next time you want to tackle it, stick a flock o' bombs around an' attack the bombers too. If they're kept busy down below, maybe the planes can get the bombers, or otherwise they'll get a chance to use a big gun on the Wabbly."
The major-general nodded.
"We four," he observed, "are the only living men who've actually seen the Wabbly and gotten away. I shall use both your suggestions. And I shall not send those orders by radio--not even tight beam radio. I'll carry them myself. Good luck!"
A non-commissioned officer of the Eastern Coast Observation Force and a yet uncommissioned flying cadet waved a cheerful good-by to the major-general in charge of home defense in three states. Then they went on into the town.
"Monocycles first," said Sergeant Walpole. "An' a sender."
* * * * *
The 'copter man nodded. The street-lights of the town dimmed and brightened. The Wabbly had paused only to create havoc, not to produce utter chaos. It had gone back and forth over the town two or three times, spewing out gas as it went. But most of the town was still standing, and the power-house had not been touched. Only its untended Diesels had checked before a fuel-pump cleared.
They found a cycle-shop, its back wall bulged in by wreckage against it. Sergeant Walpole inspected its wares expertly. A voice began to speak suddenly. A television set had somehow been turned on by the crash that bulged the back wall.
"The monster tank has been held in check," said a smug voice encouragingly. "Encountered by home-defense troops and artillery, it proved unable to face shell-fire...."
"Liars!" said the 'copter man calmly. He picked up the nearest loose object and flung it into the bland face of the official news-announcer. The television set went dead, but there were hissings and sputterings in its interior. He had flung a Bissel battery at it, one of a display-group, and its high-tension terminals hissed and sparked among the stray wires in the cabinet.
"That makes me mad," said the 'copter man grimly. "Lying for morale! The other side murders our civilians to break down morale, and our side lies about it to build morale back up again. To hell with morale!"
Sergeant Walpole reached in and pulled out the battery. Bissel batteries turn out six hundred volts these days, and they make a fat spark when short-circuited.
"For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole. "If they can pick up sparks from a motor, can't they pick 'em up from this? What the hell y'doin'? Y'want 'em droppin' eggs on us? Say!"
* * * * *
He stopped short, his eyes burning. He began to talk, suddenly groping for words while he waved the high-powered small battery in his hand. The helicopter man listened, at first skeptically and then with an equally hungry enthusiasm.
"Sergeant," he said evenly, "that's an idea! A whale of an idea! A hell of a fine idea! Let's get some rockets!"
"Why rockets?" demanded Sergeant Walpole in his turn. "Whatcha want to do? Celebrate the Fourth o' July?"
The 'copter man explained, this time, and Sergeant Walpole seized upon the addition. Then they began a hunt. They roved the town over, and it was not pleasant. When the Wabbly had gone into that town there had still been very many living human beings in it. Some of them had believed in the ability of the artillery to defend the town against a single monster. Some had had no means of getting away. But all of them had tried to get away when the Wabbly went lurching in among the houses.
For them, the Wabbly had spewed out deadly gases. Also it had simply forged ahead. And the two living men in their gas-masks paid as little attention as possible to the bodies in the streets, most of them in flimsy night-clothing, struck down in frenzied flight, but they could not help seeing too much....
In the end they went back to the artillery-positions and found signal-rockets there. Two full cases of them, marvelously unexploded. A little later two monocycles purred madly in the beaten-down paths of the monstrous treads. Sergeant Walpole bore very many Bissel batteries, which will deliver six hundred volts even on short-circuit for half an hour at a time. The 'copter man carried some of them, too, and both men were loaded down.
* * * * *
When dawn came they were hollow-eyed and gaunt and weary. It had started to rain, too, and both of them were drenched. They could see no more than a couple of hundred yards in every direction, and they were hungry, and they had seen things no man should have to look upon, in the way of destruction. They came upon a wrecked artillery-train just as the world lightened to a pallid gray. Guns twisted and burst. Caissons, no more than shattered scraps of metal, because of the explosion of the shells within them. And the tread-tracks of the Wabbly led across the mess. Steam still rose, hissing softly, from the bent and twisted guns which had burst when they were heated to redness by the power-beam. And there was a staff gyrocar crumpled against a tree where it had been flung by some explosion or other. There were neither sound nor wounded men about; only dead ones. The Wabbly had been here.
"Hullo," said the helicopter man in a dreary levity, "there's a portable vision set in this car. Let's call up the general and see how he is?"
Sergeant Walpole spat. Then he held up his hand. He was listening. Far off in the drumming downpour of the rain there was a rumbling sound. He had heard it before. It was partly made up of the noise of internal-combustion engines of unthinkable power, and partly of grumbling treads forcing a way through reluctant trees. It was a long way off, now, but it was coming nearer.
"The Wabbly," said Sergeant Walpole. "Comin' back. Why? Hell's bells! Why's it comin' back?"
"I don't know," said the 'copter man, "but let's get some rockets fixed up."
The two of them worked almost lackadaisically. They were tired out. But they took the tiny Bissel batteries and twisted the attached wires about the rocket-heads. They had twenty or thirty of them fixed by the time the noise of the Wabbly was very near. There was the noise of felled trees, pushed down by the Wabbly in its progress. Great, crackling crashes, and then crunching sounds, and above them the thunderous smooth purring rumble of the monster. The 'copter man climbed into the upside-down staff car. He turned the vision set on and fiddled absurdly with the controls.
"I'm getting something," he announced suddenly. "The bomber up aloft is sending its stuff down a beam, a tight beam to the Wabbly. Listen to it!"
* * * * *
The uncouth, clacking syllables of the enemy tongue came from the vision set. Someone was speaking crisply and precisely somewhere. Blurred, indistinct flashes appeared on the vision set screen.
"They ought to be worried," the 'copter man said wearily. "Even an infra-red telescope can't pick up a damned thing through clouds like this. And the Wabbly's in a mess without a bomber to help...."
Sergeant Walpole did not reply. He was exhausted. He sat looking tiredly off through the rain in the direction of the approaching noise. Somehow it did not occur to him to run away. He sat quite still, smoking a soggy cigarette.
Something beaked and huge appeared behind a monstrous oak-tree. It came on. The oak-tree crackled, crashed, and went down. It was ground under by the monstrous war-engine that went over it. The Wabbly was unbelievably impersonal and horrible in its progress. There had been a filling-station for gyrocars close by the place where the artillery-train had been wrecked. One of the eight-foot treads loomed over that station, descended upon it--and the filling-station was no more. The Wabbly was then not more than a hundred yards from Sergeant Walpole, less than a city block. He looked at it in a weary detachment. It was as high as a four-story house, and it was two hundred feet long, and forty feet wide at the treads with the monstrous gun-bulges reaching out an extra ten or fifteen feet on either side above. And it came grumbling on toward him.
PART VI
"... Considered as a strategic move, the Wabbly was a
triumph. Eighteen hours after its landing, the orders for troops called for half a million men to be withdrawn from the forces at the front and in reserve, and munitions-factories were being diverted from the supply of the front to the manufacture of devices designed to cope with it. This, in turn, entailed changes in the front-line activities of the Command.... Altogether, it may be said that the Wabbly, eighteen hours after its landing, was exerting the military pressure of an army of not less than half a million men upon the most vulnerable spot in our defenses--the rear.... And when its effect upon civilian morale is considered, the Wabbly, as a force in being, constituted the most formidable military unit in history." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. P. 93.)
As Sergeant Walpole saw the Wabbly, there was no sign of humanity anywhere about the thing. It was a monstrous mass of metal, powder-stained now where shells had burst against it, and it seemed metallically alive, impersonally living. The armored tube with vision-slits at its ends must have been the counterpart of a ship's bridge, but it looked like the eye-ridge of an insect's face. The bulbous control-rooms at the ends looked like a gigantic insect's multi-faceted eyes. And the huge treads, so thick as to constitute armor for their own protection, were so cunningly joined and sprung that they, too, seemed like part of a living thing.
It came within twenty yards of the staff-car with the 'copter man in it and Sergeant Walpole smoking outside. It ignored them. It had destroyed all life at this place. And Sergeant Walpole alone was visible, and he sat motionless and detached, unemotionally waiting to be killed. The Wabbly clanked and rumbled and roared obliviously past them. Sergeant Walpole saw the flexing springs in the tread-joints, and there were hundreds of them, of a size to support a freight-car. He saw a refuse-tube casually ejecting a gush of malodorous stuff, in which the garbage of a mess-table was plainly identifiable. A drop or two of the stuff splashed on him, and he smelled coffee.
And then the treads lifted, and he saw the monstrous gas-spreading tubes at the stern, and the exhaust-pipes into which he could have ridden, monocycle and all. Then he saw a man in the Wabbly. There were ventilation-ports open at the pointed stern and a man was looking out, some fifteen feet above the ground, smoking placidly and looking out at the terrain the Wabbly left behind it. He was wearing an enemy uniform cap.
* * * * *
The monster went on. The roar of its passing diminished a little. And the 'copter man came suddenly out of the staff-car, struggling with the portable vision set.
"I think we can do it," he said shortly. "It's in constant beam communication with a bomber up aloft, and I think they're worried up there because they can't see a damned thing. But it's a good team. With the Wabbly's beam, which takes so much power no bomber could possibly carry it, the bombers are safe, and the bombers can locate any motor-driven thing that might attack the Wabbly and blow it to hell. But right now they can't see it. So I think we can do it. Coming?"
Sergeant Walpole threw away his cigarette and rose stiffly. Even those few moments of rest had intensified his weariness. He flung a leg over the monocycle's seat and pointed tiredly to the trail of the Wabbly. It nearly paralleled, here, a ribbon of concrete road which once had been a reasonably important feeder-highway.
"Let's go."
They went off through the rain along the road, nearly parallel to the route the Wabbly was taking. Rain beat at them. Off in the woods to their right the Wabbly's noise grew louder as they overtook it. They passed it, and came abruptly out of the wooded area upon cultivated fields, rolling and beautifully cared-for. There had been a farm-headquarters off to one side, a huge central-station for all the agricultural work on what once would have been half a county, but there were jagged walls where buildings had been, and smoke still rose from the place.
Then the Wabbly came out of the woods, a dim gray monstrous shape in the rain.
* * * * *
The helicopter man pulled the ignition-cord and a rocket began to sputter. He made a single wipe with his knife-blade along the twisted insulated wires of the Bissel battery, and a wavering blue spark leaped into being. The rocket shot upward, curved down, and landed with enough force to bury its head in the muddy ploughed earth and conceal the signal-flare that must have ignited.
"That ought to do it," said the 'copter man. "Let's send some more."
Sergeant Walpole got exhaustedly off his monocycle and duplicated the 'copter man's efforts. A second rocket, a third.... A dozen or more rockets went off, each one bearing a wavering, uncertain blue spark at its tip. And that spark would continue for half an hour or more. In a loop aerial, eight miles up, it might sound like a spark-plug, or it might sound like something else. But it would not sound like the sort of thing that ought to spring up suddenly in front of the Wabbly, and it would sound like something that had better be bombed, for safety's sake.
The Wabbly was moving across the ploughed fields with a deceptive smoothness. It was drawing nearer and nearer to the spot where the rockets had plunged to earth.
It stopped.
Another rocket left the weary pair of men, its nearly flashless exhaust invisible in the daytime, anyway. The Wabbly backed slowly from the irregular line where the first rockets sparked invisibly. It was no more than a distinct gray shadow in the falling rain, but the queer bulk atop its body moved suddenly. Like a searchlight, the power-beam swept the earth before the Wabbly. But nothing happened.
The 'copter man turned on the vision set he had packed from the staff gyrocar. Voices, crisp and anxious, came out of it. He caressed the set affectionately.
"Listen to 'em, Sergeant," he said hungrily. "They're worried!"
* * * * *
The voice changed suddenly. There was a sudden musical buzzing in the set, as of two dozen spitting sparks, in as many tones, all going at once.
"Letting the guys in the Wabbly hear what they hear," said the 'copter man grimly. "If God's good to us, now...."
The voices changed again. They stopped.
The Wabbly itself was still, halted in its passage across a clear and rain-swept field by little sparking sounds which seemed to indicate the presence of something that had better be bombed for safety's sake.
A thin whining noise came down from aloft. It rose to a piercing shriek, and there was a gigantic crater a half mile from the Wabbly, from which smoke rose lazily. The Wabbly remained motionless. Another whining noise which turned to a shriek.... The explosion was terrific. It was a bit nearer the Wabbly.
"We'll send 'em some more rockets," said the 'copter man.
They went hissing invisibly through the rain. The Wabbly backed cautiously away from the spot where they landed, because they were wholly invisible and they made a sound which those in the Wabbly could not understand. Always, to a savage, the unexplained is dangerous. Modern warfare has reached the same high peak of wisdom. The Wabbly drew off from the sparks because it could not know what made them, and because it had used its power-beam and the bomber had dropped its bombs without stopping or destroying them. It was not conceivable to anybody on either the Wabbly or the bombers aloft that inexplicable things could be especially contrived to confront the Wabbly, unless they were contrived to destroy it.
"They don't know what in hell they're up against," said the 'copter man joyously. "Now lets give 'em fits!"
* * * * *
Rockets went off in swift succession. To the blinded men in the bomber above the clouds it seemed that unexplained mechanisms were springing into action by dozens, all about the Wabbly. They were mechanisms. They were electric mechanisms. They were obviously designed to have some effect on the Wabbly. And the Wabbly had no defense against the unguessed-at effects of unknown weapons except....
Bombs began to rain from the sky. The Wabbly crawled toward the last gap left in the ring of mysterious mechanisms. That closed. Triumphant, singing sparks sang viciously in the amplifiers. Nothing was visible. Nothing! Perhaps that was what precipitated panic. The bombers rained down their deadly missiles. And somebody forgot the exact length of time it takes a bomb to drop eight miles....
Sergeant Walpole and the 'copter man were flat on the ground with their hands to their ears. The ground bucked and smote them. The unthinkable violence of the hexynitrate explosions tore at their nerves, even at their sanity. And then there was an explosion with a subtle difference in its sound. Sergeant Walpole looked up, his head throbbing, his eyes watering, dizzy and dazed, and bleeding at the nose and ears.
Then he bumped into the 'copter man, shuddering on the ground. He did it deliberately. There was a last crashing sound, and some of the blasted earth spattered on them. But then the 'copter man looked where Sergeant Walpole pointed dizzily.
The Wabbly was careened crazily on one side. One of its treads was uncoiling slowly from its frame. Its stern was blown in. Someone had forgotten how long it takes a bomb to drop eight miles, and the Wabbly had crawled under one. More, from the racked-open stern of the Wabbly there was coming a roaring, spitting cloud of gas. The Wabbly's storage-tanks of gas had been set off. Inside, it would be a shambles. Its crew would be dead, killed by the gas the Wabbly itself had broadcast in its wake....
PART VII
"... It is a point worth noticing, by any student of
strategy, that while the Wabbly in working solely for effectiveness in lowering civilian morale worked upon sound principles, yet the destruction of the Wabbly by Sergeant Walpole and Flight Cadet Ryerson immediately repaired all the damage done. Had it worked toward more direct military aims, its work would have survived it. It remains a pretty question for the student, whether the Enemy Command, with the information it possessed, made the soundest strategic use of its unparalleled weapon.... But on the whole, the raid of the Wabbly remains the most startling single strategic operation of the war, if only because of its tremendous effect upon civilian morale...." (Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43.--U. S. War College. Pp. 94-96.)
A major-general climbed out of a staff gyrocar and waded through mud for half a mile, after which he, in person, waked two sleeping men. They were sprawled out in the puddle of rain which had gathered in a torn-away tread from the Wabbly. They waked with extreme reluctance, and then yawned even in the act of saluting in a military manner.
"Yes, sir;" said Sergeant Walpole, yawning again. "Yes, sir; the bombers've gone. We heard 'em tryin' to raise the Wabbly for about half an hour after she'd blown up. Then they cut off. I think they went home, sir. Most likely, sir, they think we used some new dinkus on the Wabbly. It ain't likely they'll realize they blew it up themselves for us."
The major-general gave crisp orders. Men began to explore the Wabbly, cautiously. He turned back to the two sleepy and disreputable men who had caused its destruction. His aspect was one of perplexity and admiration.
"What did you men do?" he demanded warmly. "What in hell did you do?"
Sergeant Walpole grinned tiredly. The 'copter man spoke for him.
"I think, sir," said the helicopter man, "that we affected the morale of the Wabbly's and the bombers' crews."
SAND DOOM
by Murray Leinster
Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely uncomfortable vibration of rocket blasts shook the ship. Rockets were strictly emergency devices, these days, so when they were used there was obviously an emergency.
He sat still. He had been reading, in the passenger lounge of the Warlock--a very small lounge indeed--but as a senior Colonial Survey officer he was well-traveled enough to know when things did not go right. He looked up from the bookscreen, waiting. Nobody came to explain the eccentricity of a spaceship using rockets. It would have been immediate, on a regular liner, but the Warlock was practically a tramp. This trip it carried just two passengers. Passenger service was not yet authorized to the planet ahead, and would not be until Bordman had made the report he was on his way to compile. At the moment, though, the rockets blasted, and stopped, and blasted again. There was something definitely wrong.
The Warlock's other passenger came out of her cabin. She looked surprised. She was Aletha Redfeather, an unusually lovely Amerind. It was extraordinary that a girl could be so self-sufficient on a tedious space-voyage, and Bordman approved of her. She was making the journey to Xosa II as a representative of the Amerind Historical Society, but she'd brought her own bookreels and some elaborate fancywork which--woman-fashion--she used to occupy her hands. She hadn't been at all a nuisance. Now she tilted her head on one side as she looked inquiringly at Bordman.
"I'm wondering, too," he told her, just as an especially sustained and violent shuddering of rocket-impulsion made his chair legs thutter on the floor.
There was a long period of stillness. Then another violent but much shorter blast. A shorter one still. Presently there was a half-second blast which must have been from a single rocket tube because of the mild shaking it produced. After that there was nothing at all.
Bordman frowned to himself. He'd been anticipating groundfall within a matter of hours, certainly. He'd just gone through his specbook carefully and re-familiarized himself with the work he was to survey on Xosa II. It was a perfectly commonplace minerals-planet development, and he'd expected to clear it FE--fully established--and probably TP and NQ ratings as well, indicating that tourists were permitted and no quarantine was necessary. Considering the aridity of the planet, no bacteriological dangers could be expected to exist, and if tourists wanted to view its monstrous deserts and infernolike wind sculptures--why they should be welcome.
But the ship had used rocket drive in the planet's near vicinity. Emergency. Which was ridiculous. This was a perfectly routine sort of voyage. Its purpose was the delivery of heavy equipment--specifically a smelter--and a senior Colonial Survey officer to report the completion of primary development.
Aletha waited, as if for more rocket blasts. Presently she smiled at some thought that had occurred to her.
"If this were an adventure tape," she said humorously, "the loudspeaker would now announce that the ship had established itself in an orbit around the strange, uncharted planet first sighted three days ago, and that volunteers were wanted for a boat landing."
Bordman demanded impatiently:
"Do you bother with adventure tapes? They're nonsense! A pure waste of time!"
Aletha smiled again.
"My ancestors," she told him, "used to hold tribal dances and make medicine and boast about how many scalps they'd taken and how they did it. It was satisfying--and educational for the young. Adolescents became familiar with the idea of what we nowadays call adventure. They were partly ready for it when it came. I suspect your ancestors used to tell each other stories about hunting mammoths and such. So I think it would be fun to hear that we were in orbit and that a boat landing was in order."
Bordman grunted. There were no longer adventures. The universe was settled; civilized. Of course there were still frontier planets--Xosa II was one--but pioneers had only hardships. Not adventures.
* * * * *
The ship-phone speaker clicked. It said curtly:
"Notice. We have arrived at Xosa II and have established an orbit about it. A landing will be made by boat."
Bordman's mouth dropped open.
"What the devil's this?" he demanded.
"Adventure, maybe," said Aletha. Her eyes crinkled very pleasantly when she smiled. She wore the modern Amerind dress--a sign of pride in the ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization. "If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital waiting make the"--her smile widened to a grin--"the pent-up restlessness of trouble-makers in the crew----"
The ship-phone clicked again.
"Mr. Bordman. Miss Redfeather. According to advices from the ground, the ship may have to stay in orbit for a considerable time. You will accordingly be landed by boat. Will you make yourselves ready, please, and report to the boat-blister?" The voice paused and added, "Hand luggage only, please."
Aletha's eyes brightened. Bordman felt the shocked incredulity of a man accustomed to routine when routine is impossibly broken. Of course survey ships made boat landings from orbit, and colony ships let down robot hulls by rocket when there was as yet no landing grid for the handling of a ship. But never before in his experience had an ordinary freighter, on a routine voyage to a colony ready for its final degree-of-completion survey, ever landed anybody by boat.
"This is ridiculous!" said Bordman, fuming.
"Maybe it's adventure," said Aletha. "I'll pack."
She disappeared into her cabin. Bordman hesitated. Then he went into his own. The colony on Xosa II had been established two years ago. Minimum comfort conditions had been realized within six months. A temporary landing grid for light supply ships was up within a year. It had permitted stock-piling, and it had been taken down to be rebuilt as a permanent grid with every possible contingency provided for. The eight months since the last ship landing was more than enough for the building of the gigantic, spidery, half-mile-high structure which would handle this planet's interstellar commerce. There was no excuse for an emergency! A boat landing was nonsensical!
But he surveyed the contents of his cabin. Most of the cargo of the Warlock was smelter equipment which was to complete the outfitting of the colony. It was to be unloaded first. By the time the ship's holds were wholly empty, the smelter would be operating. The ship would wait for a full cargo of pig metal. Bordman had expected to live in this cabin while he worked on the survey he'd come to make, and to leave again with the ship.
Now he was to go aground by boat. He fretted. The only emergency equipment he could possibly need was a heat-suit. He doubted the urgency of that. But he packed some clothing for indoors, and then defiantly included his specbook and the volumes of definitive data to which specifications for structures and colonial establishments always referred. He'd get to work on his report immediately he landed.
He went out of the passenger's lounge to the boat-blister. An engineer's legs projected from the boat port. The engineer withdrew, with a strip of tape from the boat's computer. He compared it dourly with a similar strip from the ship's figurebox. Bordman consciously acted according to the best traditions of passengers.
"What's the trouble?" he asked.
"We can't land," said the engineer shortly.
He went away--according to the tradition by which ships' crews are always scornful of passengers.
* * * * *
Bordman scowled. Then Aletha came, carrying a not-too-heavy bag. Bordman put it in the boat, disapproving of the crampedness of the craft. But this wasn't a lifeboat. It was a landing boat. A lifeboat had Lawlor drive and could travel light-years, but in the place of rockets and rocket fuel it had air-purifiers and water-recovery units and food-stores. It couldn't land without a landing grid aground, but it could get to a civilized planet. This landing boat could land without a grid, but its air wouldn't last long.
"Whatever's the matter," said Bordman darkly, "it's incompetence somewhere!"
But he couldn't figure it out. This was a cargo ship. Cargo ships neither took off nor landed under their own power. It was too costly of fuel they would have to carry. So landing grids used local power--which did not have to be lifted--to heave ships out into space, and again used local power to draw them to ground again. Therefore ships carried fuel only for actual space-flight, which was economy. Yet landing grids had no moving parts, and while they did have to be monstrous structures they actually drew power from planetary ionospheres. So with no moving parts to break down and no possibility of the failure of a power source--landing grids couldn't fail! So there couldn't be an emergency to make a ship ride orbit around a planet which had a landing grid!
The engineer came back. He carried a mail sack full of letter-reels. He waved his hand. Aletha crawled into the landing-boat port. Bordman followed. Four people, with a little crowding, could have gotten into the little ship. Three pretty well filled it. The engineer followed them and sealed the port.
"Sealed off," he said into the microphone before him.
The exterior-pressure needle moved halfway across the dial. The interior-pressure needle stayed steady.
"All tight," said the engineer.
The exterior-pressure needle flicked to zero. There were clanking sounds. The long halves of the boat-blister stirred and opened, and abruptly the landing boat was in an elongated cup in the hull-plating, and above them there were many, many stars. The enormous disk of a nearby planet floated into view around the hull. It was monstrous and blindingly bright. It was of a tawny color, with great, irregular areas of yellow and patches of bluishness. But most of it was the color of sand. And all its colors varied in shade--some places were lighter and some darker--and over at one edge there was blinding whiteness which could not be anything but an ice cap. But Bordman knew that there was no ocean or sea or lake on all this whole planet, and the ice cap was more nearly hoarfrost than such mile-deep glaciation as would be found at the poles of a maximum-comfort world.
"Strap in," said the engineer over his shoulder. "No-gravity coming, and then rocket-push. Settle your heads."
Bordman irritably strapped himself in. He saw Aletha busy at the same task, her eyes shining. Without warning, there came a sensation of acute discomfort. It was the landing boat detaching itself from the ship and the diminishment of the ship's closely-confined artificial-gravity field. That field suddenly dropped to nothingness, and Bordman had the momentary sickish dizziness that flicked-off gravity always produces. At the same time his heart pounded unbearably in the instinctive, racial-memory reaction to the feel of falling.
Then roarings. He was thrust savagely back against his seat. His tongue tried to slide back into his throat. There was an enormous oppression on his chest. He found himself thinking panicky profanity.
Simultaneously the vision ports went black, because they were out of the shadow of the ship. The landing boat turned--but there was no sensation of centrifugal force--and they were in a vast obscurity with merely a dim phantom of the planetary surface to be seen. But behind them a blue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm--hot--even though it came through the polarized shielding ports.
"Did ... did you say," panted Aletha happily--breathless because of the acceleration--"that there weren't any adventures?"
Bordman did not answer. But he did not count discomfort as an adventure.
* * * * *
The engineer did not look out the ports at all. He watched the screen before him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighted disk. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in thousands of miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and the vertical line became double and another blip began to descend. It measured height in hundreds of miles. A bright spot--a square--appeared at one side of the screen. A voice muttered metallically, and suddenly seemed to shout, and then muttered again. Bordman looked out one of the black ports and saw the planet as if through smoked glass. It was a ghostly reddish thing which filled half the cosmos. It had mottlings. Its edge was curved. That would be the horizon.
The engineer moved controls and the white square moved. It went across the screen. He moved more controls. It came back to the center. The height-in-hundreds blip was at the bottom, now, and the vertical line tripled and a tens-of-miles-height blip crawled downward.
There were sudden, monstrous plungings of the landing boat. It had hit the outermost fringes of atmosphere. The engineer said words it was not appropriate for Aletha to hear. The plungings became more violent. Bordman held on--to keep from being shaken to pieces despite the straps--and stared at the murky surface of the planet. It seemed to be fleeing from them and they to be trying to overtake it. Gradually, very gradually, its flight appeared to slow. They were down to twenty miles, then.
Quite abruptly the landing boat steadied. The square spot bobbed about in the center of the astrogation screen. The engineer worked controls to steady it.
The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below more distinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring could produce. There were vast stretches of tawny sand. A little while more, and he could see the shadows of mountains. He made out mountain flanks which should have had valleys between them and other mountain flanks beyond, but they had tawny flatnesses between, instead. These, he knew, would be the sand plateaus which had been observed on this planet and which had only a still-disputed explanation. But he could see areas of glistening yellow and dirty white, and splashes of pink and streaks of ultramarine and gray and violet, and the incredible red of iron oxide covering square miles--too much to be believed.
The landing-boat's rockets cut off. It coasted. Presently the horizon tilted and all the dazzling ground below turned sedately beneath them. There came staccato instructions from a voice-speaker, which the engineer obeyed. The landing boat swung low--below the tips of giant mauve mountains with a sand plateau beyond them--and its nose went up. It stalled.
Then the rockets roared again--and now, with air about them and after a momentary pause, they were horribly loud--and the boat settled down and down upon its own tail of fire.
There was a completely blinding mass of dust and rocket fumes which cut off all sight of everything else. Then there was a crunching crash, and the engineer swore peevishly to himself. He cut the rockets again. Finally.
* * * * *
Bordman found himself staring straight up, still strapped in his chair. The boat had settled on its own tail fins, and his feet were higher than his head, and he felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work unstrapping himself. He duplicated the action, but it was absurdly difficult to get out of the chair.
Aletha managed more gracefully. She didn't need help.
"Wait," said the engineer ungraciously, "till somebody comes."
So they waited, using what had been chair backs for seats.
The engineer moved a control and the windows cleared further. They saw the surface of Xosa II. There was no living thing in sight. The ground itself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders--all apparently tumbled from the starkly magnificent mountains to one side. There were monstrous, many-colored cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in the unmistakable fashion of wind-erosion. Through a notch in the mountain wall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. If such a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was a flow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere there was blinding brightness and the look and feel of blistering sunshine. But there was not one single leaf or twig or blade of grass. This was pure desert. This was Xosa II.
Aletha regarded it with bright eyes.
"Beautiful!" she said happily. "Isn't it?"
"Personally," said Bordman, "I never saw a place that looked less homelike or attractive."
Aletha laughed.
"My eyes see it differently."
Which was true. It was accepted, nowadays, that humankind might be one species but was many races, and each saw the cosmos in its own fashion. On Kalmet III there was a dense, predominantly Asiatic population which terraced its mountainsides for agriculture and deftly mingled modern techniques with social customs not to be found on--say--Demeter I, where there were many red-tiled stucco towns and very many olive groves. In the llano planets of the Equis cluster, Amerinds--Aletha's kin--zestfully rode over plains dotted with the descendants of buffalo and antelope and cattle brought from ancient Earth. On the oases of Rustam IV there were date palms and riding camels and much argument about what should be substituted for the direction of Mecca at the times for prayer, while wheat fields spanned provinces on Canna I and highly civilized emigrants from the continent of Africa on Earth stored jungle gums and lustrous gems in the warehouses of their spaceport city of Timbuk.
So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kindred were the pioneers of the stars, these days. Their heritage made them less than appreciative of urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them the steel-construction men of the cosmos, and more than two-thirds of the landing grids in the whole galaxy had their coup-feather symbols on the key posts. But the planet government on Algonka V was housed in a three-thousand-foot white stone tepee, and the best horses known to men were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheekbones on the llano planet Chagan.
* * * * *
Now, here, in the Warlock's landing boat, the engineer snorted. A vehicle came around a cliff wall, clanking its way on those eccentric caterwheels that new-founded colonies find so useful. The vehicle glittered. It crawled over tumbled boulders, and flowed over fallen scree. It came briskly toward them. The engineer snorted again.
"That's my cousin Ralph!" said Aletha in pleased surprise.
Bordman blinked and looked again. He did not quite believe his eyes. But they told the truth. The figure controlling the ground car was Indian--Amerind--wearing a breechcloth and thick-soled sandals and three streamlined feathers in a band about his head. Moreover, he did not ride in a seat. He sat astride a semi-cylindrical part of the ground car, over which a gaily-colored blanket had been thrown.
The ship's engineer rumbled disgustedly. But then Bordman saw how sane this method of riding was--here. The ground vehicle lurched and swayed and rolled and pitched and tossed as it came over the uneven ground. To sit in anything like a chair would have been foolish. A back rest would throw one forward in a frontward lurch, and give no support in case of a backward one. A sidewise tilt would tend to throw one out. Riding a ground car as if in a saddle was sense!
But Bordman was not so sure about the costume. The engineer opened the port and spoke hostilely out of it:
"D'you know there's a lady in this thing?"
The young Indian grinned. He waved his hand to Aletha, who pressed her nose against a viewport. And just then Bordman did understand the costume or lack of it. Air came in the open exit port. It was hot and desiccated. It was furnace-like!
"How, 'Letha," called the rider on the caterwheel steed. "Either dress for the climate or put on a heat-suit before you come out of there!"
Aletha chuckled. Bordman heard a stirring behind him. Then Aletha climbed to the exit port and swung out. Bordman heard a dour muttering from the engineer. Then he saw her greeting her cousin. She had slipped out of the conventionalized Amerind outfit to which Bordman was accustomed. Now she was clad as Anglo-Saxon girls dressed for beaches on the cool-temperature planets.
For a moment Bordman thought of sunstroke, with his own eyes dazzled by the still-partly-filtered sunlight. But Aletha's Amerind coloring was perfectly suited to sunshine even of this intensity. Wind blowing upon her body would cool her skin. Her thick, straight black hair was at least as good protection against sunstroke as a heat-helmet. She might feel hot, but she would be perfectly safe. She wouldn't even sunburn. But he, Bordman----
He grimly stripped to underwear and put on the heat-suit from his bag. He filled its canteens from the boat's water tank. He turned on the tiny, battery-powered motors. The suit ballooned out. It was intended for short periods of intolerable heat. The motors kept it inflated--away from his skin--and cooled its interior by the evaporation of sweat plus water from its canteen tanks. It was a miniature air-conditioning system for one man, and it should enable him to endure temperatures otherwise lethal to someone with his skin and coloring. But it would use a lot of water.
He climbed to the exit port and went clumsily down the exterior ladder to the tail fin. He adjusted his goggles. He went over to the chattering young Indians, young man and girl. He held out his gloved hand.
"I'm Bordman," he said painfully. "Here to make a degree-of-completion survey. What's wrong that we had to land by boat?"
Aletha's cousin shook hands cordially.
"I'm Ralph Redfeather," he said, introducing himself. "Project engineer. About everything's wrong. Our landing grid's gone. We couldn't contact your ship in time to warn it off. It was in our gravity field before it answered, and its Lawlor drive couldn't take it away--not working because of the field. Our power, of course, went with the landing grid. The ship you came in can't get back, and we can't send a distress message anywhere, and our best estimate is that the colony will be wiped out--thirst and starvation--in six months. I'm sorry you and Aletha have to be included."
Then he turned to Aletha and said amiably:
"How's Mike Thundercloud and Sally Whitehorse and the gang in general, 'Letha?"
* * * * *
The Warlock rolled on in her newly-established orbit about Xosa II. The landing boat was aground, having removed the two passengers. It would come back. Nobody on the ship wanted to stay aground, because they knew the conditions and the situation below--unbearable heat and the complete absence of hope. But nobody had anything to do! The ship had been maintained in standard operating condition during its two-months' voyage from Trent to here. No repairs or overhaulings were needed. There was no maintenance-work to speak of. There would be only stand-by watches until something happened. There would be nothing to do on those watches. There would be off-watch time for twenty-one out of every twenty-four hours, and no purposeful activity to fill even half an hour of it. In a matter of--probably--years, the Warlock should receive aid. She might be towed out of her orbit to space in which the Lawlor drive could function, or the crew might simply be taken off. But meanwhile, those on board were as completely frustrated as the colony. They could not do anything at all to help themselves.
In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the Warlock's crew had nothing ahead but tedium.
The skipper faced the future with extreme, grim distaste.
* * * * *
The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground-car's cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space, the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine--and given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn't throwing him violently about or bringing sun-heated--blue-white-sun heated--metal to press his heat-suit against him.
The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced salt water they gave him and went to bed. He'd get back his strength with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours straight.
When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed. It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort class D--a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred and ten degrees. Africans could take such a climate--with night-relief quarters. Amerinds could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by insulated shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors except in a heat-suit. He couldn't stay long then. It was not a weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.
Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer's office. It occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication in three separate communities, so that an individual could change his quarters and ordinary associates from time to time and colony fever--frantic irritation with one's companions--was minimized.
Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose leaf volume before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar volumes.
"I made a spectacle of myself!" said Bordman, bitterly.
"Not at all!" Aletha assured him. "It could happen to anybody. I wouldn't do too well on Timbuk."
There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet, barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.
"Ralph's on the way here now," added Aletha. "He and Dr. Chuka were out picking a place to leave the records. The sand dunes here are terrible, you know. When an explorer-ship does come to find out what's happened to us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be. It isn't easy to pick a record-cache that's quite sure to be found."
"When," said Bordman skeptically, "there's nobody left alive to point it out. Is that it?"
"That's it," agreed Aletha. "It's pretty bad all around. I didn't plan to die just yet."
Her voice was perfectly normal. Bordman snorted. As a senior Colonial Survey officer, he'd been around. But he'd never yet known a human colony to be extinguished when it was properly equipped and after a proper pre-settlement survey. He'd seen panic, but never real cause for a matter-of-fact acceptance of doom.
* * * * *
There was a clanking noise outside the hulk which was the Project Engineer's headquarters. Bordman couldn't see clearly through the filtered ports. He reached over and opened a door. The brightness outside struck his eyes like a blow. He blinked them shut instantly and turned away. But he'd seen a glistening, caterwheel ground car stopping not far from the doorway.
He stood wiping tears from his light-dazzled eyes as footsteps sounded outside. Aletha's cousin came in, followed by a huge man with remarkably dark skin. The dark man wore eyeglasses with a curiously thick, corklike nosepiece to insulate the necessary metal of the frame from his skin. It would blister if it touched bare flesh.
"This is Dr. Chuka," said Redfeather pleasantly, "Mr. Bordman. Dr. Chuka's the director of mining and mineralogy here."
Bordman shook hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing startlingly white teeth. Then he began to shiver.
"It's like a freeze-box in here," he said in a deep voice. "I'll get a robe and be with you."
He vanished through a doorway, his teeth chattering audibly. Aletha's cousin took half a dozen deliberate deep breaths and grimaced.
"I could shiver myself," he admitted "but Chuka's really acclimated to Xosa. He was raised on Timbuk."
Bordman said curtly:
"I'm sorry I collapsed on landing. It won't happen again. I came here to do a degree-of-completion survey that should open the colony to normal commerce, let the colonists' families move in, tourists, and so on. But I was landed by boat instead of normally, and I am told the colony is doomed. I would like an official statement of the degree of completion of the colony's facilities and an explanation of the unusual points I have just mentioned."
The Indian blinked at him. Then he smiled faintly. The dark man came back, zipping up an indoor warmth-garment. Redfeather dryly brought him up to date by repeating what Bordman had just said. Chuka grinned and sprawled comfortably in a chair.
"I'd say," he remarked humorously, in that astonishingly deep-toned voice of his, "sand got in our hair. And our colony. And the landing grid. There's a lot of sand on Xosa. Wouldn't you say that was the trouble?"
The Indian said with elaborate gravity:
"Of course wind had something to do with it."
Bordman fumed.
"I think you know," he said fretfully, "that as a senior Colonial Survey officer, I have authority to give any orders needed for my work. I give one now. I want to see the landing grid--if it is still standing. I take it that it didn't fall down?"
Redfeather flushed beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. It would be hard to offend a steelman more than to suggest that his work did not stand up.
"I assure you," he said politely, "that it did not fall down."
"Your estimate of its degree of completion?"
"Eighty per cent," said Redfeather formally.
"You've stopped work on it?"
"Work on it has been stopped," agreed the Indian.
"Even though the colony can receive no more supplies until it is completed?"
"Just so," said Redfeather without expression.
"Then I issue a formal order that I be taken to the landing-grid site immediately," said Bordman angrily. "I want to see what sort of incompetence is responsible! Will you arrange it--at once?"
Redfeather said in a completely emotionless voice:
"You want to see the site of the landing grid. Very good. Immediately."
He turned and walked out into the incredible, blinding sunshine. Bordman blinked at the momentary blast of light, and then began to pace up and down the office. He fumed. He was still ashamed of his collapse from the heat during the travel from the landed rocket-boat to the colony. Therefore he was touchy and irritable. But the order he had given was strictly justifiable.
He heard a small noise. He whirled. Dr. Chuka, huge and black and spectacled, rocked back and forth in his seat, suppressing laughter.
"Now, what the devil does that mean?" demanded Bordman suspiciously. "It certainly isn't ridiculous to ask to see the structure on which the life of the colony finally depends!"
"Not ridiculous," said Dr. Chuka. "It's--hilarious!"
He boomed laughter in the office with the rounded ceiling of a remade robot hull. Aletha smiled with him, though her eyes were grave.
"You'd better put on a heat-suit," she said to Bordman.
He fumed again, tempted to defy all common sense because its dictates were not the same for everybody. But he marched away, back to the cubbyhole in which he had awakened. Angrily, he donned the heat-suit that had not protected him adequately before, but had certainly saved his life. He filled the canteens topping full--he suspected he hadn't done so the last time. He went back to the Project Engineer's office with a feeling of being burdened and absurd.
* * * * *
Out a filter-window, he saw that men with skins as dark as Dr. Chuka's were at work on a ground car. They were equipping it with a sunshade and curious shields like wings. Somebody pushed a sort of caterwheel handtruck toward it. They put big, heavy tanks into its cargo space. Dr. Chuka had disappeared, but Aletha was back at work making notes from the loose-leaf volume on the desk.
"May I ask," asked Bordman with some irony, "what your work happens to be just now?"
She looked up.
"I thought you knew," she said in surprise. "I'm here for the Amerind Historical Society. I can certify coups. I'm taking coup-records for the Society. They'll go in the record-cache Ralph and Dr. Chuka are arranging, so no matter what happens to the colony, the record of the coups won't be lost."
"Coups?" demanded Bordman. He knew that Amerinds painted feathers on the key-posts of steel structures they'd built, and he knew that the posting of such "coup-marks" was a cherished privilege and undoubtedly a survival or revival of some American Indian tradition back on Earth. But he did not know what they meant.
"Coups," repeated Aletha matter-of-factly. "Ralph wears three eagle-feathers. You saw them. He has three coups. Pinions, too! He built the landing grids on Norlath and--Oh, you don't know!"
"I don't," admitted Bordman, his temper not of the best because of what seemed unnecessary condescensions on Xosa II.
Aletha looked surprised.
"In the old days," she explained, "back on Earth, if a man scalped an enemy, he counted coup. The first to strike an enemy in a battle counted coup, too--a lesser one. Nowadays a man counts coups for different things, but Ralph's three eagle-feathers mean he's entitled to as much respect as a warrior in the old days who, three separate times, had killed and scalped an enemy warrior in the middle of his own camp. And he is, too!"
Bordman grunted.
"Barbarous, I'd say!"
"If you like," said Aletha. "But it's something to be proud of--and one doesn't count coup for making a lot of money!" Then she paused and said curtly: "The word 'snobbish' fits it better than 'barbarous.' We are snobs! But when the head of a clan stands up in Council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, representing his clan, and men have to carry the ends of the feather headdress with all the coups the members of his clan have earned--why one is proud to belong to that clan!" She added defiantly, "Even watching it on a vision-screen!"
Dr. Chuka opened the outer door. Blinding light poured in. He did not enter--and his body glistened with sweat.
"Ready for you, Mr. Bordman!"
Bordman adjusted his goggles and turned on the motors of his heat-suit. He went out the door.
* * * * *
The heat and light outside were oppressive. He darkened the goggles again and made his way heavily to the waiting, now-shaded ground car. He noted that there were other changes beside the sunshade. The cover-deck of the cargo space was gone, and there were cylindrical riding seats like saddles in the back. The odd lower shields reached out sidewise from the body, barely above the caterwheels. He could not make out their purpose and irritably failed to ask.
"All ready," said Redfeather coldly. "Dr. Chuka's coming with us. If you'll get in here, please----"
Bordman climbed awkwardly into the boxlike back of the car. He bestrode one of the cylindrical arrangements. With a saddle on it, it would undoubtedly have been a comfortable way to cover impossibly bad terrain in a mechanical carrier. He waited. About him there were the squatty hulls of the space-barges which had been towed here by a colony ship, each one once equipped with rockets for landing. Emptied of their cargoes, they had been huddled together into the three separate, adjoining communities. There were separate living quarters and mess halls and recreation rooms for each, and any colonist lived in the community of his choice and shifted at pleasure, or visited, or remained solitary. For mental health a man has to be assured of his free will, and over-regimentation is deadly in any society. With men psychologically suited to colonize, it is fatal.
Above--but at a distance, now--there was a monstrous scarp of mountains, colored in glaring and unnatural tints. Immediately about there was raw rock. But it was peculiarly smooth, as if sand grains had rubbed over it for uncountable aeons and carefully worn away every trace of unevenness. Half a mile to the left, dunes began and went away to the horizon. The nearer ones were small, but they gained in size with distance from the mountains--which evidently affected the surface-winds hereabouts--and the edge of seeing was visibly not a straight line. The dunes yonder must be gigantic. But of course on a world the size of ancient Earth, and which was waterless save for snow-patches at its poles, the size to which sand dunes could grow had no limit. The surface of Xosa II was a sea of sand, on which islands and small continents of wind-swept rock were merely minor features.
Dr. Chuka adjusted a small metal object in his hand. It had a tube dangling from it. He climbed into the cargo space and fastened it to one of the two tanks previously loaded.
"For you," he told Bordman. "Those tanks are full of compressed air at rather high pressure--a couple of thousand pounds. Here's a reduction-valve with an adiabatic expansion feature, to supply extra air to your heat-suit. It will be pretty cold, expanding from so high a pressure. Bring down the temperature a little more."
Bordman again felt humiliated. Chuka and Redfeather, because of their races, were able to move about nine-tenths naked in the open air on this planet, and they thrived. But he needed a special refrigerated costume to endure the heat. More, they provided him with sunshades and refrigerated air that they did not need for themselves. They were thoughtful of him. He was as much out of his element, where they fitted perfectly, as he would have been making a degree-of-completion survey on an underwater project. He had to wear what was practically a diving suit and use a special air supply to survive!
He choked down the irritation his own inadequacy produced.
"I suppose we can go now," he said as coldly as he could.
Aletha's cousin mounted the control-saddle--though it was no more than a blanket--and Dr. Chuka mounted beside Bordman. The ground car got under way. It headed for the mountains.
* * * * *
The smoothness of the rock was deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed. Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles made the light endurable, but he felt ashamed.
"Those side-fins," said Chuka's deep voice pleasantly, "the bottom ones, make things better for you. The shade overhead cuts off direct sunlight, and they cut off the reflected glare. It would blister your skin even if the sun never touched you directly."
Bordman did not answer. The caterwheel car went on. It came to a patch of sand--tawny sand, heavily mineralized. There was a dune here. Not a big one for Xosa II. It was no more than a hundred feet high. But they went up its leeward, steeply slanting side. All the planet seemed to tilt insanely as the caterwheels spun. They reached the dune's crest, where it tended to curl over and break like a water-comber, and here the wheels struggled with sand precariously ready to fall, and Bordman had a sudden perception of the sands of Xosa II as the oceans that they really were. The dunes were waves which moved with infinite slowness, but the irresistible force of storm-seas. Nothing could resist them. Nothing!
They traveled over similar dunes for two miles. Then they began to climb the approaches to the mountains. And Bordman saw for the second time--the first had been through the ports of the landing-boat--where there was a notch in the mountain wall and sand had flowed out of it like a waterfall, making a beautifully symmetrical cone-shaped heap against the lower cliffs. There were many such falls. There was one place where there was a sand-cascade. Sand had poured over a series of rocky steps, piling up on each in turn to its very edge, and then spilling again to the next.
They went up a crazily slanting spur of stone, whose sides were too steep for sand to lodge on, and whose narrow crest had a bare thin coating of powder.
The landscape looked like a nightmare. As the car went on, wabbling and lurching and dipping on its way, the heights on either side made Bordman tend to dizziness. The coloring was impossible. The aridness, the desiccation, the lifelessness of everything about was somehow shocking. Bordman found himself straining his eyes for the merest, scrubbiest of bushes and for however stunted and isolated a wisp of grass.
The journey went on for an hour. Then there came a straining climb up a now-windswept ridge of eroded rock, and the attainment of its highest point. The ground car went onward for a hundred yards and stopped.
They had reached the top of the mountain range, and there was doubtlessly another range beyond. But they could not see it. Here, at the place to which they had climbed so effortfully, there were no more rocks. There was no valley. There was no descending slope. There was sand. This was one of the sand plateaus which were a unique feature of Xosa II. And Bordman knew, now, that the disputed explanation was the true one.
Winds, blowing over the mountains, carried sand as on other worlds they carried moisture and pollen and seeds and rain. Where two mountain ranges ran across the course of long-blowing winds, the winds eddied above the valley between. They dropped sand into it. The equivalent of trade winds, Bordman considered, in time would fill a valley to the mountain tops, just as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon it. But----
* * * * *
"Well?" said Bordman challengingly.
"This is the site of the landing grid," said Redfeather.
"Where?"
"Here," said the Indian dryly. "A few months ago there was a valley here. The landing grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There was to be four hundred feet more--the lighter top construction justifies my figure of eighty per cent completion. Then there was a storm."
It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at mountaintop height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman's face and bent down in the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for Bordman's necessity. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry, of course. The circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial-fever box. He'd been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded air was almost deliriously refreshing.
Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.
"A storm, eh?" asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There'd be some hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau. It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. "But what has a storm to do----"
"It was a sandstorm," said Redfeather coldly. "Probably there was a sunspot flare-up. We don't know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because this storm blew for"--his voice went flat and deliberate because it was stating the unbelievable--"for two months. We did not see the sun in all that time. And we couldn't work, naturally. The sand would flay a man's skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.
"When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet down in the sand you see. Our unfabricated building-steel is piled ready for erection--under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but stored power it is hardly practical"--Redfeather's tone was sardonic--"for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions of tons of stuff to be moved. If we could get the sand away, we could finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we'd have power enough to get the sand away--in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery that wore out handling it. And if there wasn't another sandstorm."
He paused. Bordman took deep breaths of the cooler air. He could think more clearly.
"If you will accept photographs," said Redfeather politely, "you can check that we actually did the work."
* * * * *
Bordman saw the implications. The colony had been formed of Amerinds for the steel work and Africans for the labor the Amerinds were congenitally averse to--the handling of complex mining-machinery underground and the control of modern high-speed smelting operations. Both races could endure this climate and work in it--provided that they had cooled sleeping quarters. But they had to have power. Power not only to work with, but to live by. The air-cooling machinery that made sleep possible also condensed from the cooled air the minute trace of water vapor it contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would thirst. Without the landing grid and the power it took from the ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the universe. So they would starve.
And the Warlock, now in orbit somewhere overhead, was well within the planet's gravitational field and could not use its Lawlor drive to escape with news of their predicament. In the normal course of events it would be years before a colony ship capable of landing or blasting out of a planetary gravitational field by rocket-power was dispatched to find out why there was no news from Xosa II. There was no such thing as interstellar signaling, of course. Ships themselves travel faster than any signal that could be sent, and distances were so great that mere communication took enormous lengths of time. A letter sent to Earth from the Rim even now took ten years to make the journey, and another ten for a reply. Even the much shorter distances involved in Xosa II's predicament still ruled out all hope. The colony was strictly on its own.
Bordman said heavily:
"I'll accept the photographs. I even accept the statement that the colony will die. I will prepare my report for the cache Aletha tells me you're preparing. And I apologize for any affront I may have offered you."
Dr. Chuka nodded approvingly. He regarded Bordman with benign warmth. Ralph Redfeather said cordially enough:
"That's perfectly all right. No harm done."
"And now," said Bordman shortly, "since I have authority to give any orders needed for my work, I want to survey the steps you've taken to carry out those parts of your instructions dealing with emergencies. I want to see right away what you've done to beat this state of things. I know they can't be beaten, but I intend to leave a report on what you've tried!"
* * * * *
The Warlock swung in emptiness around the planet Xosa II. It was barely five thousand miles above the surface, so the mottled terrain of the dry world flowed swiftly and perpetually beneath it. It did not seem beneath, of course. It simply seemed out--away--removed from the ship. And in the ship's hull there was artificial gravity, and light, and there were the humming sounds of fans which kept the air in motion and flowing through the air apparatus. Also there was food, and adequate water, and the temperature was admirably controlled. But nothing happened. Moreover, nothing could be expected to happen. There were eight men in the crew, and they were accustomed to space-voyages which lasted from one month to three. But they had traveled a good two months from their last port. They had exhausted the visireels, playing them over and over until they were intolerable. They had read and reread all the bookreels they could bear. On previous voyages they had played chess and similar games until it was completely predictable who would beat whom in every possible contest.
Now they viewed the future with bitterness. The ship could not land, because there was no landing grid in operation on the planet below them. They could not depart, because the Lawlor drive simply does not work within five diameters of an Earth-gravity planet. Space is warped only infinitesimally by so thin a field, but a Lawlor drive needs almost perfectly unstressed emptiness if it is to take hold. They did not have fuel enough to blast out the necessary thirty-odd thousand miles against gravity. The same consideration made their lifeboats useless. They could not escape by rocket-power and their Lawlor drives, also, were ineffective.
The crew of the Warlock was bored. The worst of the boredom was that it promised to last without limit. They had food and water and physical comfort, but they were exactly in the situation of men sentenced to prison for an unknown but enormous length of time. There was no escape. There could be no alleviation. The prospect invited frenzy by anticipation.
A fist fight broke out in the crew's quarters within two hours after the Warlock had established its orbit--as a first reaction to their catastrophe. The skipper went through the ship and painstakingly confiscated every weapon. He locked them up. He, himself, already felt the nagging effect of jangling nerves. There was nothing to do. He didn't know when there would ever be anything to do. It was a condition to produce hysteria.
* * * * *
There was night. Outside and above the colony there were uncountable myriads of stars. They were not the stars of Earth, of course, but Bordman had never been on Earth. He was used to unfamiliar constellations. He stared out a port at the sky, and noted that there were no moons. He remembered, when he thought, that Xosa II had no moons. There was a rustling of paper behind him. Aletha Redfeather turned a page in a loose-leaf volume and painstakingly made a note. The wall behind her held many more such books. From them could be extracted the detailed history of every bit of work that had been done by the colony-preparation crews. Separate, tersely-phrased items could be assembled to make a record of individual men.
There had been incredible hardships, at first. There were heroic feats. There had been an attempt to ferry water supplies down from the pole by aircraft. It was not practical, even to build up a reserve of fluid. Winds carried sand particles here as on other worlds they carried moisture. Aircraft were abraded as they flew. The last working flier made a forced landing five hundred miles from the colony. A caterwheel expedition went out and brought the crew in. The caterwheel trucks were armored with silicone plastic, resistant to abrasion, but when they got back they had to be scrapped. There had been men lost in sudden sand-squalls, and heroic searches for them, and once or twice rescues. There had been cave-ins in the mines. There had been accidents. There had been magnificent feats of endurance and achievement.
Bordman went to the door of the hull which was Ralph Redfeather's Project Engineer office. He opened it. He stepped outside.
It was like stepping into an oven. The sand was still hot from the sunshine just ended. The air was so utterly dry that Bordman instantly felt it sucking at the moisture of his nasal passages. In ten seconds his feet--clad in indoor footwear--were uncomfortably hot. In twenty the soles of his feet felt as if they were blistering. He would die of the heat at night, here! Perhaps he could endure the outside near dawn, but he raged a little. Here where Amerinds and Africans lived and throve, he could live unprotected for no more than an hour or two--and that at one special time of the planet's rotation!
He went back in, ashamed of the discomfort of his feet and angrily letting them feel scorched rather than admit to it.
Aletha turned another page.
"Look, here!" said Bordman angrily. "No matter what you say, you're going to go back on the Warlock before----"
She raised her eyes.
"We'll worry about that when the time comes. But I think not. I'd rather stay here."
"For the present, perhaps," snapped Bordman. "But before things get too bad you go back to the ship! They've rocket fuel enough for half a dozen landings of the landing boat. They can lift you out of here!"
Aletha shrugged.
"Why leave here to board a derelict? The Warlock's practically that. What's your honest estimate of the time before a ship equipped to help us gets here?"
Bordman would not answer. He'd done some figuring. It had been a two-month journey from Trent--the nearest Survey base--to here. The Warlock had been expected to remain aground until the smelter it brought could load it with pig metal. Which could be as little as two weeks, but would surprise nobody if it was two months instead. So the ship would not be considered due back on Trent for four months. It would not be considered overdue for at least two more. It would be six months before anybody seriously wondered why it wasn't back with its cargo. There'd be a wait for lifeboats to come in, should there have been a mishap in space. There'd eventually be a report of noncommunication to the Colony Survey headquarters on Canna III. But it would take three months for that report to be received, and six more for a confirmation--even if ships made the voyages exactly at the most favorable intervals--and then there should at least be a complaint from the colony. There were lifeboats aground on Xosa II, for emergency communication, and if a lifeboat didn't bring news of a planetary crisis, no crisis would be considered to exist. Nobody could imagine a landing grid failing!
Maybe in a year somebody would think that maybe somebody ought to ask around about Xosa II. It would be much longer before somebody put a note on somebody else's desk that would suggest that when, or if, a suitable ship passed near Xosa II, or if one should be available for the inquiry, it might be worth while to have the noncommunication from the planet looked into. Actually, to guess at three years before another ship arrived would be the most optimistic of estimates.
"You're a civilian," said Bordman shortly. "When the food and water run low, you go back to the ship. You'll at least be alive when somebody does come to see what's the matter here!"
Aletha said mildly:
"Maybe I'd rather not be alive. Will you go back to the ship?"
Bordman flushed. He wouldn't. But he said doggedly;
"I can order you sent on board, and your cousin will carry out the order!"
"I doubt it very much," said Aletha pleasantly.
She returned to her task.
* * * * *
There were crunching footsteps outside the hulk. Bordman winced a little. With insulated sandals, it was normal for these colonists to move from one part of the colony to another in the open, even by daylight. He, Bordman, couldn't take out-of-doors at night! His lips twisted bitterly.
Men came in. There were dark men with rippling muscles under glistening skin, and bronze Amerinds with coarse straight hair. Ralph Redfeather was with them. Dr. Chuka came in last of all.
"Here we are," said Redfeather. "These are our foremen. Among us, I think we can answer any questions you want to ask."
He made introductions. Bordman didn't try to remember the names. Abeokuta and Northwind and Sutata and Tallgrass and T'ckka and Spottedhorse and Lewanika---- They were names which in combination would only be found in a very raw, new colony. But the men who crowded into the office were wholly at ease, in their own minds as well as in the presence of a senior Colonial Survey officer. They nodded as they were named, and the nearest shook hands. Bordman knew that he'd have liked their looks under other circumstances. But he was humiliated by the conditions on this planet. They were not. They were apparently only sentenced to death by them.
"I have to leave a report," said Bordman curtly--and he was somehow astonished to know that he did expect to leave a report rather than make one; he accepted the hopelessness of the colony's future--"on the degree-of-completion of the work here. But since there's an emergency, I have also to leave a report on the measures taken to meet it."
The report would be futile, of course. As futile as the coup-records Aletha was compiling, which would be read only after everybody on the planet was dead. But Bordman knew he'd write it. It was unthinkable that he shouldn't.
"Redfeather tells me," he added, again curtly, "that the power in storage can be used to cool the colony buildings--and therefore condense drinking water from the air--for just about six months. There is food for about six months. If one lets the buildings warm up a little, to stretch the fuel, there won't be enough water to drink. Go on half rations to stretch the food, and there won't be enough water to last and the power will give out anyhow. No profit there!"
There were nods. The matter had been thrashed out long before.
"There's food in the Warlock overhead," Bordman went on coldly, "but they can't use the landing boat more than a few times. It can't use ship fuel. No refrigeration to hold it stable. They couldn't land more than a ton of supplies all told. There are five hundred of us here. No help there!"
He looked from one to another.
"So we live comfortably," he told them with irony, "until our food and water and minimum night-comfort run out together. Anything we do to try to stretch anything is useless because of what happens to something else. Redfeather tells me you accept the situation. What are you doing--since you accept it?"
Dr. Chuka said amiably:
"We've picked a storage place for our records, and our miners are blasting out space in which to put away the record of our actions to the last possible moment. It will be sandproof. Our mechanics are building a broadcast unit we'll spare a tiny bit of fuel for. It will run twenty-odd years, broadcasting directions so it can be found regardless of how the terrain is changed by drifting sand."
"And," said Bordman, "the fact that nobody will be here to give directions."
Chuka added benignly:
"We're doing a great deal of singing, too. My people are ... ah ... religious. When we are ... ah ... no longer here ... there have been boastings that there'll be a well-practiced choir ready to go to work in the next world."
White teeth showed in grins. Bordman was almost envious of men who could grin at such a thought. But he went on grimly:
"And I understand that athletics have also been much practiced."
Redfeather said:
"There's been time for it. Climbing teams have counted coup on all the worst mountains within three hundred miles. There's been a new record set for the javelin, adjusted for gravity constant, and Johnny Cornstalk did a hundred yards in eight point four seconds. Aletha has the records and has certified them."
"Very useful!" said Bordman sardonically. Then he disliked himself for saying it even before the bronze-skinned men's faces grew studiedly impassive.
Chuka waved his hand.
"Wait, Ralph! Lewanika's nephew will beat that within a week!"
Bordman was ashamed again because Chuka had spoken to cover up his own ill-nature.
"I take it back!" he said irritably. "What I said was uncalled for. I shouldn't have said it! But I came here to do a completion survey and what you've been giving me is material for an estimate of morale! It's not my line! I'm a technician, first and foremost! We're faced with a technical problem!"
Aletha spoke suddenly from behind him.
"But these are men, first and foremost, Mr. Bordman. And they're faced with a very human problem--how to die well. They seem to be rather good at it, so far."
Bordman ground his teeth. He was again humiliated. In his own fashion he was attempting the same thing. But just as he was genetically not qualified to endure the climate of this planet, he was not prepared for a fatalistic or pious acceptance of disaster. Amerind and African, alike, these men instinctively held to their own ideas of what the dignity of a man called upon him to do when he could not do anything but die. But Bordman's idea of his human dignity required him to be still fighting: still scratching at the eyes of fate or destiny when he was slain. It was in his blood or genes or the result of training. He simply could not, with self-respect, accept any physical situation as hopeless even when his mind assured him that it was.
* * * * *
"I agree," he said coldly, "but still I have to think in technical terms. You might say that we are going to die because we cannot land the Warlock with food and equipment. We cannot land the Warlock because we have no landing grid. We have no landing grid because it and all the material to complete it is buried under millions of tons of sand. We cannot make a new light-supply-ship type of landing grid because we have no smelter to make beams, nor power to run it if we had, yet if we had the beams we could get the power to run the smelter we haven't got to make the beams. And we have no smelter, hence no beams, no power, no prospect of food or help because we can't land the Warlock. It is strictly a circular problem. Break it at any point and all of it is solved."
One of the dark men muttered something under his breath to those near him. There were chuckles.
"Like Mr. Woodchuck," explained the man, when Bordman's eyes fell on him. "When I was a little boy there was a story like that."
Bordman said icily:
"The problem of coolness and water and food is the same sort of problem. In six months we could raise food--if we had power to condense moisture. We've chemicals for hydroponics--if we could keep the plants from roasting as they grew. Refrigeration and water and food are practically another circular problem."
Aletha said tentatively:
"Mr. Bordman----"
He turned, annoyed. Aletha said almost apologetically:
"On Chagan there was a--you might call it a woman's coup given to a woman I know. Her husband raises horses. He's mad about them. And they live in a sort of home on caterwheels out on the plains--the llanos. Sometimes they're months away from a settlement. And she loves ice cream and refrigeration isn't too simple. But she has a Doctorate in Human History. So she had her husband make an insulated tray on the roof of their trailer and she makes her ice cream there."
Men looked at her. Her cousin said amusedly:
"That should rate some sort of technical-coup feather!"
"The Council gave her a brass pot--official," said Aletha. "Domestic science achievement." To Bordman she explained: "Her husband put a tray on the roof of their house, insulated from the heat of the house below. During the day there's an insulated cover on top of it, insulating it from the heat of the sun. At night she takes off the top cover and pours her custard, thin, in the tray. Then she goes to bed. She has to get up before daybreak to scrape it up, but by then the ice cream is frozen. Even on a warm night." She looked from one to another. "I don't know why. She said it was done in a place called Babylonia on Earth, many thousands of years ago."
Bordman blinked. Then he said decisively:
"Damn! Who knows how much the ground-temperature drops here before dawn?"
"I do," said Aletha's cousin, mildly. "The top-sand temperature falls forty-odd degrees. Warmer underneath, of course. But the air here is almost cool when the sun rises. Why?"
"Nights are cooler on all planets," said Bordman, "because every night the dark side radiates heat to empty space. There'd be frost everywhere every morning if the ground didn't store up heat during the day. If we prevent daytime heat-storage--cover a patch of ground before dawn and leave it covered all day--and uncover it all night while shielding it from warm winds---- We've got refrigeration! The night sky is empty space itself! Two hundred and eighty below zero!"
* * * * *
There was a murmur. Then argument. The foremen of the Xosa II colony-preparation crew were strictly practical men, but they had the habit of knowing why some things were practical. One does not do modern steel construction in contempt of theory, nor handle modern mining tools without knowing why as well as how they work. This proposal sounded like something that was based on reason--that should work to some degree. But how well? Anybody could guess that it should cool something at least twice as much as the normal night temperature-drop. But somebody produced a slipstick and began to juggle it expertly. He astonishedly announced his results. Others questioned, and then verified it. Nobody paid much attention to Bordman. But there was a hum of absorbed discussion, in which Redfeather and Chuka were immediately included. By calculation, it astoundingly appeared that if the air on Xosa II was really as clear as the bright stars and deep day-sky color indicated, every second night a total drop of one hundred and eighty degrees temperature could be secured by radiation to interstellar space--if there were no convection-currents, and they could be prevented by----
It was the convection-current problem which broke the assembly into groups with different solutions. But it was Dr. Chuka who boomed at all of them to try all three solutions and have them ready before daybreak, so the assembly left the hulk, still disputing enthusiastically. But somebody had recalled that there were dewponds in the one arid area on Timbuk, and somebody else remembered that irrigation on Delmos III was accomplished that same way. And they recalled how it was done----
Voices went away in the ovenlike night outside. Bordman grimaced, and again said:
"Damn! Why didn't I think of that myself?"
"Because," said Aletha, smiling, "you aren't a Doctor of Human History with a horse-raising husband and a fondness for ice cream. Even so, a technician was needed to break down the problem here into really simple terms." Then she said, "I think Bob Running Antelope might approve of you, Mr. Bordman."
Bordman fumed to himself.
"Who's he? Just what does that whole comment mean?"
"I'll tell you," said Aletha, "when you've solved one or two more problems."
Her cousin came back into the room. He said with gratification:
"Chuka can turn out silicone-wool insulation, he says. Plenty of material, and he'll use a solar mirror to get the heat he needs. Plenty of temperature to make silicones! How much area will we need to pull in four thousand gallons of water a night?"
"How do I know?" demanded Bordman. "What's the moisture-content of the air here, anyhow?" Then he said vexedly, "Tell me! Are you using heat-exchangers to help cool the air you pump into the buildings, before you use power to refrigerate it? It would save some power----"
The Indian project engineer said absorbedly:
"Let's get to work on this! I'm a steel man myself, but----"
They settled down. Aletha turned a page.
The Warlock spun around the planet. The members of its crew withdrew into themselves. In even two months of routine tedious voyaging to this planet, there had been the beginnings of irritation with the mannerisms of other men. Now there would be years of it. At the beginning, every man tended to become a hermit so that he could postpone as long as possible the time when he would hate his shipmates. Monotony was already so familiar that its continuance was a foreknown evil. The crew of the Warlock already knew how intolerable they would presently be to each other, and the foreknowledge tended to make them intolerable now.
Within two days of its establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist fight. A bitter one.
Fist fights are not healthy symptoms in a spaceship which cannot hope to make port for a matter of years.
* * * * *
Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivial part of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races because they were different, and they tended to be different because they were enemies, so there was enmity--The big problem of interstellar flight was that nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing could travel faster than light because mass increased with speed, and mass increased with speed--obviously!--because ships remained in the same time-slot, and ships remained in the same time-slot long after a one-second shift was possible because nobody realized that it meant traveling faster than light. And even before there was interstellar travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it took so much fuel to take off and land. And it took more fuel to carry the fuel to take off and land, and more still to carry the fuel for that, until somebody used power on the ground for heave-off instead of take-off, and again on the ground for landing. And then interplanetary ships carried cargoes. And on Xosa II there was an emergency because a sandstorm had buried the almost completed landing grid under some megatons of sand, and it couldn't be completed because there was only storage power because it wasn't completed, because there was only storage power because----
But it took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimately simple thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem, but he hadn't seen its true circularity. It was actually--like all circular problems--inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began to fall apart when he saw that mere refrigeration would break its solidity.
In one week there were ten acres of desert covered with silicone-wool-felt in great strips. By day a reflective surface was uppermost, and at sundown caterwheel trucks hooked on to towlines and neatly pulled it over on its back, to expose gridded black-body surfaces to the starlight. And the gridding was precisely designed so that winds blowing across it did not make eddies in the grid-squares, and the chilled air in those pockets remained undisturbed and there was no conduction of heat downward by eddy currents, while there was admirable radiation of heat out to space. And this was in the manner of the night sides of all planets, only somewhat more efficient.
* * * * *
In two weeks there was a water yield of three thousand gallons per night, and in three weeks more there were similar grids over the colony houses and a vast roofed cooling-shed for pre-chilling of air to be used by the refrigeration systems themselves. The fuel-store--stored power--was thereupon stretched to three times its former calculated usefulness. The situation was no longer a simple and neat equation of despair.
Then something else happened. One of Dr. Chuka's assistants was curious about a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made the silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. And after one blank moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon Amerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no longer a fuel tank because its fuel was gone, and they built a demountable solar mirror some sixty feet across--which African mechanics deftly powered--and suddenly there was a spot of incandescence even brighter than the sun of Xosa II, down on the planet's surface. It played upon a mineral cliff, and monstrous smells developed and even the African mining-technicians put on goggles because of the brightness, and presently there were threads of molten metal and slag trickling--and separating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliff-side.
And Dr. Chuka beamed and slapped his sweating thighs, and Bordman went out in a caterwheel truck, wearing a heat-suit, to watch it for all of twenty minutes. When he got back to the Project Engineer's office he gulped iced salt water and dug out the books he'd brought down from the ship. There was the specbook for Xosa II, and there were the other volumes of definitions issued by the Colonial Survey. They were definitions of the exact meanings of terms used in briefer specifications, for items of equipment sometimes ordered by the Colony Office.
* * * * *
When Chuka came into the office, presently, he carried the first crude pig of Xosa II iron in his gloved hand. He gloated. Bordman was then absent, and Ralph Redfeather worked feverishly at his desk.
"Where's Bordman?" demanded Chuka in that resonant bass voice of his. "I'm ready to report for degree-of-completion credit that the mining properties on Xosa II are prepared as of today to deliver pig iron, cobalt, zirconium and beryllium in commercial quantities! We require one day's notice to begin delivery of metal other than iron at the moment, because we're short of equipment, but we can furnish chromium and manganese on two days' notice--the deposits are farther away."
He dumped the pig of metal on the second desk, where Aletha sat with her perpetual loose-leafed volumes before her. The metal smoked and began to char the desk-top. He picked it up again and tossed it from one gloved hand to the other.
"There y'are, Ralph!" he boasted. "You Indians go after your coups! Match this coup for me! Without fuel and minus all equipment except of our own making--I credit an assist on the mirror, but that's all--we're set to load the first ship that comes in for cargo! Now what are you going to do for the record? I think we've wiped your eye for you!"
Ralph hardly looked up. His eyes were very bright. Bordman had shown him and he was copying feverishly the figures and formulae from a section of the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The books started with the specifications for antibiotic growth equipment for colonies with problems in local bacteria. It ended with definitions of the required strength-of-material and the designs stipulated for cages in zoos for motile fauna, subdivided into flying, marine, and solid-ground creatures: sub-sub-divided into carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores, with the special specifications for enclosures to contain abyssal creatures requiring extreme pressures, and the equipment for maintaining a healthfully re-poisoned atmosphere for creatures from methane planets.
Redfeather had the third volume open at, "Landing Grids, Lightest Emergency, Commerce Refuges, For Use Of." There were some dozens of non-colonized planets along the most-traveled spaceways on which refuges for shipwrecked spacemen were maintained. Small forces of Patrol personnel manned them. Space lifeboats serviced them. They had the minimum installations which could draw on their planets' ionospheres for power, and they were not expected to handle anything bigger than a twenty-ton lifeboat. But the specifications for the equipment of such refuges were included in the reference volumes for Bordman's use in the making of Colonial surveys. They were compiled for the information of contractors who wanted to bid on Colonial Survey installations, and for the guidance of people like Bordman who checked up on the work. So they contained all the data for the building of a landing grid, lightest emergency, commerce refuge for use of, in case of need. Redfeather copied feverishly.
Chuka ceased his boasting, but still he grinned.
"I know we're stuck, Ralph," he said amiably, "but it's nice stuff to go in the records. Too bad we don't keep coup-records like you Indians!"
Aletha's cousin--Project Engineer--said crisply:
"Go away! Who made your solar mirror? It was more than an assist! You get set to cast beams for us! Girders! I'm going to get a lifeboat aloft and away to Trent! Build a minimum size landing grid! Build a fire under somebody so they'll send us a colony ship with supplies! If there's no new sandstorm to bury the radiation refrigerators Bordman brought to mind, we can keep alive with hydroponics until a ship can arrive with something useful!"
Chuka stared.
"You don't mean we might actually live through this! Really?"
Aletha regarded the two of them with impartial irony.
"Dr. Chuka," she said gently, "you accomplished the impossible. Ralph, here, is planning to attempt the preposterous. Does it occur to you that Mr. Bordman is nagging himself to achieve the inconceivable? It is inconceivable, even to him, but he's trying to do it!"
"What's he trying to do?" demanded Chuka, wary but amused.
"He's trying," said Aletha, "to prove to himself that he's the best man on this planet. Because he's physically least capable of living here! His vanity's hurt. Don't underestimate him!"
"He the best man here?" demanded Chuka blankly. "In his way he's all right. The refrigeration proves that! But he can't walk out-of-doors without a heat-suit!"
Ralph Redfeather said dryly, without ceasing his feverish work:
"Nonsense, Aletha. He has courage. I give him that. But he couldn't walk a beam twelve hundred feet up. In his own way, yes. He's capable. But the best man----"
"I'm sure," agreed Aletha, "that he couldn't sing as well as the worst of your singing crew, Dr. Chuka, and any Amerind could outrun him. Even I could! But he's got something we haven't got, just as we have qualities he hasn't. We're secure in our competences. We know what we can do, and that we can do it better than any--" her eyes twinkled--"paleface. But he doubts himself. All the time and in every way. And that's why he may be the best man on this planet! I'll bet he does prove it!"
Redfeather said scornfully:
"You suggested radiation refrigeration! What does it prove that he applied it?"
"That," said Aletha, "he couldn't face the disaster that was here without trying to do something about it--even when it was impossible. He couldn't face the deadly facts. He had to torment himself by seeing that they wouldn't be deadly if only this one or that or the other were twisted a little. His vanity was hurt because nature had beaten men. His dignity was offended. And a man with easily-hurt dignity won't ever be happy, but he can be pretty good!"
Chuka raised his ebony bulk from the chair in which he still shifted the iron pig from gloved hand to gloved hand.
"You're kind," he said, chuckling. "Too kind! I don't want to hurt his feelings. I wouldn't, for the world! But really ... I've never heard a man praised for his vanity before, or admired for being touchy about his dignity! If you're right ... why ... it's been convenient. It might even mean hope. But ... hm-m-m---- Would you want to marry a man like that?"
"Great Manitou forbid!" said Aletha firmly. She grimaced at the bare idea. "I'm an Amerind. I'll want my husband to be contented. I want to be contented along with him. Mr. Bordman will never be either happy or content. No paleface husband for me! But I don't think he's through here yet. Sending for help won't satisfy him. It's a further hurt to his vanity. He'll be miserable if he doesn't prove himself--to himself--a better man than that!"
Chuka shrugged his massive shoulders. Redfeather tracked down the last item he needed and fairly bounced to his feet.
"What tonnage of iron can you get out, Chuka?" he demanded. "What can you do in the way of castings? What's the elastic modulus--how much carbon in this iron? And when can you start making castings? Big ones?"
"Let's go talk to my foremen," said Chuka complacently. "We'll see how fast my ... ah ... mineral spring is trickling metal down the cliff-face. If you can really launch a lifeboat, we might get some help here in a year and a half instead of five----"
* * * * *
They went out-of-doors together. There was a small sound in the next office. Aletha was suddenly very, very still. She sat motionless for a long half-minute. Then she turned her head.
"I owe you an apology, Mr. Bordman," she said ruefully. "It won't take back the discourtesy, but--I'm very sorry."
Bordman came into the office from the next room. He was rather pale. He said wryly:
"Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, eh? Actually I was on the way in here when I heard--references to myself it would embarrass Chuka and your cousin to know I heard. So I stopped. Not to listen, but to keep them from knowing I'd heard their private opinions of me. I'll be obliged if you don't tell them. They're entitled to their opinions of me. I've mine of them." He added grimly, "Apparently I think more highly of them than they do of me!"
Aletha said contritely:
"It must have sounded horrible! But they ... we ... all of us think better of you than you do of yourself!"
Bordman shrugged.
"You in particular. 'Would you marry someone like me? Great Manitou, no!'"
"For an excellent reason," said Aletha firmly. "When I get back from here--if I get back from here--I'm going to marry Bob Running Antelope. He's nice. I like the idea of marrying him. I want to! But I look forward not only to happiness but to contentment. To me that's important. It isn't to you, or to the woman you ought to marry. And I ... well ... I simply don't envy either of you a bit!"
"I see," said Bordman with irony. He didn't. "I wish you all the contentment you look for." Then he snapped: "But what's this business about expecting more from me? What spectacular idea do you expect me to pull out of somebody's hat now? Because I'm frantically vain!"
"I haven't the least idea," said Aletha calmly. "But I think you'll come up with something we couldn't possibly imagine. And I didn't say it was because you were vain, but because you are discontented with yourself. It's born in you! And there you are!"
"If you mean neurotic," snapped Bordman, "you're all wrong. I'm not neurotic! I'm not. I'm annoyed. I'll get hopelessly behind schedule because of this mess! But that's all!"
Aletha stood up and shrugged her shoulders ruefully.
"I repeat my apology," she told him, "and leave you the office. But I also repeat that I think you'll turn up something nobody else expects--and I've no idea what it will be. But you'll do it now to prove that I'm wrong about how your mind works."
She went out. Bordman clamped his jaws tightly. He felt that especially haunting discomfort which comes of suspecting that one has been told something about himself which may be true.
"Idiotic!" he fumed, all alone. "Me neurotic? Me wanting to prove I'm the best man here out of vanity?" He made a scornful noise. He sat impatiently at the desk. "Absurd!" he muttered wrathfully. "Why should I need to prove to myself I'm capable? What would I do if I felt such a need, anyhow?"
Scowling, he stared at the wall. It was irritating. It was a nagging sort of question. What would he do if she were right? If he did need constantly to prove to himself----
He stiffened, suddenly. A look of intense surprise came upon his face. He'd thought of what a self-doubtful, discontented man would try to do, here on Xosa II at this juncture.
The surprise was because he had also thought of how it could be done.
* * * * *
The Warlock came to life. Her skipper gloomily answered the emergency call from Xosa II. He listened. He clicked off the communicator and hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against those times when the blue-white sun of Xosa shone upon this side of the hull. He moved the manual control to make it more transparent. He stared down at the monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five thousand miles away. He searched for the spot he bitterly knew was the colony's site.
He saw what he'd been told he'd see. It was an infinitely fine, threadlike projection from the surface of the planet. It rose at a slight angle--it leaned toward the planet's west--and it expanded and widened and formed an extraordinary sort of mushroom-shaped object that was completely impossible. It could not be. Humans do not create visible objects twenty miles high, which at their tops expand like toadstools on excessively slender stalks, and which drift westward and fray and grow thin, and are constantly renewed.
But it was true. The skipper of the Warlock gazed until he was completely sure. It was no atomic bomb, because it continued to exist. It faded, but was constantly replenished. There was no such thing!
He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But when the Warlock was around on that side of the planet again, the members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined it with telescopes. They grew hysterically happy. They went frantically to work to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and despair.
It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet was fainter. On the seventh it was larger than before. It continued larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the emergency communication had said.
Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse, waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time before. But there was no reason to hate anybody, now. The skipper was very much relieved.
* * * * *
There was eighteen hundred feet of steel grid overhead. It made a crisscross, ring-shaped wall more than a quarter-mile high and almost to the top of the surrounding mountains. But the valley was not exactly a normal one. It was a crater, now: a steeply sloping, conical pit whose walls descended smoothly to the outer girders of the red-painted, glistening steel structure. More girders for the completion of the grid projected from the sand just outside its half-mile circle. And in the landing grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced object. It rested on the rocky ground, and it was not painted, and it was quite small. A hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred across. But it was visibly a miniature of the great, now-uncovered, re-painted landing grid which was qualified to handle interstellar cargo ships and all the proper space-traffic of a minerals-colony planet.
A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground-reflector wings, and Bordman rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a heat-suit.
The truck reached the pit's bottom. There was a tool shed there. The caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles ride.
"Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?" asked Chuka brightly.
"I'm all right," said Bordman curtly. "I'm quite comfortable, so long as you feed me that expanded air." It was plain that he resented needing even a special air supply. "What's all this about? Bringing the Warlock in? Why the insistence on my being here?"
"Ralph has a problem," said Chuka blandly. "He's up there. See? He needs you. There's a hoist. You've got to check degree-of-completion anyhow. You might take a look around while you're up there. But he's anxious for you to see something. There where you see the little knot of people. The platform."
Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used to heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn't been up on steel-work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV nearly a year ago. He would be dizzy at first.
He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised cage to ascend in--planks and a handrail forming an insecure platform that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.
Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage went up and up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but----
* * * * *
"Well?" he asked fretfully. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the matter?"
Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka's foremen--one did not look happy--and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.
"I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report."
A dark man who worked under Chuka--and looked as if he belonged on solid ground--said carefully:
"We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down."
He stopped. One of the Indians said:
"We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't understand why you ordered it there. But we built it."
The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:
"We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big grid work, finished or not!"
Bordman said impatiently:
"All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?"
"Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!"
Her cousin said conversationally:
"We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up to mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on."
"And we rode it down, that little grid," said one of the remaining Indians, grinning. "What a party! Manitou!"
Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.
"It hurled the sand up from its center. As you said it would, the sand swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it made a mushroom-head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We've made a new dune-area ten miles downwind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into the valley."
Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt uncomfortably warm.
"In six days," said Ralph, almost ceremonially, "it had uncovered half the original grid we'd built. Then we were able to modify that to heave sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many times the power the little grid could apply to sand-lifting! In two days more the landing grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing grid, and now it is possible to land the Warlock, and receive her supplies, and the solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We wanted you to see what we have done. The colony is no longer in danger, and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection before the ship is ready to return."
Bordman said uncomfortably:
"That's very good. It's excellent. I'll put it in my survey report."
"But," said Ralph, more ceremonially still, "we have the right to count coup for the members of our tribe and clan. Now----"
Then there was confusion. Aletha's cousin was saying syllables that did not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals, speaking gibberish. Aletha's eyes were shining and she looked incredibly pleased and satisfied.
"But what ... what's this?" demanded Bordman when they stopped.
Aletha spoke proudly.
"Ralph just formally adopted you into the tribe, Mr. Bordman--and into his clan and mine! He gave you a name I'll have to write down for you, but it means, 'Man-who-believes-not-his-own-wisdom.' And now----"
Ralph Redfeather--licensed interstellar engineer, graduate of the stiffest technical university in this quarter of the galaxy, wearer of three eagle-pinion feathers and clad in a pair of insulated sandals and a breechcloth--whipped out a small paint-pot and a brush from somewhere and began carefully to paint on a section of girder ready for the next tier of steel. He painted a feather on the metal.
"It's a coup," he told Bordman over his shoulder. "Your coup. Placed where it was earned--up here. Aletha is authorized to certify it. And the head of the clan will add an eagle-feather to the headdress he wears in council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, and--your clan-brothers will be proud!"
Then he straightened up and held out his hand.
Chuka said benignly:
"Being civilized men, Mr. Bordman, we Africans do not go in for uncivilized feathers. But we ... ah ... rather approve of you, too. And we plan a corroboree at the colony after the Warlock is down, when there will be some excellently practiced singing. There is ... ah ... a song, a sort of choral calypso, about this ... ah ... adventure you have brought to so satisfying a conclusion. It is quite a good calypso. It's likely to be popular on a good many planets."
Bordman swallowed. He was acutely uncomfortable. He felt that he ought to say something, and he did not know what.
But just then there was a deep-toned humming in the air. It was a vibrant tone, instinct with limitless power. It was the eighteen-hundred-foot landing grid, giving off that profoundly bass and vibrant, note it uttered while operating. Bordman looked up.
The Warlock was coming down.
THE END
The SKY TRAP
by FRANK BELKNAP LONG
Lawton enjoyed a good fight. He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to savor it as it ebbed.
"Better luck next time, Slashaway," he said, and unlimbered a left hook that thudded against his opponent's jaw with such violence that the big, hairy ape crumpled to the resin and rolled over on his back.
Lawton brushed a lock of rust-colored hair back from his brow and stared down at the limp figure lying on the descending stratoship's slightly tilted athletic deck.
"Good work, Slashaway," he said. "You're primitive and beetle-browed, but you've got what it takes."
Lawton flattered himself that he was the opposite of primitive. High in the sky he had predicted the weather for eight days running, with far more accuracy than he could have put into a punch.
They'd flash his report all over Earth in a couple of minutes now. From New York to London to Singapore and back. In half an hour he'd be donning street clothes and stepping out feeling darned good.
He had fulfilled his weekly obligation to society by manipulating meteorological instruments for forty-five minutes, high in the warm, upper stratosphere and worked off his pugnacity by knocking down a professional gym slugger. He would have a full, glorious week now to work off all his other drives.
The stratoship's commander, Captain Forrester, had come up, and was staring at him reproachfully. "Dave, I don't hold with the reforming Johnnies who want to re-make human nature from the ground up. But you've got to admit our generation knows how to keep things humming with a minimum of stress. We don't have world wars now because we work off our pugnacity by sailing into gym sluggers eight or ten times a week. And since our romantic emotions can be taken care of by tactile television we're not at the mercy of every brainless bit of fluff's calculated ankle appeal."
Lawton turned, and regarded him quizzically. "Don't you suppose I realize that? You'd think I just blew in from Mars."
"All right. We have the outlets, the safety valves. They are supposed to keep us civilized. But you don't derive any benefit from them."
"The heck I don't. I exchange blows with Slashaway every time I board the Perseus. And as for women--well, there's just one woman in the world for me, and I wouldn't exchange her for all the Turkish images in the tactile broadcasts from Stamboul."
"Yes, I know. But you work off your primitive emotions with too much gusto. Even a cast-iron gym slugger can bruise. That last blow was--brutal. Just because Slashaway gets thumped and thudded all over by the medical staff twice a week doesn't mean he can take--"
The stratoship lurched suddenly. The deck heaved up under Lawton's feet, hurling him against Captain Forrester and spinning both men around so that they seemed to be waltzing together across the ship. The still limp gym slugger slid downward, colliding with a corrugated metal bulkhead and sloshing back and forth like a wet mackerel.
A full minute passed before Lawton could put a stop to that. Even while careening he had been alive to Slashaway's peril, and had tried to leap to his aid. But the ship's steadily increasing gyrations had hurled him away from the skipper and against a massive vaulting horse, barking the flesh from his shins and spilling him with violence onto the deck.
He crawled now toward the prone gym slugger on his hands and knees, his temples thudding. The gyrations ceased an instant before he reached Slashaway's side. With an effort he lifted the big man up, propped him against the bulkhead and shook him until his teeth rattled. "Slashaway," he muttered. "Slashaway, old fellow."
Slashaway opened blurred eyes, "Phew!" he muttered. "You sure socked me hard, sir."
"You went out like a light," explained Lawton gently. "A minute before the ship lurched."
"The ship lurched, sir?"
"Something's very wrong, Slashaway. The ship isn't moving. There are no vibrations and--Slashaway, are you hurt? Your skull thumped against that bulkhead so hard I was afraid--"
"Naw, I'm okay. Whatd'ya mean, the ship ain't moving? How could it stop?"
Lawton said. "I don't know, Slashaway." Helping the gym slugger to his feet he stared apprehensively about him. Captain Forrester was kneeling on the resin testing his hocks for sprains with splayed fingers, his features twitching.
"Hurt badly, sir?"
The Commander shook his head. "I don't think so. Dave, we are twenty thousand feet up, so how in hell could we be stationary in space?"
"It's all yours, skipper."
"I must say you're helpful."
Forrester got painfully to his feet and limped toward the athletic compartment's single quartz port--a small circle of radiance on a level with his eyes. As the port sloped downward at an angle of nearly sixty degrees all he could see was a diffuse glimmer until he wedged his brow in the observation visor and stared downward.
Lawton heard him suck in his breath sharply. "Well, sir?"
"There are thin cirrus clouds directly beneath us. They're not moving."
Lawton gasped, the sense of being in an impossible situation swelling to nightmare proportions within him. What could have happened?
* * * * *
Directly behind him, close to a bulkhead chronometer, which was clicking out the seconds with unabashed regularity, was a misty blue visiplate that merely had to be switched on to bring the pilots into view.
The Commander hobbled toward it, and manipulated a rheostat. The two pilots appeared side by side on the screen, sitting amidst a spidery network of dully gleaming pipe lines and nichrome humidification units. They had unbuttoned their high-altitude coats and their stratosphere helmets were resting on their knees. The Jablochoff candle light which flooded the pilot room accentuated the haggardness of their features, which were a sickly cadaverous hue.
The captain spoke directly into the visiplate. "What's wrong with the ship?" he demanded. "Why aren't we descending? Dawson, you do the talking!"
One of the pilots leaned tensely forward, his shoulders jerking. "We don't know, sir. The rotaries went dead when the ship started gyrating. We can't work the emergency torps and the temperature is rising."
"But--it defies all logic," Forrester muttered. "How could a metal ship weighing tons be suspended in the air like a balloon? It is stationary, but it is not buoyant. We seem in all respects to be frozen in."
"The explanation may be simpler than you dream," Lawton said. "When we've found the key."
The Captain swung toward him. "Could you find the key, Dave?"
"I should like to try. It may be hidden somewhere on the ship, and then again, it may not be. But I should like to go over the ship with a fine-tooth comb, and then I should like to go over outside, thoroughly. Suppose you make me an emergency mate and give me a carte blanche, sir."
Lawton got his carte blanche. For two hours he did nothing spectacular, but he went over every inch of the ship. He also lined up the crew and pumped them. The men were as completely in the dark as the pilots and the now completely recovered Slashaway, who was following Lawton about like a doting seal.
"You're a right guy, sir. Another two or three cracks and my noggin would've split wide open."
"But not like an eggshell, Slashaway. Pig iron develops fissures under terrific pounding but your cranium seems to be more like tempered steel. Slashaway, you won't understand this, but I've got to talk to somebody and the Captain is too busy to listen.
"I went over the entire ship because I thought there might be a hidden source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And there are bulkhead porosities which could have clogged."
"Yeah," muttered Slashaway, scratching his head. "I see what you mean, sir."
"It was no soap. There's nothing inside the ship that could possibly keep us up. Therefore there must be something outside that isn't air. We know there is air outside. We've stuck our heads out and sniffed it. And we've found out a curious thing.
"Along with the oxygen there is water vapor, but it isn't H2O. It's HO. A molecular arrangement like that occurs in the upper Solar atmosphere, but nowhere on Earth. And there's a thin sprinkling of hydrocarbon molecules out there too. Hydrocarbon appears ordinarily as methane gas, but out there it rings up as CH. Methane is CH4. And there are also scandium oxide molecules making unfamiliar faces at us. And oxide of boron--with an equational limp."
"Gee," muttered Slashaway. "We're up against it, eh?"
Lawton was squatting on his hams beside an emergency 'chute opening on the deck of the Penguin's weather observatory. He was letting down a spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet of gleaming metal cordage.
Suddenly as he stared the drum stopped revolving. Lawton stiffened, a startled expression coming into his face. He had been playing a hunch that had seemed as insane, rationally considered, as his wild idea about the bulkhead porosities. For a moment he was stunned, unable to believe that he had struck pay dirt. The winch indicator stood at one hundred and three feet, giving him a rich, fruity yield of startlement.
One hundred feet below him the plummet rested on something solid that sustained it in space. Scarcely breathing, Lawton leaned over the windlass and stared downward. There was nothing visible between the ship and the fleecy clouds far below except a tiny black dot resting on vacancy and a thin beryllium plumb line ascending like an interrogation point from the dot to the 'chute opening.
"You see something down there?" Slashaway asked.
Lawton moved back from the windlass, his brain whirling. "Slashaway there's a solid surface directly beneath us, but it's completely invisible."
"You mean it's like a frozen cloud, sir?"
"No, Slashaway. It doesn't shimmer, or deflect light. Congealed water vapor would sink instantly to earth."
"You think it's all around us, sir?"
Lawton stared at Slashaway aghast. In his crude fumblings the gym slugger had ripped a hidden fear right out of his subconsciousness into the light.
"I don't know, Slashaway," he muttered. "I'll get at that next."
* * * * *
A half hour later Lawton sat beside the captain's desk in the control room, his face drained of all color. He kept his gaze averted as he talked. A man who succeeds too well with an unpleasant task may develop a subconscious sense of guilt.
"Sir, we're suspended inside a hollow sphere which resembles a huge, floating soap bubble. Before we ripped through it it must have had a plastic surface. But now the tear has apparently healed over, and the shell all around us is as resistant as steel. We're completely bottled up, sir. I shot rocket leads in all directions to make certain."
The expression on Forrester's face sold mere amazement down the river. He could not have looked more startled if the nearer planets had yielded their secrets chillingly, and a super-race had appeared suddenly on Earth.
"Good God, Dave. Do you suppose something has happened to space?"
Lawton raised his eyes with a shudder. "Not necessarily, sir. Something has happened to us. We're floating through the sky in a huge, invisible bubble of some sort, but we don't know whether it has anything to do with space. It may be a meteorological phenomenon."
"You say we're floating?"
"We're floating slowly westward. The clouds beneath us have been receding for fifteen or twenty minutes now."
"Phew!" muttered Forrester. "That means we've got to--"
He broke off abruptly. The Perseus' radio operator was standing in the doorway, distress and indecision in his gaze. "Our reception is extremely sporadic, sir," he announced. "We can pick up a few of the stronger broadcasts, but our emergency signals haven't been answered."
"Keep trying," Forrester ordered.
"Aye, aye, sir."
The captain turned to Lawton. "Suppose we call it a bubble. Why are we suspended like this, immovably? Your rocket leads shot up, and the plumb line dropped one hundred feet. Why should the ship itself remain stationary?"
Lawton said: "The bubble must possess sufficient internal equilibrium to keep a big, heavy body suspended at its core. In other words, we must be suspended at the hub of converging energy lines."
"You mean we're surrounded by an electromagnetic field?"
Lawton frowned. "Not necessarily, sir. I'm simply pointing out that there must be an energy tug of some sort involved. Otherwise the ship would be resting on the inner surface of the bubble."
Forrester nodded grimly. "We should be thankful, I suppose, that we can move about inside the ship. Dave, do you think a man could descend to the inner surface?"
"I've no doubt that a man could, sir. Shall I let myself down?"
"Absolutely not. Damn it, Dave, I need your energies inside the ship. I could wish for a less impulsive first officer, but a man in my predicament can't be choosy."
"Then what are your orders, sir?"
"Orders? Do I have to order you to think? Is working something out for yourself such a strain? We're drifting straight toward the Atlantic Ocean. What do you propose to do about that?"
"I expect I'll have to do my best, sir."
Lawton's "best" conflicted dynamically with the captain's orders. Ten minutes later he was descending, hand over hand, on a swaying emergency ladder.
"Tough-fibered Davie goes down to look around," he grumbled.
He was conscious that he was flirting with danger. The air outside was breathable, but would the diffuse, unorthodox gases injure his lungs? He didn't know, couldn't be sure. But he had to admit that he felt all right so far. He was seventy feet below the ship and not at all dizzy. When he looked down he could see the purple domed summits of mountains between gaps in the fleecy cloud blanket.
He couldn't see the Atlantic Ocean--yet. He descended the last thirty feet with mounting confidence. At the end of the ladder he braced himself and let go.
He fell about six feet, landing on his rump on a spongy surface that bounced him back and forth. He was vaguely incredulous when he found himself sitting in the sky staring through his spread legs at clouds and mountains.
He took a deep breath. It struck him that the sensation of falling could be present without movement downward through space. He was beginning to experience such a sensation. His stomach twisted and his brain spun.
He was suddenly sorry he had tried this. It was so damnably unnerving he was afraid of losing all emotional control. He stared up, his eyes squinting against the sun. Far above him the gleaming, wedge-shaped bulk of the Perseus loomed colossally, blocking out a fifth of the sky.
Lowering his right hand he ran his fingers over the invisible surface beneath him. The surface felt rubbery, moist.
He got swayingly to his feet and made a perilous attempt to walk through the sky. Beneath his feet the mysterious surface crackled, and little sparks flew up about his legs. Abruptly he sat down again, his face ashen.
From the emergency 'chute opening far above a massive head appeared. "You all right, sir," Slashaway called, his voice vibrant with concern.
"Well, I--"
"You'd better come right up, sir. Captain's orders."
"All right," Lawton shouted. "Let the ladder down another ten feet."
Lawton ascended rapidly, resentment smouldering within him. What right had the skipper to interfere? He had passed the buck, hadn't he?
* * * * *
Lawton got another bad jolt the instant he emerged through the 'chute opening. Captain Forrester was leaning against a parachute rack gasping for breath, his face a livid hue.
Slashaway looked equally bad. His jaw muscles were twitching and he was tugging at the collar of his gym suit.
Forrester gasped: "Dave, I tried to move the ship. I didn't know you were outside."
"Good God, you didn't know--"
"The rotaries backfired and used up all the oxygen in the engine room. Worse, there's been a carbonic oxide seepage. The air is contaminated throughout the ship. We'll have to open the ventilation valves immediately. I've been waiting to see if--if you could breathe down there. You're all right, aren't you? The air is breathable?"
Lawton's face was dark with fury. "I was an experimental rat in the sky, eh?"
"Look, Dave, we're all in danger. Don't stand there glaring at me. Naturally I waited. I have my crew to think of."
"Well, think of them. Get those valves open before we all have convulsions."
A half hour later charcoal gas was mingling with oxygen outside the ship, and the crew was breathing it in again gratefully. Thinly dispersed, and mixed with oxygen it seemed all right. But Lawton had misgivings. No matter how attenuated a lethal gas is it is never entirely harmless. To make matters worse, they were over the Atlantic Ocean.
Far beneath them was an emerald turbulence, half obscured by eastward moving cloud masses. The bubble was holding, but the morale of the crew was beginning to sag.
Lawton paced the control room. Deep within him unsuspected energies surged. "We'll last until the oxygen is breathed up," he exclaimed. "We'll have four or five days, at most. But we seem to be traveling faster than an ocean liner. With luck, we'll be in Europe before we become carbon dioxide breathers."
"Will that help matters, Dave?" said the captain wearily.
"If we can blast our way out, it will."
The Captain's sagging body jackknifed erect. "Blast our way out? What do you mean, Dave?"
"I've clamped expulsor disks on the cosmic ray absorbers and trained them downward. A thin stream of accidental neutrons directed against the bottom of the bubble may disrupt its energies--wear it thin. It's a long gamble, but worth taking. We're staking nothing, remember?"
Forrester sputtered: "Nothing but our lives! If you blast a hole in the bubble you'll destroy its energy balance. Did that occur to you? Inside a lopsided bubble we may careen dangerously or fall into the sea before we can get the rotaries started."
"I thought of that. The pilots are standing by to start the rotaries the instant we lurch. If we succeed in making a rent in the bubble we'll break out the helicoptic vanes and descend vertically. The rotaries won't backfire again. I've had their burnt-out cylinder heads replaced."
An agitated voice came from the visiplate on the captain's desk: "Tuning in, sir."
Lawton stopped pacing abruptly. He swung about and grasped the desk edge with both hands, his head touching Forrester's as the two men stared down at the horizontal face of petty officer James Caldwell.
Caldwell wasn't more than twenty-two or three, but the screen's opalescence silvered his hair and misted the outlines of his jaw, giving him an aspect of senility.
"Well, young man," Forrester growled. "What is it? What do you want?"
The irritation in the captain's voice seemed to increase Caldwell's agitation. Lawton had to say: "All right, lad, let's have it," before the information which he had seemed bursting to impart could be wrenched out of him.
It came in erratic spurts. "The bubble is all blooming, sir. All around inside there are big yellow and purple growths. It started up above, and--and spread around. First there was just a clouding over of the sky, sir, and then--stalks shot out."
For a moment Lawton felt as though all sanity had been squeezed from his brain. Twice he started to ask a question and thought better of it.
Pumpings were superfluous when he could confirm Caldwell's statement in half a minute for himself. If Caldwell had cracked up--
Caldwell hadn't cracked. When Lawton walked to the quartz port and stared down all the blood drained from his face.
The vegetation was luxuriant, and unearthly. Floating in the sky were serpentine tendrils as thick as a man's wrist, purplish flowers and ropy fungus growths. They twisted and writhed and shot out in all directions, creating a tangle immediately beneath him and curving up toward the ship amidst a welter of seed pods.
He could see the seeds dropping--dropping from pods which reminded him of the darkly horned skate egg sheaths which he had collected in his boyhood from sea beaches at ebb tide.
It was the unwholesomeness of the vegetation which chiefly unnerved him. It looked dank, malarial. There were decaying patches on the fungus growths and a miasmal mist was descending from it toward the ship.
The control room was completely still when he turned from the quartz port to meet Forrester's startled gaze.
"Dave, what does it mean?" The question burst explosively from the captain's lips.
"It means--life has appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside the bubble, sir. All in the space of an hour or so."
"But that's--impossible."
Lawton shook his head. "It isn't at all, sir. We've had it drummed into us that evolution proceeds at a snailish pace, but what proof have we that it can't mutate with lightning-like rapidity? I've told you there are gases outside we can't even make in a chemical laboratory, molecular arrangements that are alien to earth."
"But plants derive nourishment from the soil," interpolated Forrester.
"I know. But if there are alien gases in the air the surface of the bubble must be reeking with unheard of chemicals. There may be compounds inside the bubble which have so sped up organic processes that a hundred million year cycle of mutations has been telescoped into an hour."
Lawton was pacing the floor again. "It would be simpler to assume that seeds of existing plants became somehow caught up and imprisoned in the bubble. But the plants around us never existed on earth. I'm no botanist, but I know what the Congo has on tap, and the great rain forests of the Amazon."
"Dave, if the growth continues it will fill the bubble. It will choke off all our air."
"Don't you suppose I realize that? We've got to destroy that growth before it destroys us."
* * * * *
It was pitiful to watch the crew's morale sag. The miasmal taint of the ominously proliferating vegetation was soon pervading the ship, spreading demoralization everywhere.
It was particularly awful straight down. Above a ropy tangle of livid vines and creepers a kingly stench weed towered, purplish and bloated and weighted down with seed pods.
It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton had ever smelt before.
The bubble had become a blooming horror sailing slowly westward above the storm-tossed Atlantic. And all the chemical agents which Lawton sprayed through the ventilation valves failed to impede the growth or destroy a single seed pod.
It was difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion of problematically poisonous acids.
It was no sale. The growths increased by leaps and bounds, as though determined to show their resentment of the measures taken against them by marshalling all their forces in a demoralizing plantkrieg.
Thwarted, desperate, Lawton played his last card. He sent five members of the crew, equipped with blow guns. They returned screaming. Lawton had to fortify himself with a double whiskey soda before he could face the look of reproach in their eyes long enough to get all of the prickles out of them.
From then on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship's kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant engineer leapt through a 'chute opening, after avowing that he preferred impalement to suffocation.
He was impaled. It was horrible. Looking down Lawton could see his twisted body dangling on a crimson-stippled thornlike growth forty feet in height.
Slashaway was standing at his elbow in that Waterloo moment, his rough-hewn features twitching. "I can't stand it, sir. It's driving me squirrelly."
"I know, Slashaway. There's something worse than marijuana weed down there."
Slashaway swallowed hard. "That poor guy down there did the wise thing."
Lawton husked: "Stamp on that idea, Slashaway--kill it. We're stronger than he was. There isn't an ounce of weakness in us. We've got what it takes."
"A guy can stand just so much."
"Bosh. There's no limit to what a man can stand."
From the visiplate behind them came an urgent voice: "Radio room tuning in, sir."
Lawton swung about. On the flickering screen the foggy outlines of a face appeared and coalesced into sharpness.
The Perseus radio operator was breathless with excitement. "Our reception is improving, sir. European short waves are coming in strong. The static is terrific, but we're getting every station on the continent, and most of the American stations."
Lawton's eyes narrowed to exultant slits. He spat on the deck, a slow tremor shaking him.
"Slashaway, did you hear that? We've done it. We've won against hell and high water."
"We done what, sir?"
"The bubble, you ape--it must be wearing thin. Hell's bells, do you have to stand there gaping like a moronic ninepin? I tell you, we've got it licked."
"I can't stand it, sir. I'm going nuts."
"No you're not. You're slugging the thing inside you that wants to quit. Slashaway, I'm going to give the crew a first-class pep talk. There'll be no stampeding while I'm in command here."
He turned to the radio operator. "Tune in the control room. Tell the captain I want every member of the crew lined up on this screen immediately."
The face in the visiplate paled. "I can't do that, sir. Ship's regulations--"
Lawton transfixed the operator with an irate stare. "The captain told you to report directly to me, didn't he?"
"Yes sir, but--"
"If you don't want to be cashiered, snap into it."
"Yes--yessir."
The captain's startled face preceded the duty-muster visiview by a full minute, seeming to project outward from the screen. The veins on his neck were thick blue cords.
"Dave," he croaked. "Are you out of your mind? What good will talking do now?"
"Are the men lined up?" Lawton rapped, impatiently.
Forrester nodded. "They're all in the engine room, Dave."
"Good. Block them in."
The captain's face receded, and a scene of tragic horror filled the opalescent visiplate. The men were not standing at attention at all. They were slumping against the Perseus' central charging plant in attitudes of abject despair.
* * * * *
Madness burned in the eyes of three or four of them. Others had torn open their shirts, and raked their flesh with their nails. Petty officer Caldwell was standing as straight as a totem pole, clenching and unclenching his hands. The second assistant engineer was sticking out his tongue. His face was deadpan, which made what was obviously a terror reflex look like an idiot's grimace.
Lawton moistened his lips. "Men, listen to me. There is some sort of plant outside that is giving off deliriant fumes. A few of us seem to be immune to it.
"I'm not immune, but I'm fighting it, and all of you boys can fight it too. I want you to fight it to the top of your courage. You can fight anything when you know that just around the corner is freedom from a beastliness that deserves to be licked--even if it's only a plant.
"Men, we're blasting our way free. The bubble's wearing thin. Any minute now the plants beneath us may fall with a soggy plop into the Atlantic Ocean.
"I want every man jack aboard this ship to stand at his post and obey orders. Right this minute you look like something the cat dragged in. But most men who cover themselves with glory start off looking even worse than you do."
He smiled wryly.
"I guess that's all. I've never had to make a speech in my life, and I'd hate like hell to start now."
It was petty officer Caldwell who started the chant. He started it, and the men took it up until it was coming from all of them in a full-throated roar.
I'm a tough, true-hearted skyman, Careless and all that, d'ye see? Never at fate a railer, What is time or tide to me?
All must die when fate shall will it, I can never die but once, I'm a tough, true-hearted skyman; He who fears death is a dunce.
Lawton squared his shoulders. With a crew like that nothing could stop him! Ah, his energies were surging high. The deliriant weed held no terrors for him now. They were stout-hearted lads and he'd go to hell with them cheerfully, if need be.
It wasn't easy to wait. The next half hour was filled with a steadily mounting tension as Lawton moved like a young tornado about the ship, issuing orders and seeing that each man was at his post.
"Steady, Jimmy. The way to fight a deliriant is to keep your mind on a set task. Keep sweating, lad."
"Harry, that winch needs tightening. We can't afford to miss a trick."
"Yeah, it will come suddenly. We've got to get the rotaries started the instant the bottom drops out."
He was with the captain and Slashaway in the control room when it came. There was a sudden, grinding jolt, and the captain's desk started moving toward the quartz port, carrying Lawton with it.
"Holy Jiminy cricket," exclaimed Slashaway.
The deck tilted sharply; then righted itself. A sudden gush of clear, cold air came through the ventilation valves as the triple rotaries started up with a roar.
Lawton and the captain reached the quartz port simultaneously. Shoulder to shoulder they stood staring down at the storm-tossed Atlantic, electrified by what they saw.
Floating on the waves far beneath them was an undulating mass of vegetation, its surface flecked with glinting foam. As it rose and fell in waning sunlight a tainted seepage spread about it, defiling the clean surface of the sea.
But it wasn't the floating mass which drew a gasp from Forrester, and caused Lawton's scalp to prickle. Crawling slowly across that Sargasso-like island of noxious vegetation was a huge, elongated shape which bore a nauseous resemblance to a mottled garden slug.
Forrester was trembling visibly when he turned from the quartz port.
"God, Dave, that would have been the last straw. Animal life. Dave, I--I can't realize we're actually out of it."
"We're out, all right," Lawton said, hoarsely. "Just in time, too. Skipper, you'd better issue grog all around. The men will be needing it. I'm taking mine straight. You've accused me of being primitive. Wait till you see me an hour from now."
Dr. Stephen Halday stood in the door of his Appalachian mountain laboratory staring out into the pine-scented dusk, a worried expression on his bland, small-featured face. It had happened again. A portion of his experiment had soared skyward, in a very loose group of highly energized wavicles. He wondered if it wouldn't form a sort of sub-electronic macrocosm high in the stratosphere, altering even the air and dust particles which had spurted up with it, its uncharged atomic particles combining with hydrogen and creating new molecular arrangements.
If such were the case there would be eight of them now. His bubbles, floating through the sky. They couldn't possibly harm anything--way up there in the stratosphere. But he felt a little uneasy about it all the same. He'd have to be more careful in the future, he told himself. Much more careful. He didn't want the Controllers to turn back the clock of civilization a century by stopping all atom-smashing experiments.
POISONED AIR
By Capt. S. P. Meek
A telephone bell jangled insistently. The orderly on duty dropped his feet from the desk to the floor and lifted the receiver with a muttered curse.
"Post hospital, Aberdeen Proving Ground," he said sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
A burst of raucous coughing answered him. Several times it ceased for an instant and a voice tried to speak, but each time a fresh spasm of deep-chested wracking coughing interrupted.
"Who is this?" demanded the now aroused orderly. "What's the matter?"
Between intervals of coughing difficultly enunciated words reached him.
"This is--uch! uch!--Lieutenant Burroughs at the--uch!--Michaelville range. We have been--uch!--caught in a cloud of poison--uch! uch!--gas. Send an ambulance and a--uch!--surgeon at once. Better bring--uch!--gas masks."
"At the Michaelville range, sir? How many men are down there?"
"Uch! uch! uch!--five--all help--uch! uch!--helpless. Hurry!"
"Yes, sir. I'll start two ambulances down at once, sir."
"Don't forget the--uch! uch!--gas--uch!--masks."
"No, sir; I'll send them, sir."
* * * * *
Five minutes later two ambulances rolled out of the garage and took the four-mile winding ribbon of concrete which separated the Michaelville water impact range from the main front of the Aberdeen Proving Ground. On each ambulance was a hastily awakened and partially clothed medical officer. For three miles they tore along the curving road at high speed. Without warning the leading machine slowed down. The driver of the second ambulance shoved home his brake just in time to keep from ramming the leading vehicle.
"What's the matter?" he shouted.
As he spoke he gave a muttered curse and switched on his amber fog-light. From the marshes on either side of the road a deep blanket of fog rolled up and enveloped the vehicle, almost shutting off the road from sight. The forward ambulance began to grope its way slowly forward. The senior medical officer sniffed the fog critically and shouted to his driver.
"Stop!" he cried. "There's something funny about this fog. Every one put on gas masks."
He coughed slightly as he adjusted his mask. His orders were shouted to the ambulance in the rear but before the masks could be adjusted, every member of the crew was vying with the rest in the frequency and violence of the coughs which he could emit. The masks did not seem to shut out the poisonous fog which crept in between the masks and the men's faces and seemed to take bodily possession of their lungs.
"I don't believe we'll ever make the last mile to Michaelville through this, Major," cried the driver between intervals of coughing. "Hadn't we better turn back while we can?"
"Drive on!" cried the medical officer. "We'll keep going as long as we can. Imagine what those poor devils on the range are going through without masks of any sort."
* * * * *
On through the rapidly thickening fog, the two ambulances groped their way. The road seemed interminable, but at length the flood lights of the Michaelville end of the range came dimly into view. As the vehicles stopped the two surgeons jumped to the ground and groped their way forward, stretcher bearers following them closely. Presently Major Martin stumbled over a body which lay at full length on the concrete runway between the two main buildings. He stooped and examined the man with the aid of a pocket flashlight.
"He's alive," he announced in muffled tones through his mask. "Take him to the ambulance and fit a mask on him."
Three more unconscious men were carried to the ambulances before the prone form of Lieutenant Burroughs was found by the searchers. The lieutenant lay on his back not far from the telephone and directly under the glare of a huge arc-light. His eyes were open and he was conscious, but when he tried to speak, only a murmur came from his lips. There was a rattle in his chest and faint coughs tried in vain to force their way out between his stiffened lips.
"Easy, Lieutenant," said Major Martin as he bent over him; "don't try to talk just now. You're all right and we'll have a mask on you in a jiffy. That damned gas isn't as thick right here as it is down the road a way."
Two medical corps men lifted the lieutenant onto a stretcher and started to fit a mask over his face. He feebly raised a hand to stop them. His lips formed words which he could not enunciate, but Major Martin understood them.
"Your men?" he said between intervals of coughing. "We've got them all in the ambulance, I think. There were four besides yourself, weren't there?"
The lieutenant nodded.
"Right. We have them all. Now we'll take you back to the hospital and have you fixed up in a jiffy."
* * * * *
The entire rescue crew were coughing violently as the ambulances left Michaelville. For a mile they drove through fog that was thicker than had been seen in Maryland for years. They reached the point where they had encountered the congealed moisture on the way out, but now there was no diminution of its density. The main post was less than two miles away when they burst out into a clear night and increased their speed.
As the two machines drew up in front of the post hospital, the driver of the leading ambulance swayed in his seat. Blindly he pulled on his emergency brake and then slumped forward in his seat, his breath coming in wheezing gasps. Major Martin hastily tore the mask from his face and glanced at it.
"Take him in with the rest!" he cried. "His mask must have leaked."
As they entered the hospital, a sickening weakness overcame Major Martin. From all sides a black pall seemed to roll in on him and bits of ice seemed to form in his brain. He reeled and caught at the shoulder of a corps man who was passing. The orderly caught at him and looked for a moment at his livid face.
"Sergeant Connors!" he cried.
A technical sergeant hastened up. Major Martin forced words with difficulty through stiffening lips.
"Call Captain Murdock," he wheezed, "and have him get Captain Williams. I'm down and probably Dr. Briscoe will be down in a few minutes. Telephone the commanding officer and tell him to quarantine the whole proving ground. Have the telephone orderly wake everyone on the post and order them to close all windows in all buildings and not to venture outside until they get fresh orders. This seems to be the same stuff they had in Belgium last December."
As the last words came from his lips he slowly stiffened and slumped toward the ground. The sergeant and the orderly picked him up and carried him to a bed in the emergency ward. The orderly hurried away to close all of the hospital windows while Sergeant Connors took down the receiver of the telephone and began to carry out the Major's orders.
* * * * *
Dr. Bird glanced at the news-paper clipping which Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service laid on his desk. Into his eyes came a curious glitter, sure evidence that the famous scientist's interest was aroused.
"Last December when we discussed this matter, Doctor," said the detective, "you gave it as your opinion that Ivan Saranoff was at the bottom of it and that the same plague which devastated the Meuse Valley in Belgium would eventually make an appearance in the United States. You were right."
Dr. Bird bounded to his feet.
"Is Saranoff back on this side of the Atlantic?" he demanded.
"Officially, he is not. Every customs inspector and immigration officer has his photograph and no report of his arrest has come in, but we know Saranoff well enough to discount negative evidence where he is concerned. Whether he is here or not, the plague is."
"When did it appear?"
"Last night at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. It has killed eight or ten and twice as many more are sick. The place is quarantined and a rigid censorship has been placed over the telephones, but it is only a matter of time before some press man will get the story. I have a car waiting below and a pass signed by the Secretary of War. Grab what apparatus you need and we'll start."
Dr. Bird pressed a button on his desk. A tall, willowy girl entered, notebook in hand. Carnes glanced with keen appreciation at her slim beauty.
"Miss Andrews," said the doctor, "in five minutes Mr. Carnes and I will leave here for Aberdeen Proving Ground in the Government car which is waiting below. You will see that Mr. Davis is in that car and that traveling laboratory 'Q' is ready to follow us."
"Yes, Doctor."
"You remember that mysterious plague in Belgium last December, do you not?"
"Yes, Doctor."
"I was unable to get over to Belgium, but an army surgeon and two Public Health Service men went over. You will get copies of all reports they made, including especially any reports of autopsies on bodies of victims. I want all data on file in the Public Health Service or the War Department. You will then obtain a car and follow us to Aberdeen. Arrangements will be made for your admittance to the proving ground. The Belgian plague has made its appearance in the United States."
* * * * *
Swiftly the expression of the girl's face changed. Her dark eyes glowed with an internal fire and the immobility of her face vanished as if by magic to be replaced by an expression of fierce hatred. Her lips drew back, exposing her strong white teeth and she literally spat out her words.
"That swine, Saranoff!" she hissed.
Carnes sprang to his feet.
"Why, it's Feodrovna Androvitch!" he cried in astonishment.
In an instant the rage faded from her face and the calm, immobility which had marked it reappeared. Through the silence Dr. Bird's voice cut like a whip.
"Miss Andrews," he said sternly, "I thought that I had impressed on you the fact that even a momentary lapse from the character which you have assumed may easily be fatal to both of us. Unless you can learn to control your emotions, your usefulness to me is at an end."
Although Carnes watched closely he could not detect the slightest change of expression in the girl's face as the doctor spoke.
"I am very sorry, Doctor," she said evenly. "We were alone and I allowed the mask to slip for an instant. It will not happen again."
"It must not," said the doctor curtly. "Carry out your instructions."
"Yes, Doctor."
She turned on her heel and left the office. Carnes looked quickly at Dr. Bird.
"Surely that is Feodrovna Androvitch, Doctor?" he asked.
"It was. It is now Thelma Andrews, my secretary. She changed her name with her appearance and politics. I have been training her since last August. This is her first official appearance, so to speak."
"In view of her past associations, is it safe to trust her?"
"If I didn't think so, I wouldn't use her. She has ample reason to hate Ivan Saranoff and she knows how much mercy she has to hope for from him if he ever gets her in his clutches. We can't play a lone hand against Saranoff forever and I know of no better place to recruit an organization than the enemy's camp. Thelma saved our lives in Russia, you may remember."
"But even when she was rescuing us from the clutches of Saranoff's gang, she was an ardent communist, if I remember correctly."
"Theoretically I believe she still favors the world revolution, but she hates Saranoff even more than she does the bourgeoisie and I believe she had come to be willing to accept capitalistic institutions for the present, at least as far as this country is concerned. At any rate, I trust her. If you have any doubts, you can have her watched for a while."
* * * * *
Carnes thought for a moment and then picked up the telephone.
"I have plenty of confidence in your judgment, Doctor," he said apologetically, "but if you don't mind, I'll have Haggerty trail her for a few days. It won't do any harm."
"Very well; and if any of the Young Labor gang should penetrate her disguise, he'd be a mighty efficient bodyguard. Do as you see fit."
Carnes called the number of the secret service and conferred for a few moments with Bolton, the chief of the bureau. He turned to Dr. Bird with a smile of satisfaction.
"Haggerty will be on the job in a few minutes, Doctor."
"Good enough. The five minutes I allowed are up. Let's see how well she has performed her first task."
As they emerged from the Bureau of Standards, Carnes glanced rapidly around. In the front seat of the secret service car which he had left sat a young man whom the detective recognized as one of Dr. Bird's assistants. Behind the car stood a small delivery truck with two of the Bureau mechanics on the seat.
Dr. Bird nodded to the mechanics and followed Carnes into the big sedan. With a motorcycle policeman clearing a way for them, they roared across Washington and north along the Baltimore pike. Two hours and a half of driving brought them to Aberdeen and they turned down the concrete road leading to the proving ground. Two miles from the town a huge chain was stretched across the road with armed guards patrolling behind it. The car stopped and an officer stepped forward and examined the pass which Carnes presented.
"You are to go direct to headquarters, gentlemen," he said. "Colonel Wesley is waiting for you."
The commanding officer rose to his feet as Carnes and Dr. Bird entered his office.
"I am at your service, Dr. Bird," he said formally. "The Chief of Ordnance has given instructions which, as I understand them, put you virtually in command of this post." There was resentment in the colonel's tone.
* * * * *
Dr. Bird smiled affably and extended his hand. The old colonel struggled with his chagrin for a moment, but few men could resist Dr. Bird when he deliberately tried to charm them. Colonel Wesley grasped the proffered hand.
"What I want most, Colonel, is your cooperation," said the doctor suavely. "I am not competent to assume command here even if I wished to. I would like to ask a few favors but if they should prove to be contrary to your established policies, I will gladly withdraw my request."
Colonel Wesley's face cleared as if by magic.
"You have only to ask for anything we have, Doctor," he said earnestly, "and it is yours. Frankly, we are at our wit's end."
"Thank you. I have a truck with some apparatus and three men outside. Will you have them guided to your laboratory and given what aid they need in setting their stuff up?"
"Gladly."
"My secretary, Miss Andrews, will arrive from Washington later in the day with some information. I would like to have her passed through the guards and brought directly to me wherever I am. You have the place well guarded, have you not?"
"As well as I can with my small force. All roads are patrolled by motorcycles; four launches are on the waterfront, and there are seven planes aloft."
"That is splendid. Now can you tell me just what happened last night?"
"Captain Murdock, the acting surgeon, can do that better than I can, Doctor. He is at the hospital but I'll have him up here in a few minutes."
"With your permission, we'll go to the hospital and talk to him there. I want to examine the patients in any event."
"Certainly, Doctor. I will remain at my office until I am sure that I can give you no further assistance."
* * * * *
With a word of thanks, Dr. Bird left, and, accompanied by Carnes, made his way to the hospital. Captain Murdock was frankly relieved to greet the famous Bureau of Standards scientist and readily gave him the information he desired.
"The first intimation we had of trouble was when Lieutenant Burroughs telephoned from the water impact range where they were doing night firing last night at about four A.M. Two ambulances went down and brought him and his four men back, all of them stricken with what I take to be an extremely rapidly developing form of lobar pneumonia. All of the men who went down were stricken with the same disease, two of them as soon as they got back. So far we have had eight deaths among these men and all of the rest, except Lieutenant Burroughs, are apt to go at any moment.
"The trouble seemed to come from a cloud of some dense heavy gas which rolled in from the marsh. On the advice of Major Martin, every door and window in the post was kept closed until morning. The gas never reached the upper part of the post but it reached the stables. Eleven horses and mules are dead and all of the rest are stricken. The stable detachment either failed to close their barracks tightly or else the gas went in through cracks for seven out of the nine are here in the hospital, although none of them are very seriously ill. As soon as the sun came up, the gas seemed to disappear."
"Let me see the men who are sick."
Captain Murdock led the way into the ward. Dr. Bird went from man to man, examining charts and asking questions of the nurses and medical corps men on duty. When he had gone the rounds of the ward he entered the morgue and carefully examined the bodies of the men who lay there.
"Have you performed any autopsies?" he asked.
"Not yet."
"Have you the authority?"
"On the approval of the commanding officer."
"Please secure that approval at once. Have all lights taken out of the operating room and the windows shaded. I want to work under red light. We must examine the lungs of these men at once. With all due respect to your medical knowledge, Captain, I am not convinced that these men died of pneumonia."
"Neither am I, Doctor, but that is the best guess I could make. I'll have things fixed up for you right away."
* * * * *
Dr. Bird stepped to the telephone and called the laboratory. When, in half an hour, Captain Murdock announced that he was ready to proceed, Davis had arrived with an ultra-microscope and other apparatus which the doctor had telephoned for.
"Did you arrange about the horses, Davis?" asked Dr. Bird.
"Yes, sir. They will be up here as soon as the trucks can bring them."
"Good enough. We'll start operating."
An hour later, Dr. Bird straightened up and faced the puzzled medical officer.
"Captain," he said, "your diagnosis is faulty. With one possible exception, the lungs of these men are free from pneumonicocci. On the other hand there is a peculiar aspect of the tissues as though a very powerful antiseptic solution had been applied to them."
"Hardly an antiseptic, Doctor; wouldn't you say, rather, a cauterizing agent."
Dr. Bird bent again over the ultra-microscope.
"Are you familiar with the work done by Bancroft and Richter at Cornell University last November and December?" he asked.
"No, I can't say that I am."
"They were working under a Heckscher Foundation grant studying just how antiseptic solutions destroy bacteria. It has always been held that some chemical change went on, but this theory they disproved. It is a process of absorption. If enough of the chemical adheres to the living bacterium, the living protoplasm thickens and irreversibly coagulates. It resembles a boiling without heat. I have seen some of their slides and the appearance is exactly what I see in this tissue."
Captain Murdock bent over the microscope with a new respect for Dr. Bird in his face.
"I agree with you, Doctor," he said. "This tissue certainly looks as though it had been boiled. It is certainly coagulated, as I can plainly see now that you point it out to me. You believe, then, that it is a simple case of gassing?"
"If so, it was done by no known gas. I have studied at Edgewood Arsenal, and I am familiar with all of the work done by the Chemical Warfare Service in gases. No known gas will produce exactly this appearance. It is something new. Carnes, have those horses been brought up yet?"
"I'll see, Doctor."
"If they are, bring one here."
* * * * *
In a few moments the body of a dead horse was dragged into the operating room and Dr. Bird attacked it with a rib saw. He soon laid the lungs open and dragged them from the body. He cut down the middle of one of the organs and shaved off a thin slice which he placed under the lens of a powerful binocular microscope.
"Hello, what the dickens is this?" he exclaimed.
With a scalpel and a delicate pair of tweezers he carefully separated from the lung tissue a tiny speck of crystalline substance which glittered under the red light in the operating room. He carefully transferred it to a glass slide and put it under a microscope with a higher magnification.
"Rhombohedral regular," he mused as he examined it. "Colorless, friable, and cleaving in irregular planes. What in thunder can it be? Have you ever seen anything like this in a lung, Murdock?"
The medical officer bent over the microscope for a long time before he shook his head with a puzzled air.
"I never have," he admitted.
"Then that's probably what we're looking for. Start slicing every lung in this place and look for those crystals. Save them and put them in this watch glass. If we can get enough of them, we may be able to learn something. Carnes, get the rest of those horses in here and open them up."
Two hours of careful work netted them a tiny pile of the peculiar crystals. Some had come from the lungs of the dead animals and some few from the lungs of the dead soldiers. Dr. Bird placed the crystals in a glass bottle which he covered with layer after layer of black paper.
"Get me more of those crystals if you can find them, Captain Murdock," he said, "and in any case, leave the bodies here for further study. Davis and I will go to the laboratory and try to find out what they are. Carnes, hasn't Miss Andrews showed up yet?"
"No, Doctor."
"Locate her on the telephone if you can and tell her not to bother about anything except the autopsy reports and to get them here as quickly as possible. Let me know when you have that done."
* * * * *
In a dark room of the photographic laboratory, Dr. Bird removed the black wrappings from the bottle. He dropped a few of the crystals in a test tube and added distilled water. The water assumed a pink tinge as the blood with which the crystals were covered dissolved, but the crystals themselves did not change. They rose and floated on the surface of the water.
"Insoluble in water, Davis," commented the doctor. "Better wash the lot and then we'll get after the ultimate analysis. Whether we'll be able to make a proximate is doubtful in view of the small amount of sample we have. It's dollars to doughnuts that it's some carbon compound."
He heated a few of the washed crystals in a watch glass. Suddenly there was a sharp crack and the material disappeared. Dr. Bird thrust his nose toward the glass and sniffed carefully.
"The dickens!" he muttered. "Davis, have I got a cold or do you smell garlic?"
"Faintly, Doctor."
"I have a hunch. Fill a gasometer with purified argon and we'll introduce a few of these crystals and explode them. If I'm right--"
Half an hour later he straightened up and examined the tube of the gas analysis apparatus with which he was working. The level of the gas showed it to be of the original volume but the liquid under the argon was stained a light brown.
"It's impossible, Davis," cried the doctor, "but nevertheless, it's true. Expose some of those crystals to strong sunlight and see what happens."
The crystals rapidly disappeared as the light from a sun-ray arc fell on them.
"It's true, Davis," cried the doctor, positive awe in his voice. "Keep this strictly under your hat for the present. Now that you know what we're up against, fix up a couple of masks and air-collecting apparatus. That stuff will show up again in the swamp to-night and I am going down there to collect some samples. I'll telephone the hospital now."
* * * * *
As Dr. Bird emerged from the dark room, Carnes hurried up with a worried expression.
"The devil's to pay, Doctor," was his greeting.
"All right, stall him off for a minute while I telephone the hospital. I think I can save some of those poor fellows up there."
Carnes paced the floor in anxiety while Dr. Bird got Captain Murdock on the telephone.
"Bird talking, Murdock," he said crisply. "How much deep therapy X-ray apparatus have you got up there?... Too bad.... Well, at least you can give every patient a four-minute dose of maximum intensity and repeat in an hour or so. Keep them under sun-ray arcs as much as you can. Be ready for a fresh attack of the same epidemic to-night. As fast as the patients come in, give them a five-minute dose of X-rays and then sun-rays. Do you understand?... All right, then."
"Just a moment more, Carnes," he went on as he called the office of the commanding officer. "Colonel Wesley, this is Dr. Bird. I think that I have some light on your problem. You must anticipate another more virulent attack than you had last night, probably as soon as the sun goes down. Will you arrange to have everyone removed from the swamp area before that time? Never mind trying to guard the place; you'll just lose more lives if you do. Warn everyone to keep inside the buildings with all doors and windows closed tight. Get all the women and children and everyone else who isn't needed here off the post before dark. Send them to Aberdeen or Baltimore or anywhere.... No, sir, the sick had better not be moved. I think they will be safer in the hospital than they would be elsewhere.... Yes, sir, that's all. Thank you."
* * * * *
Dr. Bird turned to the waiting Carnes.
"Did you locate Miss Andrews?" he asked.
"No, I didn't and that is what I want to talk to you about. I just started to telephone when a hurry call came through from Washington for me and I took it. It was Haggerty on the wire. He followed your precious secretary from the Bureau of Standards over to the Public Health Office and waited for her to come out. She stayed in the building for about an hour and brought a bundle of papers with her when she returned. She walked toward the State, War and Navy Building and Haggerty followed.
"On Pennsylvania Avenue, she was stopped by two men whom Haggerty describes as dark, swarthy, bearded Europeans of some sort. He tried to overhear their conversation but it was in a language which he did not recognize. He got only one word. The girl called one of them 'Denberg.'"
"Denberg!" cried the doctor, "Why, he's one of the Young Labor crowd, but he's in Atlanta."
"He was, Doctor, but I telephoned Atlanta, and found that he had been released last month. After several minutes of talk the two men and your secretary went off together in perfect amity with Haggerty following. The trio got into a waiting car and Haggerty trailed them in a taxi. They drove around town rather aimlessly for some time and then left the car and walked. Haggerty was afraid he would lose them in the crowd so he closed in on them. He doesn't know what happened except that he felt a sudden stab in his arm and everything went black. He recovered in the police station twenty minutes later but the birds had flown."
"The devil!" cried Dr. Bird, consternation in his voice. "Of course, it's easy to see what happened. They spotted him and a confederate slipped a hypo into his arm. What worries me is the fact that they've got Thelma."
* * * * *
"I hope they kill her," snapped Carnes vindictively. "She was never kidnapped in broad daylight. Haggerty says she went with them quite willingly and talked and laughed with them. She has deserted, if she wasn't simply acting as a spy from the first. I didn't trust her at all."
"I hate to admit that my judgment is that rotten, Carnes, but the evidence certainly points that way. At that, I think I'll reserve final judgment until later. Now, in view of what you have learned, I have a job for you."
"It's about time, Doctor. I have been rather useless with all the high-powered science that has been flying around here."
"Well, you'll be in your element now. We know that Denberg is loose and their capture of Thelma is no coincidence. I was pretty sure that Saranoff and his gang were at the bottom of this; now I am certain. They must have introduced something onto the marshes last night which caused the trouble. They could not have come overland very well, for the place is too well patrolled. Had they come by air, they would have attracted attention, even had they used a Bird silencer on their motor, for they couldn't muffle their propeller, especially on a takeoff, and there are plenty of men here who would have recognized it. You might check up on that, but I am confident that they came by water. Launches and boats are continually passing up and down the Chesapeake and its tributaries and one more could easily have escaped notice. The Bush River is at the far end of the Michaelville range and it is navigable for craft of light draft at high tide. Find out whether any strange craft were seen in the vicinity of the proving ground last night. If you draw a blank, go to Perryville and Havre de Grace and see what you can find out there. I have a hunch that their base is more likely to be up the Susquehanna than down toward the coast. Above all, Carnes, don't approach the proving ground by water to-night and don't get near the mouth of the Bush River."
"All right, Doctor. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going down on the swamp and collect samples. Oh, don't look so worried. I know just what I am up against and I will have adequate protection. I'll be in no danger and you would just be in the way. Toddle along, old dear, and report to me by telephone as soon as you have learned anything."
"As you say, Doctor. You'll hear from me the minute I do."
* * * * *
When Carnes had left, Dr. Bird climbed into the waiting car and was driven back to the hospital. Captain Murdock greeted him with a smiling face.
"I don't know how you got on to that treatment, Dr. Bird," he said, "but it is doing the men good. The worst cases haven't been affected much, one way or the other, but the progress of the malady in the mild cases from the stables has been completely checked. I think they have a chance now."
"They'll be all right if the destruction and coagulation of tissue hadn't progressed too far before you checked it, Captain. Treat them now for simple lung cauterization and they ought to get well."
"I have some more of those crystals dissected out, Doctor."
"Keep them in the dark until Mr. Davis comes after them. I want to take a few of them back to Washington for study."
"You expect another attack to-night, Doctor?"
"Yes, sometime after sundown."
"What, in heaven's name, is it?"
"Heaven has nothing to do with it, Captain; the stuff comes from the devil's regions and it is the product of a Russian chemist, who I sometimes believe is verily the devil himself. How it's done and what it is, I haven't found out yet, but I am going to investigate a little to-night. The effect is what you have seen. Are you familiar with the various forms of oxygen?"
"The forms of oxygen? Why, there is only one, oxygen gas. Wait a minute though, there is another form, ozone. Are there any more?"
"None that have been previously listed and studied, but at least one other form exists. Those crystals are pure oxygen."
"Impossible! Oxygen is a gas at all ordinary temperatures."
* * * * *
"Yes, a gas, but one whose density varies. Oxygen, to which we chemists assign the formula O{2}, meaning that its molecule consists of two atoms of oxygen, has a weight of 32 grams per gram molecule. Ozone, to which we assign the formula O{3}, meaning that its molecule contains three atoms of oxygen, weighs fifty per cent more or 48 grams per gram molecule. This new form has a density less than water, but tremendously greater than any known gas. I have not yet been able to determine its structure, so I will have to assign to it the formula, O_{x}, meaning an indefinite number of atoms per molecule. The only name which suggests itself is oxyzone, a combination of oxygen and ozone.
"The stuff is a polymerization, or condensation, to speak roughly, of the oxygen of the air. The oxygen takes this form which the lungs cannot assimilate except with great difficulty and with great damage to the tissues. The oxyzone will break down rapidly under the influence of sunlight or of any ray whose wave-length is shorter than indigo. As a result, it disappears as soon as the sun is up and it will reappear after dark. That is why I suggested X-rays as a treatment. They have a very short wave-length and will penetrate tissues and affect the particles in the lungs themselves. Once the material is removed from the lungs, the cauterization of the tissue ceases and it is merely a matter of slow recovery."
"It is a marvelous discovery, Doctor. I can foresee great uses for it in medical science if a way can be found to produce it."
"Just now we are much more interested in stopping its production than in producing it. Carry on with the line of treatment I have prescribed and be ready for a busy time to-night."
* * * * *
From the hospital, Dr. Bird made his way to the headquarters building where he conferred with Colonel Wesley on the measures being taken to clear the proving ground of all persons not strictly necessary for its guarding. The commanding officer, when he learned Dr. Bird's plans, wished to send guards with him, but the doctor promptly vetoed the scheme.
"My assistant, Mr. Davis, won't be able to fix up more than two masks before dark, Colonel," he said, "and you would just be condemning men to death to send them with me into that fog without proper protection. I can see that you are anxious to know what is causing it, but I'm not ready to tell just yet. I had given your medical officer enough information to enable him to treat the hospital cases scientifically, and to-morrow or the next day I hope to be able to tell you all about it. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to the laboratory to see how Mr. Davis is getting along. It will be dark in three-quarters of an hour and I hope that everyone will stay under cover as much as possible."
Davis looked up as Dr. Bird entered the laboratory.
"I'll have the masks completed in an hour, Doctor," he said, "but I don't know how much value they will be. If the oxygen polymerizes before it enters the body, these masks ought to stop it, but if it polymerizes under the influence of heat and moisture in the lungs, they will be useless."
"I'll have to take a chance on that, Davis. From the description of the fog, I strongly suspect that the process takes place outside the body. Have you had your supper?"
"No, Doctor."
"Neither have I. I'll go over to the officers' mess and get a bite to eat. As soon as you have those masks done, get your supper and then telephone me at the club. If Carnes isn't back, I may have to ask you to drive me down toward Michaelville."
"I'll be very glad to, Doctor."
* * * * *
Carnes had not returned when Davis called Dr. Bird at the officers' club two hours later. Night had fallen and everyone on the proving ground sat behind tightly closed windows with lights blazing on them, wondering whether the finger of death would reach in from the swamp to touch them. The fog had not yet made an appearance on the main post and Dr. Bird had no fear of it when he entered his car and drove down to pick up his assistant.
Davis came out to meet him with a curious hood made of vitiolene and rubber, pulled down well over his head. In his hand he carried a second one. Dr. Bird adjusted the second mask and the two men loaded the rear of the car with apparatus designed for collecting samples of air. The outside of each sample cylinder was heavily coated with black rubberine paint. At a word from the Doctor, Davis took the wheel and drove off along the winding ribbon of concrete which led to the upper end of the Michaelville range.
For a mile they drove through a clear, calm night with no traces of fog apparent. Dr. Bird's eyes continually searched the swamps on both sides of the road.
"Stop!" he said suddenly, his voice coming muffled through the enveloping mask. The car stopped and the Doctor pointed to the west. Over the swamp a few stray fingers of fog were curling up from the water.
* * * * *
Leaving Davis in charge of the car, Dr. Bird donned rubber hip boots and with a gas cylinder in his hand, splashed through the water toward the fog. He reached the place with no difficulty and spent ten minutes trying to collect a sample. Finally, with a muttered exclamation, he removed his mask and inhaled deeply a dozen times. Carrying the mask in his hand, he made his way back to the car.
"False alarm," he said as he pulled on his mask. "It was so thin that I couldn't get a sample so I tested it by breathing. There isn't a trace of cough in that fog. Drive on."
A half mile farther along the road, a curtain of fog swept in on them, momentarily hiding the road from view. They were through the belt of fog in a few feet and the car came to a stop. Dr. Bird sprang out, gas cylinder in hand. He returned to the car shortly.
"We may have what we are looking for, Davis," he said, "but I am not at all certain. It looked very much like ordinary fog. Let's go down to the range."
The car drew up between the two main buildings of the Michaelville front. The air was clear as far as they could see, but from under the north building, a tiny wisp of fog was coming. As it came under the glare of the three huge arc-lights which flooded the ground with light, it grew more tenuous and gradually dissipated into nothingness. With an exclamation of satisfaction, Dr. Bird bent down and thrust the end of a cylinder under the building. He removed it in a moment as the fog began to stream from the upper end. Carefully he closed the pet-cocks of the tube and replaced it in the car. He filled a half dozen tubes before he was satisfied.
"I'd like to go down to the water," he said through his mask. "What kind of a jigger do they run on that track?"
"It's a Ford scooter, I was told. It's probably in that shed."
* * * * *
Half an hour later the two men were running the scooter down the four miles of narrow gage track which separated Michaelville from the Bush River. A few scattered patches of fog could be seen on either side of the track, but none were of sufficient thickness to warrant much success in sample taking. At the water front Dr. Bird looked across the half mile wide river and grunted.
"The tide won't be in for another three hours," he said. "Right now there isn't over sixteen inches of water in there."
Carnes was waiting in the well lighted laboratory when they drove up.
"All right, Davis," said the doctor, "get busy on those samples. If you can't make out the first two, don't crack the others but leave them for me. Give Carnes your mask; he'll drive the rest of the night.
"What luck, Carnesy?" he asked, as the detective, wearing Davis' mask, drove toward the officers' club.
"No stray plane landed or even flew over here last night so far as I could learn. Most of the boats on the bay were either known or lent themselves to ready identification. There were four that I couldn't exactly place, but I think we can safely discard all but one. Some fishermen were pulling nets on the bay about half a mile outside the mouth of the Bush River last night. About eleven, a boat running without lights passed them. They said that they could not hear an engine running, but just a dull hum and the gurgle of a propeller. They hailed it, but got no answer. It faded away into the darkness and they think it was headed toward the mouth of the Bush River. They had their nets up and reset in another hour but the boat didn't reappear."
"Hmm. High tide was at ten minutes after midnight. There was plenty of water in the river at that hour. It sounds promising."
"I thought of telephoning Washington and getting a Coast Guard cutter put on patrol in the bay but I didn't like to do it without your sanction."
"It might have been a good idea, but on the whole it's probably better that you didn't. Carnes, we'll go down to the water front and see whether anything shows up to-night. High tide will be about eleven-thirty. It's about half-past nine now. We'd better get going."
* * * * *
On the second drive to Michaelville, the fog patches were quite noticeably denser than they had been earlier in the evening. Three times the car had to pass through bands of fog which covered the road. As they passed the second one Carnes suddenly began to cough.
"What's the matter, old man?" cried Dr. Bird, a note of anxiety in his voice. For a few moments Carnes could not answer for coughing. He seized the mask to tear it from his head but Dr. Bird restrained him. In a few minutes his voice became intelligible.
"It seemed like that fog bit right into my lungs, Doctor," he gasped. "I felt as if I were choking. It's better now."
"Are you sure your mask isn't leaking, Carnes? It'll be all up with you if it does. Test it."
The detective closed the intake valve of the mask and expelling all of the air from his lungs, took a deep breath. The air whistled noisily in through the outlet valve.
"The devil!" cried the doctor. "Take that mask off and let me look at it."
A few moments were enough to make the needed repairs and they drove on. Carnes still coughed from time to time. At Michaelville, they started the scooter and ran down the track to the river. They secreted the scooter under the parapet on the water pent-house and walked to the river's edge.
"There's no telling just where they may land, Carnes," said the doctor reflectively, "but this looks like the most likely place. I'll tell you what we'll do. The river narrows a good deal about half a mile east of here. You go up to the narrows and keep watch while I stay here. If any craft passes you, follow it upstream until you find me. If they land, handle the situation as well as you can alone. If you hear any shooting, come as fast as you can leg it. I'll do the same."
* * * * *
The detective stole away into the darkness and Dr. Bird settled himself for a long vigil. For an hour nothing broke the stillness of the night. Suddenly the doctor was on his feet, peering downstream. A faint purring murmur came over the water, so faint that no one with less sensitive ears than the doctor's could have detected it. Assured after a few minutes of listening that some kind of a craft was coming up the river, the doctor sank back into his hiding place, an automatic pistol firmly grasped in his long tapering fingers.
The purr came nearer, but it was not appreciably louder. The gurgle of water past the prow of the boat could be heard and Dr. Bird could see a long ribbon of white on the water where the craft was passing. He stepped from his cover and leaned forward, straining his eyes to see the boat. It passed beyond him and continued up the river. He stepped quickly along the river bank, trying to keep it in sight. Suddenly he paused. The boat had turned and was coming back. Hurriedly he returned to his hiding place.
The boat came down the river until it was opposite the point where he crouched, and then it turned and came in toward the shore. Dr. Bird gripped his pistol and waited. When the craft was less than twenty feet from shore it stopped and a guttural voice spoke. Dr. Bird started. He had expected the language to be Russian, but it came as a shock to him, nevertheless. He strained his ears and cursed his inability to make out the words. Dr. Bird had been assiduously studying Russian under the tutelage of his new secretary for some months, but he had not yet progressed to the stage where he could readily understand it. The gift of languages was one which the erudite doctor did not possess.
* * * * *
The boat lay motionless for several minutes. Nervously the doctor glanced at his wrist watch. He barely stifled a cry of amazement. From the face of the luminous dial, long streamers of faintly phosphorescent light were streaming. He whirled to meet an attack from the rear but he was too late. Even as he turned the muzzle of a pistol pressed into his back and a voice spoke behind him.
"Drop that pistol, Doctor, or I'll be under the unpleasant necessity of making a hole in you."
Reluctantly, Dr. Bird dropped his pistol and the voice went on.
"Really, I hardly expected to catch you by surprise, Doctor. I thought you were clever enough to realize that our boat would be equipped with an ultra-violet searchlight. However, even the best minds must rest sometimes, and yours is due for a nice long rest. In fact, I might almost prophesy that it will be a permanent rest."
Dr. Bird shivered despite himself at the cold mercilessness of the railing voice behind him. The accents were ones which he did not recognize. His captor chuckled for a few moments and then called out in Russian. The boat came into the shore and eight figures climbed out. Two of them bore a small chest which they set down on the wharf. One of the figures picked up the doctor's automatic and his captor stepped in front. A flashlight gleamed for an instant and Dr. Bird started in surprise. The men wore no masks but only a plate of glass which protected their cheeks and eyes. Fastened to the neck of each one, below the chin, was a long tube which gleamed like glass. They wore heavy knapsacks strapped to their backs from which wires ran to each end of the bars.
"Those protectors make your enveloping head-mask look rather clumsy, don't they, Doctor?" said his captor mockingly. "It's too bad you didn't think of them first. It must be such a blow to your pride to think that anyone had invented something better than yours. Really, that mask of yours worries me. Remove it!"
* * * * *
At his words two of the men stepped forward and tore the doctor's mask roughly from his head. The mocking voice went on.
"In view of the fact that you have only a few hours of life left, Dr. Bird, it will give me pleasure to let you know how thoroughly you have been defeated. You may not know me by sight, although my name may not be unfamiliar. I am Peter Denberg."
He turned the flashlight for an instant on his own face, and Dr. Bird gazed at him keenly.
"I'll know you the next time I see you," he muttered, half to himself.
"The next time you see me will be in the hereafter, if there be such a thing," laughed the Russian. "The sweetest blow of all is now about to fall. We expected you to be here and came prepared to capture you. Had we not known that the arch enemy of the people would be here to-night, we would have struck at a point miles away. Do you know who betrayed you? It was one we placed in your laboratory for the very purpose which she served."
He turned on the light again and it picked out of the darkness another face, a long oval face with startlingly red lips and dark oval eyes which glowed as with an internal flame. As the face became visible, the red lips drew back, exposing strong white teeth and the words were literally spat out.
"Swine!" she hissed. "Bourgeois! Did you think you could bribe me with your gifts to tolerate your vileness? I have brought about your downfall and death, Dr. Bird. I, Feodrovna Androvitch! Now will I avenge my brother's death at your hands!"
She sprang forward and spat full in the doctor's face. Dr. Bird fell back for an instant under the ferocity of her attack and long nails ripped the skin from his face. Denberg stepped forward and caught her wrists.
"Gently, sister," he warned. Feodrovna struggled for an instant but gave way to the powerful muscles of the communist leader. "There is no need for anything of that sort," he went on. "In a few moments we will open the chest which we have and then you will enjoy the amazing spectacle of the man who has temporarily checked the plans of our leader a dozen times, gasping for breath like a fish out of water. Start your protectors."
* * * * *
Each of the Russians closed a switch on the knapsack which he wore. From the bars below their chins came a dull violet glow which made their faces stand out eerily in the darkness. The flashlight was centered on the box which Dr. Bird could see was made of lead, soldered into a solid mass. At a word from Denberg, one of the Russians stepped forward with a long knife in his hand and started to cut open the box.
With a sudden effort, Dr. Bird shook himself loose from the two men who were holding him and sprang forward. Denberg turned to meet him and the doctor's fist shot out like a piston rod. Full on the Russian's chin it landed and he went down like a poled ox. Two of the Russians closed with him but the two were no match for Dr. Bird's enormous strength, fighting as he was for his life. He hurled one away and swung with all of his strength at the other. His blow struck glancingly, and while the Russian spun away under the blow, he did not fall. A man caught at him from the rear and Dr. Bird whirled, but as he did so, two men seized his arms from behind. Mightily the doctor strove but others flung themselves on him. He straightened up with a superhuman effort and then from an unexpected source came help.
One of the men holding him gave a choking gasp and reeled sideways. Dr. Bird felt his neck deluged with liquid and the smell of hot blood rose sickeningly on the air. He shook himself loose again and smote with all of his strength at his nearest opponent. His blow landed fair but at the same instant an iron bar fell across his arm and it dropped limp and helpless. Again a knife flashed in the darkness and a howl of pain came from the Russian who felt it bite home.
"We are attacked!" cried one of them. They whirled about, their flashlights cutting paths through the thickening fog. With her back to the crippled doctor's Feodrovna Androvitch held aloft a bloody knife.
Something seemed to catch Dr. Bird by the throat and shut off his breath. From a gash which had been cut in the lead box, a heavy gray fog was rising and enveloping everything in its deadening blanket. The fog penetrated into the doctor's lungs and an intolerable pain, as though hot irons were searing the tissues, tore him. He tried to cough, but the sound could not force its way through his stiffening lips. Darkness closed in on him and he swayed. He was dimly conscious that the Russians were swarming about Feodrovna, knives and clubs in their hands. Then through the night came an ear-splitting crack and a flash of orange flame. One of the Russians toppled and fell forward, knocking the weakened doctor down as he did so. Again came a flash and a report, and to the doctor's fading senses came a sound of shouts and pounding feet. Over his head another flash split the fog and then darkness swarmed in and with a sigh of pain, Dr. Bird let his head fall forward on his chest.
* * * * *
He recovered consciousness slowly and looked about him. He was in a white bed in a strange, yet somehow familiar, place with a ray of light of almost intolerable brilliance boring its way into his brain. He tried to raise his hand and found himself curiously weak. With a great effort he raised his hand until he could see it and let it fall with a cry which came from his lips only as a feeble murmur. His hand was thin almost to the point of emaciation. Blue veins stood out on the back and his long, slim, mobile fingers, the fingers of an artist and dreamer, were mere claws, with the skin drawn tight over the bones.
A man in a white uniform bent over him. "Drink this, Doctor," came in soothing tones.
He was too weak to protest and he managed to sip the drink through a glass tube. Slowly he felt himself sinking through vast unexplored reaches of darkness.
How long he lay there he did not know but when he again opened his eyes the light was no longer over him. He strove to speak and a husky whisper came from his lips. A tall woman in white hastened forward and bent over him.
"Where am I?" he asked with difficulty.
"You're in the hospital at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Doctor," said the nurse. "Everything is all right and you're doing splendidly. Just don't excite yourself and you'll get well in no time. Captain Murdock will be here in a few minutes."
"How long have I been here?" he asked.
"Oh, quite a while, Doctor. Now don't ask any more questions. You must rest and get well and strong, you know."
Strength seemed to be surging slowly back into the doctor's wasted frame. His voice came clearer and stronger.
"How long have I been here?" he demanded.
* * * * *
The nurse hesitated, but her face suddenly cleared as Captain Murdock entered the ward.
"Oh, Captain," she cried, "come here and take care of your patient. He won't keep quiet."
"Out of his head again?" asked Captain Murdock as he hastened forward.
"No more than you are," came in a husky whisper from Dr. Bird's lips.
Captain Murdock looked quickly down and smiled in relief. "You'll live, Dr. Bird," he said. "Just take it easy for a few days and then you can talk all you want to."
"I'll talk now," came in stronger tones from the doctor's lips. "How long have I been here?"
Captain Murdock hesitated, but a glance at the doctor's flushed face warned him that it was better to give in than to fight him.
"You were brought in here two weeks ago yesterday," he said. "It was touch and go for a while, and, but for the treatment you devised, you would have been a goner. We fed you X-rays until I was afraid we would burn you up, but they did the business. It will cheer you up to learn that every man who got your treatment is either well or on the high road to recovery."
"The plague?" asked the doctor faintly.
"Oh, that's all over, thanks to you. It reached the post that night but under the influence of the daylight blue bulbs you had installed, it lost most of its virulence. We had a lot of sore throats in the morning but there wasn't a man dangerously sick. It all faded when the sun hit it."
An orderly entered and spoke in an undertone to Captain Murdock. The surgeon hesitated for a moment, his eyes on Dr. Bird, and then nodded.
"Bring him in," he said quietly.
* * * * *
A small, unobtrusively dressed man entered the room and stepped to the bedside. Dr. Bird's face lighted up in one of its rare smiles and he strove to raise his hand in greeting.
"Carnesy, old dear, I'm glad to see you got out all right," he whispered. "I was afraid your mask wouldn't hold up after the trouble you had with it. Tell me what happened that night."
Carnes glanced at Captain Murdock, who nodded.
"I went down to the narrows and watched, Doctor, and when the Russian boat passed, I started to make my way back to you. The tide had come in and I had to make quite a detour to get to you. I got there a little later than I liked but still in time to do some good. You were down and Miss Andrews was standing over you with a bloody knife in her hand, fighting like a wildcat. I started shooting and ran in yelling as loud as I could. I managed to plug three of them and I guess they thought I was a dozen men. I tried to make enough noise for that many. The rest took to their heels and Miss Andrews and I rigged one of their protectors over your face and dragged you to the scooter. The rest was plain sailing. We brought you in and Captain Murdock did the rest. That's all there was to it. If I hadn't been so slow, I could have driven them off before they opened that box and saved you all of this."
"Thelma?" asked the doctor faintly.
"Oh, she's none the worse, Doctor. I want to apologize to you for the poor opinion I had of your judgment. That girl wasn't recognized; she recognized Denberg on the streets of Washington and deliberately put her head into the lion's mouth by declaring herself. She got their whole plan and went along to try to checkmate them. If she hadn't started knifing when she did, the devils meant to hold your head directly over that box and it would have been just too bad."
"What was in the box?"
* * * * *
"She found that out. It was some kind of a microbe that Saranoff developed in a Belgian laboratory which does something to the oxygen of the air. You'll have to get Dr. Burgess to explain that to you later; he has some of the bugs shut up for you to play with when you get back on the job. When we found that you were knocked out, Davis got him to come down from Washington to take charge. He has been running ray machines over the swamps for two weeks and says that every trace of the bugs are gone except those he has in the laboratory."
"Saranoff has more."
"No, he hasn't, thanks to Miss Andrews. Every day they started a fresh colony, leaving one lot back to start the next brood with. She tipped us off where they were kept and Bolton and Haggerty raided and got the lot and turned them over to Dr. Burgess."
"That's enough for to-day, Mr. Carnes," interrupted Captain Murdock. "You can see Dr. Bird to-morrow, but he has had enough excitement for to-day."
As Carnes took his leave, the nurse spoke to Captain Murdock. He looked carefully at Dr. Bird and nodded.
"For one minute. No longer!" he said.
The nurse stepped to the door. Into the room came a slim young woman of remarkable beauty, her eyes glowing as with an internal light. Her parting lips of startling redness showed strong white teeth. Her eyes grew misty as she leaned over the doctor's bed. Dr. Bird blinked for a moment and his face grew stern.
"Miss Andrews," he said in a husky whisper, "Mr. Carnes has told me what you did. In my service, success does not excuse disobedience. I thank you for your services which may have saved my life and which may have put me in worse danger. In any event, please remember two things. Unless you can learn to entirely suppress your emotions and learn that I will tolerate nothing but implicit obedience, your usefulness to me will be at an end and I will no longer need you."
The happiness faded from the girl's face as if by magic and an expression of absolute immobility took its place. Her eyes looked as though a curtain had been drawn over them.
"Yes, Doctor," she said in a toneless voice as she turned and left the room.
THE BLACK LAMP
By Captain S. P. Meek
"The clue, Carnes," said Dr. Bird slowly, "lies in those windows."
Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service shook his head before he glanced at the windows of the famous scientist's private laboratory on the top floor of the Bureau of Standards.
Dr. Bird and his friend Carnes unravel another criminal web of scientific mystery.
"I usually defer to your knowledge, Doctor," he said, "but this time I think you are off on the wrong foot. If the thieves came in through the windows, what was their object in cutting that hole through the roof? The marks are very plain and they indicate that the hole was cut in some manner from the inside."
Dr. Bird smiled enigmatically.
"That is too evident for discussion," he replied. "I grant you that the thieves entered from the roof through that hole. After they had secured their booty they left by the same route. I presume that you have noticed the marks on the roof where an aircraft of some sort, probably a helicopter, landed and took off. A question of much greater moment is that of what they did before they landed and cut the hole."
"I don't follow your reasoning, Doctor."
"Carnes, that hole was cut through the roof with a heavy saw. In cutting it, the workers dislodged quite a little plaster which fell to the floor and must have made a great deal of noise. Why wasn't that noise heard?"
"It was heard. The watchman heard it, but knew that Lieutenant Breslau was working here and he thought that he made the noise."
"Surely, but why didn't Breslau hear it?"
"How do we know that he didn't? He was taken to Walter Reed Hospital this morning with his mind an absolute blank and with his tongue paralyzed. He must have seen the thieves and they treated him in some way to ensure his silence. When he is able to talk, if he ever is, he'll probably give us a good description of them."
Dr. Bird shook his head.
"Too thin, Carney, old dear," he said. "Breslau is a very intelligent young man. He was perfectly normal when I left him shortly after midnight last night. He was working alone in here on a device of the utmost military importance. On the desk is a push button which sets ringing a dozen gongs in the building. Surely a man of that type would have had sense enough when he heard and saw intruders cutting a hole through the roof to sound an alarm which would have brought every watchman on the grounds to his assistance. He must have been knocked out before the hole was started, probably before the helicopter's landing."
"How? Gas of some sort?"
"The windows were all closed and locked and I have already ascertained that the gas and water lines have not been tampered with. Gas won't penetrate through a solid roof in sufficient concentration to knock out a man like that. It was something more subtle than gas."
"What was it?"
"I don't know yet. The clue to what it was lies, as I told you, in those windows."
Carnes moved over and surveyed the windows closely.
"I see nothing unusual about them except that they need washing rather badly."
"They were washed last Friday, but they do look rather dirty, don't they? Suppose you take a rag and some scouring soap and clean up a pane."
The detective took the proffered articles and started his task. He wet a pane of glass, rubbed up a thick lather of scouring soap and applied it and rubbed vigorously. With clear water he washed the glass and then gave an exclamation of astonishment and examined it more closely.
"That isn't dirt, Doctor," he cried. "The glass seems to be fogged."
Dr. Bird chuckled.
"So it seems," he admitted. "Now look at the rest of the glass around the laboratory."
Carnes looked around and then walked to a table littered with apparatus and examined a dozen pieces carefully.
"It's all fogged in exactly the same way, Doctor," he said. "The only piece of clear glass in the room is that piece of plate glass on your desk."
Dr. Bird picked up a hammer and struck the plate on his desk a sharp blow. Carnes ducked instinctively, but the hammer rebounded harmlessly from the plate.
"That isn't glass, Carnes," said the doctor. "That plate is made of vitrilene, a new product which I have developed. It looks like glass, but it has entirely different properties. It is of enormous strength and is quite insensitive to shock. It has one most peculiar property. While ultra-violet and longer rays will penetrate it quite readily, it is a perfect screen for X-rays and other rays of shorter wave length. It appears to be the only piece of transparent substance in my laboratory which has not been fogged, as you call it."
"Do short waves fog glass, Doctor?"
"Not so far as I know at present, but you must remember that very little work has been done with the short wave-lengths. In the vast range of waves whose lengths lie between zero and that of the X-ray, only a few points have been investigated and definitely plotted. There may be in that range a wave-length which will fog glass."
"Then your theory is that some sort of a ray machine was put in operation before the helicopter landed?"
"It is too early to attempt any theorizing, Carnes. Let us confine ourselves to the known facts. Lieutenant Breslau was normal at midnight and was working in this room. Some time between then and seven this morning he underwent certain mental and physical changes which prevent him from telling us what he observed. During the same period, a hole was cut in the roof and things of great importance stolen. At the same time, all the glass in the laboratory became semi-opaque. The problem is to determine what connection there is between the three events. I will handle the scientific end here, but there is some outside work to be done, and that will be your share."
Give your orders, Doctor," said the detective briefly.
"To understand what I am driving at, I will have to tell you what has been stolen. Naturally this is highly confidential. Some rumors have leaked out as to my experiments with 'radite,' as I have named the new radium-containing disintegrating explosive on which I have been working, but no one short of the Secretary of War and the Chief of Ordnance and certain of their selected subordinates knows that my experiments have been successful and that the United States is in a position to manufacture radite in almost unlimited quantities from the pitchblende ore deposits of Wyoming and Nevada. The effects of radite will be catastrophic on the unfortunate victim on whom it is first used. The only thing left to do was to develop a gun from which radite shells could be fired with safety and precision.
"Ordinary propellant powders are too variable for this purpose, but I found that radite B, one form of my new explosive, can be used for propelling the shells from a gun. The ordinary gun will last only two or three rounds, due to the erosive action of the radite charge on the barrel, and ordinary ordnance is heavier and more cumbersome than is necessary. When this was found to be the case, the Chief of Ordnance detailed Lieutenant Breslau, the army's greatest expert on gun design, to work with me in an attempt to develop a suitable weapon. Breslau is a wizard at that sort of work and he has made a miniature working model of a gun with a vitrilene-lined barrel which is capable of being fired with a miniature shell. The gun will stand up under the repeated firing of radite charges and is very light and compact and gives an accuracy of fire control heretofore deemed impossible. From this he planned to construct a larger weapon which would fire a shell containing an explosive charge of two and one-half ounces of radite at a rate of fire of two hundred shots per minute. The destructive effect of each shell will be greater than that of the ordinary high-explosive shell fired from a sixteen-inch mortar, and all of the shells can be landed inside a two-hundred foot circle at a range of fifteen miles. The weight of the completed gun will be less than half a ton, exclusive of the firing platform. It is Breslau's working model which has been stolen."
Carnes whistled softly between his teeth.
"The matter will have to be handled pretty delicately to avoid international complications," he said. "It's hard to tell just where to look. There are a great many nations who would give any amount for a model of such a weapon."
"The matter must be handled delicately and also in absolute secrecy, Carnes. We are not yet ready to announce to the world the fact that we have such a weapon in our armory. It is the plan of the President to have a half dozen of these weapons manufactured and give a demonstration of their terrible effectiveness to representatives of the powers of the world. Think what an argument the existence of such a weapon will be for the furtherance of his plans for disarmament and universal peace! Public sentiment will force disarmament on the world, for even the worst jingoist could no longer defend armaments in the face of America's offer to scrap these super-engines of destruction and to destroy the plans from which they were made. If the model has fallen into the hands of any civilized power the damage is not irreparable, for public opinion would force its surrender and return. It is among the uncivilized powers that our search must first be made."
"That makes the problem of where to start more complicated."
"On the contrary, it simplifies it immensely. At the head of the uncivilized powers stands one which has the brains, the scientific knowledge and the manufacturing facilities to make terrible use of such a weapon. In addition, the aim of that power is to overthrow all world governments and set up in their stead its own tyrannical disorder. Need I name it?"
"You refer to Russia."
"Not to Russia, the great slumbering giant who will some day take her place in the sun in fellowship with the other nations, but to Bolsheviki, that empire within an empire, that horrible power which it holding sleeping Russia in chains of steel and blood. It is there that our search must first be made."
Of course, they have no official representative in America."
"No, but the Young Labor Party is as much their accredited representative as the British Ambassador is of imperial Britain. Your first task will be to trail down and locate every leader of that group and to investigate his present activities."
"I can tell you where most of them are without investigation. Denberg, Semensky and Karuska are in Atlanta; Fedorovitch and Caspar are in Leavenworth; Saranoff is dead—"
"Presumably."
"Why, Doctor, I saw with my own eyes the destruction of the submarine in which he was riding!"
"Did you see his dead body?"
"No."
"Neither did I, and I will never be sure until I do. Once before we were certain of his death, and he bobbed up with a new fiendish device. We cannot eliminate Saranoff."
"I will include him in my plans."
"Do so. Besides a hypothetical Saranoff, there are a half dozen or more of the old leaders of the gang who are alive and at liberty, so far as we know. They fled the country after the Coast Guard broke up their alien smuggling scheme, but some of them may have returned. There are also thirty or forty underlings who should be located and checked up on, and, in addition, we must not lose sight of the fact that new heads of the organization may have been smuggled into the United States. It is no simple task that I am setting you, Carnes, but I know that you and Bolton will see it through if anyone can."
"Thanks, Doctor, we'll do our best. If I am not speaking out of turn, what are you planning to do in the mean time?"
I am going to start Taylor off on an ultra-short wave generator and try a few experiments along that line. Breslau is at Walter Reed and they are doing all they can for him, but until I can get some definite information as to the underlying cause of his condition, they are more or less shooting in the dark."
"How are they treating him?"
"By electric stimulations and vibratory treatments and by keeping him in a darkened room. By the way, Carnes, if I am correct in my line of thought, it would be well to have an extra guard put over Karuska. He was the only real expert in ordnance that the Young Labor party had, and if they have Breslau's model they'll need him to supervise the construction of a gun."
"I'll attend to that at once, Doctor. Is there anything else?"
"Not that I know of. I am going out to Takoma Park this afternoon and have another look at Breslau, but it is too soon to hope for any change in his condition. Aside from the time I will be out there, you can find me either here or at my home, in case anything develops."
"I'll get on the job at once, Doctor."
"Thanks, old dear. Remember that speed must be the keynote of your work."
The telephone bell at the head of Dr. Bird's bed woke into noisy activity. The doctor roused himself and took down the instrument sleepily. A glance at the clock showed him that it was four in the morning and he muttered a malediction on the one who had called him.
"Hello," he said into the receiver. "Dr. Bird speaking."
"Doctor," came a crisp voice over the wire, "wake up! This is Carnes talking. Something has broken loose!"
All trace of sleep vanished from Dr. Bird's face and his eyes glowed momentarily with a peculiar glitter which Carnes would at once have recognized as indicative of the keenest interest.
"What has happened, Carnes?" he demanded.
"I telephoned Atlanta this morning and arranged to have an extra guard put over Karuska as you suggested. The matter was simplified by the fact that he and nine others were confined in the prison infirmary. The warden agreed to do as I told him, and, in addition to the regular guards, a special man was placed in the ward near Karuska's bed. At 2 A. M. the lights in the ward went out."
"Accidentally, or were they put out?"
"They haven't found out yet. At any rate they are all right now, but Karuska and all of the other inmates and all the guards of that particular ward have gone crazy."
"The dickens you say!"
"Not only that, they are also partially paralyzed. The description I got over the telephone corresponds exactly with the condition of Lieutenant Breslau as you described it to me. Here is the most interesting part of the whole affair. The special guard over Karuska was only lightly affected and has already recovered and is in a position to tell you exactly what happened. I got a garbled account of the affair from the warden, something about a goldfish bowl or something like that, the warden wouldn't take it seriously enough to give me details. I didn't press for them much for I knew that you would rather get them at first hand."
"I certainly would. I'll be ready to leave for Atlanta in less than ten minutes."
"I expected that, Doctor, and a car is already on its way to pick you up. I'll meet you at Langley Field where a plane is already being tuned up and will be ready to take off by the time we get there."
"Good work, Carnes. I'll see you at the field."
A car was waiting for Carnes and Dr. Bird when the Langley Field plane slid down to a landing at Atlanta. At the penitentiary, Dr. Bird went direct to the infirmary where Karuska had been confined. As he entered, he shot a keen glance around and gave an exclamation of satisfaction.
"Look at the windows, Carnes," he cried.
Carnes went over to the nearest window and moistened his finger tip and applied it experimentally to the glass. The moisture produced no effect, for the glass of the windows was permanently clouded as was that of the doctor's laboratory.
"Whatever happened in my laboratory the night before last was repeated here last night with a similar object," said the doctor. "The object there was to steal a gun model; here it was to steal a man who could construct a full-sized gun from the model. I understand that one of the guards escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the persons in the infirmary?"
"Not altogether, Doctor," replied the warden. "I think that his mind is somewhat affected, for he tells a wild yarn and insists on trying to wear a goldfish bowl on his head. I have him under observation in the psychopathic ward."
Dr. Bird shot a scornful glance at the warden.
"'There are none so blind as those who will not see'," he murmured.
"By all means, I wish to see him," he went on aloud. "Will you have him brought here at once, please?"
The warden nodded and spoke to one of the attendants. In a few moments a tall, fair-haired young giant stood before the doctor. Dr. Bird pushed back his unruly shock of black hair with his fingers, those long slim mobile fingers which alone betrayed the artist in his make-up, and shot a piercing glance from his black eyes into the blue ones, which returned the gaze unabashed.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Bailley, sir."
"You were on guard here last night?"
"Yes, sir. I was detailed as a special guard over No. 9764."
"Tell me in your own words just what happened. Don't be afraid to speak out; I'm not going to disbelieve you; and above all, tell me everything, no matter how unimportant it may seem to you. I'll judge the importance of things for myself. I'm Dr. Bird of the Bureau of Standards."
The guard's face lighted up at the doctor's words.
"I've heard of you, Doctor," he said in a relieved tone, "and I'll be glad to tell you everything. At ten o'clock last night, I relieved Carragher as special guard over No. 9764. Carragher reported that the prisoner was somewhat restless and hadn't been asleep as yet. I sat down about fifteen feet from his bed and prepared to keep an eye on him until I was relieved at six o'clock this morning.
"Nothing happened until about two o'clock. No. 9764 was restless as Carragher had said, but toward midnight he quieted down and apparently went to sleep. I was sleepy myself, and I got up and took a turn around the room every five minutes to be sure that I kept awake. That's how I am so sure of the time, sir."
Dr. Bird nodded.
"At five minutes to two, just as I got up, I heard a noise outside like a big electric fan. It sounded like it came from directly overhead and I went to the window and looked out. I couldn't see anything, although I could hear it pretty plainly, and then I heard a noise like something had fallen on the roof. Almost at the same time there came a sort of high-pitched whine, a good deal like the noise an electric motor makes when it is running at high speed.
"I thought of giving an alarm, but I didn't want to stir things up unless I was sure that there was some necessity for it, so I started for the door to ask one of the outside guards if he had heard anything. As I turned toward No. 9764 I saw that he had been sitting up in bed while my back was turned. As soon as he saw that I noticed him, he lay back real quick and pulled the covers over his head. He moved pretty quick, but not so quick that I couldn't see that he had something that glittered like glass before his face. I started over toward his bed to see what he was doing and then it was that the lights started to get dim!"
"Go on!" said the doctor as Bailley paused. His eyes were glittering brightly now.
"Well, sir, Doctor, I don't hardly know how to describe what happened next. The lights were getting dim, but not as they ordinarily do when the current starts to go off. The filaments were shining as bright as they ever did, but the light didn't seem to be able to penetrate the air. The whole room seemed to be filled with a blackness that stopped the light. No, sir, it wasn't like fog; it was more like something more powerful than the lights was in the room and was killing them.
It wasn't only the lights which were affected, it was me as well. This blackness, whatever it was, was getting into me as well as into the room, and I couldn't seem to make myself think like I wanted to. I tried to yell to give an alarm, and I found that I could hardly whisper. I went toward the bed and then I saw No. 9764 sit up again. He had a goldfish bowl pulled down over his head and it was evident that it was keeping the blackness away, for I could see him plainly and his eyes were as bright as ever.
"The nearer I got to him, the funnier I felt, and I began to be afraid that I would go out. No. 9764 got up out of bed, and I could see him grinning at me through the bowl. He reached up and adjusted that bowl, and all of a sudden I realized that whatever was knocking me out was not affecting him because he had that thing on. I jumped for him with the idea of taking the bowl off and putting it on my own head. He saw what I was up to and he fought like a cornered rat, but the blackness hadn't affected my muscles. I'm a pretty big man, sir, and No. 9764 is a little runt, and it didn't take me long to get the bowl off his head and pulled on over mine. As soon as I did that, I seemed to be able to think clearer. I was sitting on No. 9764 and was ready to tap him with a persuader if he started anything, but I didn't have to. In a few minutes he stopped struggling and lay perfectly quiet.
"The lights kept getting dimmer and dimmer until they went out altogether and the room became pitch dark. It wasn't exactly as if the lights had gone out, sir; I seemed to know that they were still there and were burning as bright as ever, but they couldn't penetrate the blackness in the room, if you understand what I mean."
I think I do," said Dr. Bird slowly. "It was a good deal as if you had seen a glass filled with a pale red liquid and someone had dumped black ink into the fluid and hid the red color. You would know that the red was still there, but you wouldn't be able to see it through the black."
"That's exactly what it was like, Doctor; you have described it better than I can. At any rate, after it got real dark I heard a low whistle from the roof. No. 9764 made a struggle to get up for a moment and then lay quiet again. The whistle sounded again and then I heard some one call 'Caruso.' Everything was quiet for a while and then the same voice called again and said some stuff in a foreign language that I couldn't understand. I kept perfectly quiet to see what would happen.
"For about ten minutes the room remained perfectly dark, as I have said, and all the while I could hear that whining noise. All of a sudden it began to sound in a lower note and then I could see the lights again, very dimly and like the black ink you spoke of was fading out. The note got lower until it stopped altogether, and the lights came on brighter until they were normal again. Then I heard a scraping noise on the roof and the noise I had heard at first like a big electric fan. I looked at the clock. It was two-twenty.
"For a few minutes I wasn't able to collect my wits. When I got up off of No. 9764 at last he stared at me as though he didn't know a thing, and I heaved him back into his bed and ran to the door to summon an outside guard. I could still talk in a husky whisper, but not loud, and I wasn't surprised when no one heard me. My orders were not to let No. 9764 out of my sight, but this was an emergency, so I left the ward and found a guard. It was Madigan and he was standing on his beat staring at nothing. When I touched him he looked at me and there was the same vacant look in his eyes that I had seen in the prisoner's. I talked to him in a whisper, but he didn't seem to understand, so I left him and went to a telephone and called for help. Mr. Lawson, the warden, got here with guards in a couple of minutes and I tried to tell him what had happened, but I couldn't talk loud, and I was afraid to take the fish bowl off my head."
What happened next?"
"Mr. Lawson took me to his office, and on the way we passed under an arc light. As soon as I got under it I begin to feel better, and my voice came stronger. I saw that it was doing me some good and I stopped under it for an hour before my voice got back to normal. It seemed to clear the fog from my brain, too, and I was able, about four o'clock, to tell everything that had happened. Mr. Lawson seemed to think that my brain was affected as well as the others' and he sent me to the hospital. That's all, Doctor."
"Do you feel perfectly normal now?"
"Yes, sir."
"There is no need for confining this man longer, Mr. Lawson. He is as well as he ever was. Carnes, get the Walter Reed Hospital on the telephone and tell them that I said to treat Lieutenant Breslau with light rays, rich in ultra-violet. Tell them to give him an overdose of them and not to put goggles on him. Keep him in the sun all day and under sun-ray arcs at night until further orders. Mr. Lawson, give the same treatment to the men who were disabled last night. If you haven't enough sun-ray arcs in your hospital, put them under an ordinary arc light in the yard. Bailley, have you still got that goldfish bowl?"
"It is in my office, Doctor," said the warden.
"Good enough! Send for it at once. By the way, you have two more communists here, Denberg and Semensky, haven't you?"
"I think so, although I will have to consult the records before I can be positive."
"I am sure that you have. Look the matter up and let me know."
The warden hurried away to carry out the doctor's orders, and an orderly appeared in a few moments with a hollow globe made of some crystalline transparent substance. Despite its presence in the infirmary the evening before, there was no trace of clouding apparent. Dr. Bird took it and examined it critically. He rapped it with his knuckles and then stepped to the door and hurled it violently down on the concrete floor of the yard. The globe rebounded without injury and he caught it.
"Vitrilene, or a good imitation of it," he remarked to Carnes. "After you get through talking to the hospital, get Taylor on the wire. There is plenty of loose vitrilene in the Bureau, and I want him to send down about fifty square feet of it by a special plane at once."
As Carnes left the room, the warden reappeared.
"The men are all lying in the sun now, Doctor," he said. "I find that we have the two men you mentioned confined here. They are both in Tier A, Building 6."
"Is that an isolated building?"
"No, it is one wing of the old main building."
"On which floor?"
"The second floor. It is a six-story building."
"Have they been moved there recently?"
"They have been there for nearly a year."
In that case there will be little chance of another attack of this sort to-night. At the same time, I would advise you to station extra guards there to-night and every night until I notify you otherwise. Caution them to watch the lights carefully and to give an alarm at once if they appear to get dim. In such a case, send men to the roof with rifles with orders to shoot to kill anyone they find there. I am going back to Washington and I am going to take Karuska, your No. 9764 with me. You had better have one of the guards in the corridor, where Denberg and Semensky are, wear this goldfish bowl, as you call it. A lot of plate glass—at least it will look like that—will come from Washington by plane. Cut it into sheets a foot square and use surgeon's plaster to make some temporary glass helmets for your men. I want all your guards to wear them until I either settle this matter or else send you some better helmets. Do you understand?"
"I understand all right, but I'm afraid that I can't do it. The wearing of such appliances would interfere with the efficiency of my men as guards."
"Brain and tongue paralysis would interfere rather more seriously, it seems to me. In any event, I have sufficient authority to enforce my request. If you are at all doubtful, call up the Attorney General and ask him."
The warden hesitated.
"If you don't mind, I think I will call Washington, Doctor," he said. "I will have to get authority to turn No. 9764 over to you in any event."
"Call all you wish, Mr. Lawson. Mr. Carnes is talking to Washington now and we'll have a clear line through for you in a few minutes. Meanwhile, get a set of shackles on Karuska and get him ready to travel by plane. He appears to be suffering from mental paralysis, but I don't know how his case will develope. He may go violently insane at any moment and I don't care to be aloft in a plane with an unbound maniac."
Major Martin looked up from the prone figure of Karuska.
"His condition duplicates that of Lieutenant Breslau, Dr. Bird," he said. "We received your telephoned message this afternoon and we kept Breslau in a flood of sunlight until dusk, and then put him under sun-ray lamps. I don't know how you got on to that treatment, but it is having a very beneficial effect. He can already make inarticulate sounds, and his eyes are not quite as vacant at they were. If he keeps on improving as he has, he should be able to talk intelligently in a few days. If you wish to question this man, why not give him the same treatment?"
"I haven't time, Major. I must make him talk to-night if it is humanly possible. I called you in because you are the most eminent authority on the brain in the government service. Is there any way of artificially stimulating this man's brain so that we can force the secrets of his subconscious mind from him?"
The major sat for a moment in profound thought.
"There is a way, Doctor," he said at length, "but it is a method which I would not dare to use. By applying high frequency electrical stimulations to the medulla oblongata, at the same time bathing the cerebellum with ultra-violet, it might be done, but the chances are that either death or insanity would result. I would not do it."
"Major Martin, this man is a reckless and dangerous international criminal. If his gang carries out the plan which I fear they have formed, the lives of thousands, yes, of millions, may pay for your hesitation. I will assume full responsibility for the test if you will make it, and I have the authority of the President of the United States behind me."
"In that case, Doctor, I have no choice. The President is the Commander-in-chief of the army, and if those are his orders the experiment will be carried out. As a matter of form, I will ask that your orders be reduced to writing."
"I will write them gladly, Major. Please proceed with the experiment without delay."
Major Martin bowed and spoke to a waiting orderly. The prostrate figure of Karuska was wheeled down a corridor into the electrical laboratory, and with the aid of the laboratory technician the surgeon made his preparations. The Moss lamp was arranged to throw a flood of ultra-violet over the Russian's cranium while the leads from a deep therapy X-ray tube was connected, one to the front of Karuska's throat and the other to the base of his brain. At a signal from the major, a nurse began to administer ether.
"I guarantee nothing, Dr. Bird," said the major. "The paralysis of the vocal cords may be physical, in which case the victim will still be unable to speak, regardless of the brain stimulation. If, however, the evident paralysis is due to some obscure influence on the brain, it may work."
"In any, event I will hold you blameless and thank you for your help," replied the doctor. "Please start the stimulation."
Major Martin closed a switch, and the hum of a high tension alternator filled the laboratory. The Russian quivered for a moment and then lay still. Major Martin nodded and Dr. Bird stepped to the side of the operating table.
"Ivan Karuska," he said slowly and distinctly, "do you hear me?"
The Russian's lips quivered and an unintelligible murmur came from them.
"Ivan Karuska," repeated Dr. Bird, "do you hear me?"
There was a momentary struggle on the part of the Russian and then a surprisingly clear voice came from his lips.
"I do."
"Who is the present head of the Young Labor party?"
Again there was a pause before the name "Saranoff" came from the lips of the insensible figure. Carnes gave a sharp exclamation but a gesture from the doctor silenced him.
"Is Saranoff alive?"
"Yes."
"Is he in the United States?"
"No, he is in London."
"Is he coming to the United States?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"I don't know. Soon. As soon as we are ready for him."
"Where is he living in London?"
"I don't know."
"How did you get word that you were to be rescued from Atlanta?"
"A message was smuggled in to me by O'Grady, a guard in our pay."
"What was that vitrilene helmet for?"
"To protect me from the effects of the black lamp."
"What is the black lamp?"
"I don't know exactly. Saranoff invented it. It gives a black light and it kills all other light except sunlight, and it paralyses the brain."
"Did you know that the model of the Breslau gun had been stolen?"
"Yes."
"What were you going to do after you were rescued from jail?"
"I was going to make a full-sized gun. We have a disappearing gun platform built in the swamps at the juncture of the Potomac and Piscataway Creek. The gun was to be mounted there and we would shell Washington and institute a reign of terror. It would be a signal for uprisings all over the country."
"Is there a black lamp at that gun platform?"
"Yes. The black lamp will kill both the flash and the report."
"Where did you get the formula for radite?"
"We got it from one of Dr. Bird's assistants. His name—"
As he spoke the last few sentences, Karuska's voice had steadily risen almost to a shriek. As he endeavored to give the name of the doctor's treacherous helper his voice changed to an unintelligible screech and then died away into silence. Major Martin stepped forward and bent over the prone figure. Hurriedly he tore away the electrical connections and placed a stethoscope over the Russian's heart. He listened for a moment and then straightened up, his face pale.
"I hope that the information you obtained is worth a life, Dr. Bird," he said, his voice trembling slightly, "because it has cost one."
"It may easily save thousands of lives. I thank you, Major, and I will see that no blame attaches to you for your actions. I only wish that he had lived long enough to tell me the name of my assistant who has sold me to Saranoff. However, we'll get that information in other ways. Carnes, telephone Lawson at Atlanta to slam O'Grady into a cell pending investigation while I get Camp Meade on the wire and order up a couple of tanks. We are going to attack that gun emplacement at daybreak."
The telephone bell in the laboratory jangled sharply. Major Martin answered it and turned to Carnes.
"You're wanted on the telephone, Mr. Carnes."
The detective stepped forward and took the transmitter.
"Carnes speaking," he said. "Yes. Oh, hello, Bolton. Yes, we have Karuska here, or rather his body. Yes, Dr. Bird is here right now. You've what? Great Scott, wait a minute."
"Dr. Bird," he cried eagerly turning from the telephone, "Bolton has located the Washington headquarters of the Young Labor party."
Dr. Bird sprang to the instrument.
"Bird speaking, Bolton," he cried. "You've located their headquarters? Who's running it? Stanesky, eh? You're on the right track; he used to be Saranoff's right hand man. Where is the place located? I don't seem to recollect the spot. You have it well surrounded? Where are you speaking from? All right, we'll join you as quickly as we can. Keep your patrols out and don't let anyone get away."
He hung up the receiver and turned to Carnes.
"Did you have the car wait?" he asked. "Good enough; we'll jump for the Bureau and pick up all the vitrilene laying around loose and then join Bolton. He thinks that he has the whole outfit bottled up."
Bolton was waiting as the car rolled up and Dr. Bird leaped out.
"Where are they?" demanded the doctor eagerly.
"In an abandoned factory building about three hundred yards from here," replied the Chief of the Secret Service. "I traced them through New York. We have been watching the place ever since yesterday noon, and I know that Stanesky is in there with half a dozen others. No one has tried to leave since we set our watch. One funny thing has happened. About an hour ago a peculiar red glow suffused the whole building. It has died down a good deal since, but we can still see it through the windows. Could you tell us what it means?"
"No. I couldn't, Bolton, but we'll find out. How many men have you?"
"I have sixteen stationed around."
"That's more than we'll need. I have only vitrilene shields and helmets enough to equip six men. Pick out your three best men to go with us and we'll make a try at entering."
Bolton strode off into the darkness and returned in a few moments with three men at his heels. Dr. Bird spoke briefly to the operatives, all of them men who had been his companions on other adventures. He explained the need for the vitrilene helmets and shields, and without comment the six donned their armor and followed Bolton as he strode toward the building. As they approached, a dull red glow could be plainly seen through the windows, and Dr. Bird paused and studied the phenomenon for a moment.
"I don't know what that means, Bolton," he said softly, "but I don't like the looks of it. Stanesky is up to some devilment or other. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that he knows all about your pickets and is ready for a raid."
"We'd better rush the place, then," muttered Bolton.
Dr. Bird nodded agreement and with a sharp command to his men Bolton broke into a run. Not a shot was fired as they approached, and the front door gave readily to Bolton's touch. At it opened there came a grating sound from the roof followed by the whir of a propeller. Dr. Bird ran out of the building and glanced up.
"A helicopter!" he cried. "They were expecting us and have escaped!"
He drew his pistol and fired ineffectually at the great bird-like ship which was rising almost noiselessly into the air. He cursed and turned again to the building.
Bolton still stood in the room which they had first entered. His flashlight showed it to be empty, but from under a door on the opposite side a line of dull red light glowed evilly. With his pistol ready in his hand, Bolton approached the door on hands and knees. When he reached it he threw his shoulder against it and dropped flat to the floor as the door swung open. No shot greeted him, and he stared for a moment and then rose to his feet.
"Nothing in here but some glass statues," he announced.
Dr. Bird followed him into the room. As he looked at what Bolton had called glass statues he gasped and shielded his eyes.
"God in Heaven!" he ejaculated. "Those were living men!"
Before them were three men or what had been three men. All stood in strained attitudes with a look of horror frozen on their faces. The thing that made the spectators shudder was that their bodies had, by some diabolical method, been rendered semi-transparent. The dull red light which suffused the room emanated from the three bodies. Dr. Bird examined them closely, being careful not to touch them.
"The identity of my treacherous assistant is known," he said grimly as he pointed at the middle figure. "It was Gerond. What is this?"
He took an envelope from the hand of the middle figure and opened it. A sheet of paper fell out and he picked it up and read it.
"My dear Mr. Bolton," ran the note. "Your methods of tracing and picketing my headquarters are so crude as to be almost laughable. This base has served its purpose and we were ready to abandon it in any event, but I couldn't resist the temptation to let you almost nab us. The three men whom you will find here are agents who failed in their duty. If you are interested in learning the method of their execution, you might take to heart the words of your colleague, Dr. Bird: 'The clue lies in those windows.'"
Carnes glanced at the windows and gave a cry of surprise. The glass was opaque, as had been the glass in the doctor's laboratory and the glass in the infirmary at Atlanta. The fogging however, was much more pronounced, and the opaque glass gave faintly the same red effulgence which came from the three bodies.
"What does it mean, Doctor?" he asked.
"I don't know, Carnes," said Dr. Bird slowly. "I foresee that I am going to have to do a great deal of work on short wave-lengths soon. It is doubtless the effect of some modification of the black lamp which has done it. Look out!"
He leaped to one side as he spoke, drawing Bolton and Carnes with him. A panel in the side of the wall opposite the doorway had slid silently open and through the opening poured out a beam of fiery red. Full on the three bodies it fell, and then spread out to fill the room. Dr. Bird had drawn the two nearest men out of the direct beam, but one of the secret service men stood full in its path. In the excitement of entering he had dropped his vitrilene shield and the livid ray fell full on his defenceless body. As they watched an expression of horror spread over his face and he strove to move to one side, but he was held helpless. Slowly he stiffened; and, as the ray bored through him, his body became semi-transparent and the same dull red glow which emanated from the three bodies they had found began to shine forth from him. Bolton strove to break from the doctor's grasp and rush to the rescue but Dr. Bird held him with a grip of iron.
"Too late," he said grimly. "Chalk up another murder to the arch fiend who has committed the others. I don't know the nature of that ray and vitrilene may not be an adequate defence against its full force. We had better get out of here and attack the place from the rear."
Carefully edging their way around the sides of the room, the five men made their way out through the door. Dr. Bird slammed the door shut behind him and led the way out of the building and around to the rear. A door loomed before them and he cautiously tried it. It gave to his touch and he entered. As he set his foot on the threshold a terrific explosion came from the interior of the building.
"Run!" he shouted as he led the way in retreat. "If that is a radite explosion it will act for several seconds!"
From a safe distance they watched. One corner of the building had been torn off by the force of the explosion, and as they watched the rest of the building gradually collapsed and sank into a pile of ruins.
"They had planned on a visit from us all right," said Dr. Bolton grimly. "They had a surprise for us any way we jumped. If we went in the front door, that devil's ray was to finish us, and if we went in the back door the whole place was arranged to blow up as we entered. I only hope that Stanesky thinks that he has got us all and doesn't expect an attack on his next base in the morning. If he doesn't, I think we may give him a rather unpleasant surprise. Of course, that lamp is smashed into atoms and buried under the debris, but I don't know what other devil's contraptions that ruin holds. Bolton, have your men picket it and allow no one near until I get back. I've got to get to a telephone and get a couple of tanks from Meade and a plane or two from Langley Field."
Two tanks made their way slowly across country. The front of each tank was protected by a heavy sheet of vitrilene, while from the turrets of the tanks projected the wicked looking muzzles of thirty-seven millimeter guns. Overhead two airplanes from Langley Field soared, scouting the country. Dr. Bird and Carnes rode in the leading tank.
"It ought to be somewhere near here, unless Karuska lied," said Carnes as he swept the country with a pair of binoculars.
"He didn't lie," returned Dr. Bird. "It was his subconscious mind that spoke and it never lies. He spoke of the gun emplacement as being in a swamp and I have a strong idea that it is submersible. Of course, it is bound to be well camouflaged, both from land and from air observation."
The planes circled around again and again, quartering the air like a pair of well-trained bird dogs will quarter a hunting field. First high and then low they swooped back and forth, the tanks lumbering slowly along in the same direction. Presently the occupants of the leading tank saw one of the planes bank sharply and swing around. It dropped to an altitude of only a few hundred feet and turned and went back over the ground it had just crossed.
"I believe that fellow sees something!" exclaimed Carnes.
As he spoke, three green Very lights came from the cockpit of the plane. The tank driver gave a grunt of satisfaction and turned the nose of his vehicle in that direction. The second tank followed.
Hardly had they turned in the new direction before the ground began to get soft under their tracks and the heavy vehicles began to sink. The driver of the Doctor's tank forced it ahead, but the tank sank deeper in the mire until water flowed in around the feet of the occupants.
"I reckon we'll have to get out and walk pretty soon, Doctor," said the driver.
Dr. Bird grunted in acquiescence. The tank made its way forward a few yards before the engine sputtered and died. The second tank stopped when the first one did, fifty yards behind it. Donning vitrilene helmets and taking vitrilene shields in their hands, the crews of both tanks climbed out into the waist-deep water and gathered around the Doctor for orders.
"Form a skirmish line at ten-pace intervals and cross the swamp," he directed. "We may meet with no opposition, but if there is, the more scattered we are, the safer we will be. You all have hand grenades as well as your rifles?"
A murmur of assent answered him and the line formed and started across the swamp. They had gone perhaps a hundred yards when three red lights came from one of the planes circling overhead.
"Down!" cried the doctor, dropping to his knees in the muck.
Four hundred yards ahead of them a concrete platform emerged from the marsh and rose slowly into the air. It was roofed with a dome of what looked like plate glass, but which the doctor shrewdly suspected was vitrilene. When the base of the platform was two-feet above the level of the water the dome slid silently aside disclosing two men bending over a tiny gun. Dr. Bird leveled his binoculars.
"That's the Breslau gun model that was stolen as sure as I'm a foot high!" he cried. "They must have made some miniature shells and be planning to fire it."
Slowly a pall of intense blackness rose from the marsh and enveloped the platform and hid it from view. A whining noise came from overhead, and then a crash like a thunderbolt. The blast of the explosion threw the attackers face down in the swamp, and when they arose and looked back there was merely a gaping hole where the leading tank had been. The second tank suddenly seemed to rise in the air and fly into millions of tiny fragments, and a second thunderous blast sent them again to their knees.
"Radite!" bellowed Dr. Bird to Carnes. "Imagine the effect if that had been a full charge fired from a completed Breslau gun! Watch the planes, now. I think they are going to drop a few eggs on them."
The black mist cleared as if by magic and the platform was in plain view. The big glass dome rolled back into place as the two planes swept over at an elevation of two thousand feet. From each one a small black cigar-shaped object was released and fell in a long parabola toward the earth. The glass dome which had been closing over the gun platform rolled quickly back and a long beam of intense blackness pierced the heavens. First one and then the other of the falling bombs disappeared from view into it, and then the black column faded from view. The two bombs fell with increasing speed but the dome closed over the platform before they struck. The two hit the dome at almost the same instant and instead of the blinding crash they expected, the watchers saw the bombs rebound from the dome and fall harmlessly into the water.
"Stymied!" muttered the doctor. "I wonder what other properties that confounded lamp has."
He resumed his advance, Carnes and the soldiers keeping abreast of him. When they were within two hundred yards of the platform it rose again and the transparent dome rolled back. A beam of black shot forth over the swamp, searching them out and hiding them from view. First one and then another felt the effects of the black beam; but the vitrilene which the Doctor had provided stood them in good stead, and, aside from a slight shortening of their breath, none of the attackers felt any the worse.
"Come on, men!" cried the Doctor as his athletic figure plowed forward through the breast-deep water. "That is their worst weapon and it is harmless against us!"
Cheering, they fought their way toward the platform. It sunk for a moment and then rose again. As the dome swung back a sharp crackle of machine-gun fire sounded and the water before them was whipped into foam by the plunging bullets. One of the soldiers gave a sharp cry and slumped forward into the water.
"Fire at will!" shouted the lieutenant in command.
A crackle of rifle fire answered the tattoo of the machine-gun, and the sharp ping of bullets striking on the dome could be plainly heard. An occasional shot kicked up a spurt of white dust from the concrete, but the machine-gun kept up a steady rattle of fire and the soldiers kept their heads almost at the level of the water. There came the roar of an airplane motor, and one of the planes swept over the platform, a hundred yards in the air, with two machine-guns spraying streams of bullets onto the platform. Two men abandoned their machine-gun and crouched under the partially folded-back dome as the second plane swept over, and Dr. Bird took advantage of the lull to advance his party a few yards nearer. Again the defenders of the platform rushed to their gun, but the first plane had turned and swooped down with both guns going, and again they were forced to take shelter while the Doctor and his force made another advance.
The second plane had turned and followed the first, but the defenders had had enough. The transparent dome closed over them and the platform sank into the marsh. With a shout, Dr. Bird led the way forward again.
The attackers were within a hundred yards of the platform when it again rose above the surface of the water. The guns had disappeared, but in their place stood an airship. It was a small affair with stubby wings above which were two helicopter blades revolving at high speed. No sound of a motor could be heard.
The transparent dome rolled back and like a bullet the little craft shot into the air, followed by a futile volley from the soldiers. Hardly had it appeared than the two airplanes bore down on it with machine-guns going. The helicopter paid no attention to them for a moment, and then came a puff of smoke from its side. The leading plane swerved sharply and the helicopter fired again. The leading plane maneuvered about, trying to get a machine-gun to bear, while the second plane climbed swiftly to get above the helicopter and pour a deadly stream of fire down into it. It gained position and swooped down to the attack, but another puff of smoke came from the side of the helicopter and there was a thunderous report and a blinding flash in the sky. As the smoke cleared away, no trace of the ill-fated plane could be seen. The helicopter hung motionless in the air as though daring the remaining plane to attack.
The plane accepted the challenge and bore down at full speed on the stranger. Again came a puff of smoke, but the plane swerved and an answering shot came from its side. It was above the helicopter, and the shell which missed its mark plunged to the ground. When it struck there came a roar and a flash and the whole earth seemed to shake. The helicopter shot upward into the air and forward, both its elevating fans and its propellers whirling blurs of light. The airplane followed at its sharpest climbing angle, but was helpless to compete with its swifter climbing rival.
"He's got away!" groaned Carnes.
"Not yet, old dear!" cried the Doctor hopping with excitement. "He isn't safe yet. I never told you, but one Breslau gun had been made and it is on that plane. It has deadly accuracy and is good for fifteen miles. That's Lieutenant Dreen at the controls and Mason at the gun."
As he spoke the plane swung around and made a half loop. For a few yards it flew upside down and then whirled swiftly. As it turned there came a sharp report and a puff of smoke from its rear cockpit. High above, the helicopter had ceased climbing and hovered motionless. As the plane fired, the helicopter shot forward like an arrow from a bow, and thereby spelled its doom. Not for nothing did Captain Mason bear the title of the best aerial gunner in the Air Corps. He had foreseen what the action of his opponent would be and had allowed for just such a move. Far up in the sky came a blinding flash and a cloud of smoke. When the smoke cleared the sky was empty, except for a little scattered debris falling slowly to the ground.
And that's that!" exclaimed Dr. Bird as he finished his examination of the underground laboratory with which the gun platform connected. "The lamp has gone to glory with Breslau's gun model and two of the best brains of the Young Labor party. I am sure that Stanesky was one of those two men. I wish the whole gang had been on board."
"Don't you think that this is the end of it, Doctor?" asked Carnes.
"No, Carnes, I don't. We know that the real brains of this outfit is Saranoff, and Saranoff is still alive. He probably won't try to use his black lamp again, because I will have a defence against it in a short time, now that I have seen it in action, but he'll try something else. The whole object of life to a loyal citizen of Bolshevikia is to reduce the whole world to the barbarous level in which they hold Russia, and they will spare no pains or effort to accomplish it. The greatest obstacle to their success at present is the President of the United States. He is loved and respected by the whole world, and if he is spared he will forge the world into a great machine for the preservation of peace and universal good will. That would be fatal to Bolshevikia's plans, and they will spare no effort to remove him. By the grace of God, we have saved him from harm so far, but until we remove Saranoff permanently from the scene, I will never feel safe for him."
"What do you suppose they'll try next, Doctor?"
"That, Carnes, time alone will tell."
INFINITE INTRUDER
BY ALAN E. NOURSE
When Roger Strang found that someone was killing his son--killing him horribly and often--he started investigating. He wasn't prepared to find the results of another investigation--this time about his own life.
It was the second time they tried that Roger Strang realized someone was trying to kill his son.
The first time there had been no particular question. Accidents happen. Even in those days, with all the Base safety regulations and strict speed-way lane laws, young boys would occasionally try to gun their monowheels out of the slow lanes into the terribly swift traffic; when they did, accidents did occur. The first time, when they brought David home in the Base ambulance, shaken but unhurt, with the twisted smashed remains of his monowheel, Roger and Ann Strang had breathed weakly, and decided between themselves that the boy should be scolded within an inch of his young life. And the fact that David maintained tenaciously that he had never swerved from the slow monowheel lane didn't bother his parents a bit. They were acquainted with another small-boy frailty. Small boys, on occasion, are inclined to fib.
But the second time, David was not fibbing. Roger Strang saw the accident the second time. He saw all the circumstances involved. And he realized, with horrible clarity, that someone, somehow, was trying to kill his son.
It had been late on a Saturday afternoon. The free week-ends that the Barrier Base engineers had once enjoyed to take their families for picnics "outside," or to rest and relax, were things of the past, for the work on the Barrier was reaching a critical stage, demanding more and more of the technicians, scientists and engineers engaged in its development. Already diplomatic relations with the Eurasian Combine were becoming more and more impossible; the Barrier had to be built, and quickly, or another more terrible New York City would be the result. Roger had never cleared from his mind the flaming picture of that night of horror, just five years before, when the mighty metropolis had burst into radioactive flame, to announce the beginning of the first Atomic War. The year 2078 was engraved in millions of minds as the year of the most horrible--and the shortest--war in all history, for an armistice had been signed not four days after the first bomb had been dropped. An armistice, but an uneasy peace, for neither of the great nations had really known what atomic war would be like until it had happened. And once upon them, they found that atomic war was not practical, for both mighty opponents would have been gutted in a matter of weeks. The armistice had stopped the bombs, but hostilities continued, until the combined scientific forces of one nation could succeed in preparing a defense.
That particular Saturday afternoon had been busy in the Main Labs on the Barrier Base. The problem of erecting a continent-long electronic Barrier to cover the coast of North America was a staggering proposition. Roger Strang was nearly finished and ready for home as dusk was falling. Leaving his work at the desk, he was slipping on his jacket when David came into the lab. He was small for twelve years, with tousled sand-brown hair standing up at odd angles about a sharp, intelligent face. "I came to get you, Daddy," he said.
Roger smiled. "You rode all the way down here--just to go home with me?"
"Maybe we could get some Icy-pops for supper on the way home," David remarked innocently.
Roger grinned broadly and slapped the boy on the back. "You'd sell your soul for an Icy-pop," he grinned.
The corridor was dark. The man and boy walked down to the elevator, and in a moment were swishing down to the dark and deserted lobby below.
David stepped first from the elevator when the men struck. One stood on either side of the door in the shadow. The boy screamed and reeled from the blow across the neck. Suddenly Roger heard the sharp pistol reports. David dropped with a groan, and Roger staggered against the wall from a powerful blow in the face. He shook his head groggily, catching a glimpse of the two men running through the door into the street below, as three or four people ran into the lobby, flushed out by the shots.
* * * * *
Roger shouted, pointing to the door, but the people were looking at the boy. Roger sank down beside his son, deft fingers loosening the blouse. The boy's small face was deathly white, fearful sobs choking his breath as he closed his eyes and shivered. Roger searched under his blouse, trying to find the bullet holes--and found to his chagrin that there weren't any bullet holes.
"Where did you feel the gun?"
David pointed vaguely at his lower ribs. "Right there," he said. "It hurt when they shoved the gun at me."
"But they couldn't have pulled the trigger, if the gun was pointed there--" He examined the unbroken skin on the boy's chest, fear tearing through his mind.
A Security man was there suddenly, asking about the accident, taking Roger's name, checking over the boy. Roger resented the tall man in the gray uniform, felt his temper rise at the slightly sarcastic tone of the questions. Finally the trooper stood up, shaking his head. "The boy must have been mistaken," he said. "Kids always have wild stories to tell. Whoever it was may have been after somebody, but they weren't aiming for the boy."
Roger scowled. "This boy is no liar," he snapped. "I saw them shoot--"
The trooper shrugged. "Well, he isn't hurt. Why don't you go on home?"
Roger helped the boy up, angrily. "You're not going to do anything about this?"
"What can I do? Nobody saw who the men were."
Roger grabbed the boy's hand, helped him to his feet, and turned angrily to the door. In the failing light outside the improbability of the attack struck through him strongly. He turned to the boy, his face dark. "David," he said evenly, "you wouldn't be making up stories about feeling that gun in your ribs, would you?"
David shook his head vigorously, eyes still wide with fear. "Honest, dad. I told you the truth."
"But they couldn't have shot you in the chest without breaking the skin--" He glanced down at the boy's blouse and jacket, and stopped suddenly, seeing the blackened holes in the ripped cloth. He stooped down and sniffed the holes suspiciously, and shivered suddenly in the cold evening air.
The burned holes smelled like gunpowder.
* * * * *
"Strang, you must have been wrong." The large man settled back in his chair, his graying hair smoothed over a bald spot. "Someone trying to kill you I could see--there's plenty of espionage going on, and you're doing important work here. But your boy!" The chief of the Barrier Base Security shook his head. "You must have been mistaken."
"But I wasn't mistaken!" Roger Strang sat forward in his chair, his hands gripping the arms until his knuckles were white. "I told you exactly what happened. They got him as he came off the elevator, and shot at him. Not at me, Morrel, at my son. They just clubbed me in the face to get me out of the way--"
"What sort of men?" Morrel's eyes were sharp.
Roger scowled, running his hand through his hair. "It was too dark to see. They wore hats and field jackets. The gun could be identified by ballistics. But they were fast, Morrel. They knew who they were looking for."
Morrel rose suddenly, his face impatient. "Strang," he said. "You've been here at the Base for quite awhile. Ever since a month after the war, isn't that right? August, 2078? Somewhere around there, I know. But you've been working hard. I think maybe a rest would do you some good--"
"Rest!" Roger exploded. "Look, man--I'm not joking. This isn't the first time. The boy had a monowheel accident three weeks ago, and he swore he was riding in a safe lane where he belonged. It looked like an accident then--now it looks like a murder attempt. The slugs from the gun must be in the building--embedded in the plasterwork somewhere. Surely you could try to trace the gun." He glared at the man's impassive face bitterly, "Or maybe you don't want to trace the gun--"
Morrel scowled. "I've already checked on it. The gun wasn't registered in the Base. Security has a check on every firearm within a fifty-mile range. The attackers must have been outsiders."
Roger's face flushed. "That's not true, Morrel," he said softly, "and you know it's not true."
Morrel shrugged. "Have it your own way," he said, indifferently. "Take a rest, Strang. Go home. Get some rest. And don't bother me with any more of your fairy tales." He turned suddenly on Roger. "And be careful what you do with guns, Strang. The only thing about this that I do know is that somebody shot a pistol off and scared hell out of your son. You were the only one around, as far as I know. I don't know your game, but you'd better be careful--"
* * * * *
Strang left Security Headquarters, and crossed across to the Labs, frustrated and angry. His mind spun over the accident--incredulous, but more incredulous that Morrel would practically laugh at him. He stopped by the Labs building to watch the workmen putting up a large electronic projector in one of the test yards. Work was going ahead. But so slowly.
Roger was aware of the tall thin man who had joined him before he looked around. Martin Drengo put a hand on his shoulder. "Been avoiding me lately?"
"Martin!" Roger Strang turned, his face lighting up. "No, not avoiding you--I've been so busy my own wife hasn't seen me in four days. How are things in Maintenance?"
The thin man smiled sadly. "How are things ever in Maintenance? First a railroad breaks down, then there's a steel strike, then some paymaster doesn't make a payroll--the war knocked things for a loop, Roger. Even now things are still loopy. And how are things in Production?"
Roger scowled. "Let's have some coffee," he said.
They sat in a back corner booth of the Base Dispensary as Roger told about David. Martin Drengo listened without interruption. He was a thin man from top to bottom, a shock of unruly black hair topping an almost cadaverous face, blue eyes large behind thick lenses. His whole body was like a skeleton, his fingers long and bony as he lit a cigarette. But the blue eyes were quick, and the nods warm and understanding. He listened, and then he said, "It couldn't have been an outsider?"
Roger shrugged. "Anything is possible. But why? Why go after a kid?"
Drengo hunched his shoulders forward. "I don't get it," he said. "David has done nothing to give him enemies." He drew on his cigarette. "What did Morrel have to say?"
"He laughed at me! Wouldn't even listen to me. Told me to go home and go to bed, that I was all wet. I tell you, Martin, I saw it! You know I wouldn't lie, you know I don't see things that don't happen."
"Yes," said Martin, glumly. "I believe you, all right. But I can't see why your son should be the target. You'd be more likely." He stood up, stretching his long legs. "Look, old boy. Take Morrel's advice, at least temporarily. Go home and get some sleep now; you're all worked up. I'll go in and talk to Morrel. Maybe I can handle that old buzzard better than you can."
Roger watched his friend amble down the aisle and out of the store. He felt better now that he had talked to Drengo. Smiling to himself, he finished off his coffee. Many a scrape he and Martin had seen through together. He remembered that night of horror when the bomb fell on the city, his miraculous rescue, the tall thin figure, reflecting the red glare from his glasses, forcing his way through the burning timbers of the building, tearing Roger's leg loose from the rubble covering it; the frightful struggle through the rubbish, fighting off fear-crazed mobs that sought to stop them, rob them, kill them. They had made the long trek together, Martin and he, the Evacuation Road down to Maryland, the Road of Horrors, lined with the rotting corpses of the dead and the soon-dead, the dreadful refuse of that horrible night. Martin Drengo had been a stout friend to Roger; he'd been with Martin the night he'd met Ann; took the ring from Martin's finger when they stood at the altar on their wedding day; shared with Martin his closest confidence.
Roger sighed and paid for the coffee. What to do? The boy was home now, recovering from the shock of the attack. Roger caught an out-bound tri-wheel, and sped down the busy thoroughfare toward his home. If Martin could talk to Morrel, and get something done, perhaps they could get a line. Somehow, perhaps they could trace the attackers. In the morning he'd see Martin again, and they could figure out a scheme.
But he didn't have a chance to see Martin again. For at 11:30 that night, the marauders struck again. For the third time.
* * * * *
Through his sleep he heard a door close down below, and sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding wildly. Only a tiny sound, the click of a closing door--
Ann was sitting up beside him, brown hair close around her head, her body tense. "Roger!" she whispered. "Did you hear something?"
Roger was out of bed, bounding across the room, into the hall. Blood pounded in his ears as he rushed to David's room, stopped short before the open door.
The shots rang out like whip cracks, and he saw the yellow flame from the guns. There were two men in the dark room, standing at the bed where the boy lay rolled into a terrified knot. The guns cracked again and again, ripping the bedding, bursting the pillow into a shower of feathers, tearing the boy's pajamas from his thin body, a dozen blazing shots--
Roger let out a strangled cry, grabbed one of the men by the throat, in a savage effort to stop the murderous pistols. The other man caught him a coarse blow behind the ear, and he staggered hard against the wall. Dully he heard the door slam, heavy footsteps down the corridor, running down the stairs.
He struggled feebly to his feet, glancing at the still form on the bed. Choking back a sob he staggered down the hall, shouting to Ann as he went down the stairs, redoubling his speed as he heard the purr of autojets in the driveway. In a moment he was in his own car, frantically stamping on the starter. It started immediately, the motor booming, and the powerful jet engines forced the heavy car ahead dangerously, taking the corner on two of its three wheels. He knew that Ann would call Security, and he raced to gain on the tail lights that were disappearing down the winding residential road to the main highway. Throwing caution to the winds, Roger swerved the car across a front lawn, down between two houses, into an alley, and through another driveway, gaining three blocks. Ahead, at the junction with the main Base highway he saw the long black autojet turn right.
* * * * *
Roger snaked into traffic on the highway and bore down on the black car. Traffic was light because of the late hour, but the patrol was on the road and might stop him instead of the killers. The other car was traveling at top speed, swerving around the slower cars. Roger gained slowly. He fingered the spotlight, preparing to snap it in the driver's eyes. Taking a curve at 90, he crept up alongside the black car as he heard the siren of a patrol car behind him. Cursing, he edged over on the black car, snapped the spotlight full in the face of the driver--
The screaming siren forced him off the road, and he braked hard, his hands trembling. A patrolman came over to the car, gun drawn. He took a quick look at Roger, and his face tightened. "Mr. Strang," he said sharply. "We've been looking for you. You're wanted at Security."
"That car," Roger started weakly. "You've got to stop that car I was chasing--"
"Never mind that car," the patrolman snarled. "It's you they want. Hop out. We'll go in the patrol car."
"You've got to stop them--"
The patrolman fingered his gun. "Security wants to talk to you, Mr. Strang. Hop out."
Roger moved dazedly from his car. He didn't question the patrolman; he hardly even heard him. His mind raced in a welter of confusion, trying desperately to refute the brilliant picture in his mind from that split-second that the spotlight had rested on the driver of the black car, trying to fit the impossible pieces into their places. For the second man in the black autojet had been John Morrel, chief of Barrier Base Security, and the driver had been Martin Drengo--
* * * * *
The man at the desk was a stranger to Roger Strang. He was an elderly man, stooped, with graying hair and a small clipped mustache that seemed to stick out like antennae. He watched Roger impassively with steel gray eyes, motioning him to a chair.
"You led us a merry chase," he said flatly, his voice brittle. "A very merry chase. The alarm went out for you almost an hour ago."
Strang's cheeks were red with anger. "My son was shot tonight. I was trying to follow the killers--"
"Killers?" The man raised his eyebrows.
"Yes, killers!" Roger snapped. "Do I have to draw you a picture? They shot my son down in his bed."
The gray-haired man stared at him for a long time. "Well," he said finally in a baffled tone. "Now I've heard everything."
It was Roger's turn to stare. "Can't you understand what I've said? My son was murdered."
The gray-haired man flipped a pencil down on the desk impatiently. "Mr. Strang," he said elaborately. "My name is Whitman. I flew down here from Washington tonight, after being called from my bed by the commanding officer of this base. I am the National Chief of the Federal Bureau of Security, Mr. Strang, and I am not interested in fairy tales. I would like you to come off it now, and answer some questions for me. And I don't want double-talk. I want answers. Do I make myself quite clear?"
Roger stared at him, finally nodded his head. "Quite," he said sourly.
Whitman hunched forward in his chair. "Mr. Strang, how long have you been working in the Barrier Base?"
"Five years. Ever since the bombing of New York."
Whitman nodded. "Oh, yes. The bombing of New York." He looked sharply at Roger. "And how old are you, Mr. Strang?"
Roger looked up, surprised. "Thirty-two, of course. You have my records. Why are you asking?"
The gray-haired man lit a cigarette. "Yes, we have your records," he said offhandedly. "Very interesting records, quite normal, quite in order. Nothing out of the ordinary." He stood up and looked out on the dark street. "Just one thing wrong with your records, Mr. Strang. They aren't true."
Roger stared. "This is ridiculous," he blurted. "What do you mean, they aren't true?"
Whitman took a deep breath, and pulled a sheet of paper out of a sheaf on his desk. "It says here," he said, "that you are Roger Strang, and that you were born in Indianola, Iowa, on the fourteenth of June, 2051. That your father was Jason Strang, born 11 August, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois. That you lived in Indianola until you were twelve, when your father moved to New York City, and was employed with the North American Electronics Laboratories. That you entered International Polytechnic Institute at the age of 21, studying physics and electronics, and graduated in June 2075 with the degree of Bachelor of Electronics. That you did further work, taking a Masters and Doctorate in Electronics at Polytech in 2077."
Whitman took a deep breath. "That's what it says here. A very ordinary record. But there is no record there of your birth in Indianola, Iowa, in 2051 or any other time. There is no record there of your father, the alleged Jason Strang, nor in Chicago. No one by the name of Jason Strang was ever employed by North American Electronics. No one by the name of Roger Strang ever attended Polytech." Whitman watched him with cold eyes. "To the best of our knowledge, and according to all available records, there never was anyone named Roger Strang until after the bombing of New York."
Roger sat stock still, his mind racing. "This is silly," he said finally. "Perfectly idiotic. Those schools must have records--"
Whitman's face was tight. "They do have records. Complete records. But the name of Roger Strang is curiously missing from the roster of graduates in 2075. Or any other year." He snubbed his cigarette angrily. "I wish you would tell me, and save us both much unpleasantness. Just who are you, Mr. Strang, and where do you come from?"
Strang stared at the man, his pulse pounding in his head. Filtering into his mind was a vast confusion, some phrase, some word, some nebulous doubt that frightened him, made him almost believe that gray-haired man in the chair before him. He took a deep breath, clearing his mind of the nagging doubt. "Look here," he said, exasperated. "When I was drafted for the Barrier Base, they checked for my origin, for my education and credentials. If they had been false, I'd have been snapped up right then. Probably shot--they were shooting people for chewing their fingernails in those days. I wouldn't have stood a chance."
Whitman nodded his head vigorously. "Exactly!" he snapped. "You should have been picked up. But you weren't even suspected until we did a little checking after that accident in the Labs building yesterday. Somehow, false credentials got through for you. Security does not like false credentials. I don't know how you did it, but you did. I want to know how."
"But, I tell you--" Roger stood up, fear suddenly growing in his mind. He lit a cigarette, took two nervous puffs, and set it down, forgotten, on the ash-tray. "I have a wife," he said shakily. "I married her in New York City. We had a son, born in a hospital in New York City. He went to school there. Surely there must be some kind of record--"
Whitman smiled grimly, almost mockingly. "Good old New York City," he snarled. "Married there, you say? Wonderful! Son born there? In the one city in the country where that information can never be checked. That's very convenient, Mr. Strang. Or whoever you are. I think you'd better talk."
Roger snubbed out the cigarette viciously. "My son," he said after a long pause. "He was murdered tonight. Shot down in his bed--"
The Security Chief's face went white. "Garbage!" he snapped. "What kind of a fool do you think I am, Strang? Your son murdered--bah! When the alarm went out for you I personally drove to your home. Oddly enough this wife of yours wasn't at home, but your son was. Nice little chap. He made us some coffee, and explained that he didn't know where his parents were, because he'd been asleep all night. Quietly asleep in his bed--"
The words were clipped out, and rang in Roger's ears, incredibly. His hand shook violently as he puffed his cigarette, burning his fingers on the short butt. "I don't believe it," he muttered hollowly. "I saw it happen--"
Whitman sneered. "Are you going to talk or not?"
Roger looked up helplessly. "I don't--know--" he said, weakly. "I don't know."
The Security Chief threw up his hands in disgust. "Then we'll do it the hard way," he grated. Flipping an intercom switch, his voice snapped out cold in the still room. "Send in Psych squad," he growled. "We've got a job to do--"
* * * * *
Roger Strang lay back on the small bunk, his nerves yammering from the steady barrage, lights still flickering green and red in his eyes. His body was limp, his mind functioning slowly, sluggishly. His eyelids were still heavy from the drugs, his wrists and forehead burning and sore where the electrodes had been attached. His muscles hardly responded when he tried to move, his strength completely gone--washed out. He simply lay there, his shallow breathing returning to him from the dark stone walls.
The inquisition had been savage. The hot lights, the smooth-faced men firing questions, over and over, the drugs, the curious sensation of mouthing nonsense, of hearing his voice rambling on crazily, yet being unable in any way to control it; the hypnotic effect of Whitman's soft voice, the glitter in his steel-gray eyes, and the questions, questions, questions. The lie detector had been going by his side, jerking insanely at his answers, every time the same answers, every time setting the needle into wild gyrations. And finally the foggy, indistinct memory of Whitman mopping his forehead and stamping savagely on a cigarette, and muttering desperately, "It's no use! Lies! Nothing but lies, lies, lies! He couldn't be lying under this treatment, but he is. And he knows he is!"
Lies? Roger stretched his heavy limbs, his mind struggling up into a tardy rejection. Not lies! He hadn't lied--he had been answering the truth to the questions. He couldn't have been lying, for the answers were there, clear in his memory. And yet--the same nagging doubt crept through, the same feeling that had plagued him throughout the inquisition, the nagging, haunting, horrible conviction, somewhere in the depths of his numb brain that he was lying! Something was missing somewhere, some vast gap in his knowledge, something of which he simply was not aware. The incredible turnabout of Martin Drengo, the attack on David, who was killed, but somehow was not dead. He had to be lying--
But how could he lie, and still know that he was not lying? His sluggish mind wrestled, trying to choke back the incredible doubt. Somewhere in the morass, the picture of Martin Drengo came through--Drengo, the traitor, who was trying to kill his son--but the conviction swept through again, overpowering, the certain knowledge that Drengo was not a traitor, that he must trust Drengo. Drengo was his friend, his stalwart--
HIS AGENT!
Strang sat bolt upright on the cot, his head spinning. The thought had broken through crystal clear in the darkness, revealed itself for the briefest instant, then swirled down again into the foggy gulf. Agent? Why should he have an agent? What purpose? Frantically he scanned his memory for Drengo, down along the dark channels, searching. Drengo had come through the fire, into the burning building, carried him like a child through the flames into safety. Drengo had been best man at his wedding--but he'd been married before the bombing of the city. Or had he? Where did Drengo fit in? Was the fire the first time he had seen Drengo?
Something deep in his mind forced its way through, saying NO! YOU HAVE KNOWN HIM ALL YOUR LIFE! Roger fought it back, frantically. Never! Back in Iowa there had been no Drengo. Nor in Chicago. Nor in New York. He hadn't even known him in--IN NEW ALBANY!
* * * * *
Roger Strang was on his feet, shaking, cold fear running through his body, his nerves screaming. Had they ruined his mind? He couldn't think straight any more. Telling him things that weren't true, forcing lies into his mind--frightening him with the horrible conviction that his mind was really helpless, full of false data. What had happened to him? Where had the thought of "New Albany" come from? He shivered, now thoroughly frightened. There wasn't any "New Albany." Nowhere in the world. There just wasn't any such place.
Could he have two memories? Conflicting memories?
He walked shakily to the door, peered through the small peephole. In the morning they would try again, they had said. He shuddered, terribly afraid. He had felt his mind cracking under the last questioning; another would drive him completely insane. But Drengo would have the answers. Why had he shot little Davey? How did that fit in? Was this false-credential business part of some stupendous scheme against him? Impossible! But what else? He knew with sudden certain conviction that he must see Martin Drengo, immediately, before they questioned him again, before the fear and uncertainty drove him out of his mind. He called tentatively through the peephole, half-hoping to catch a guard's attention. And the call echoed through silent halls.
And then he heard Ann's voice, clear, cool, sharp in the prison darkness. Roger whirled, fear choking the shouts still ringing in his ears, gaped at the woman who stood in his cell--
She was lovelier than he had ever seen her, her tiny body clothed in a glowing fabric which clung to every curve, accenting her trim figure, her slender hips. Brown hair wreathed her lovely face, and Roger choked as the deep longing for her welled up in his throat. Speechlessly he took her in his arms, holding her close, burying his face in her hair, sobbing in joy and relief. And then he saw the glowing circle behind her, casting its eerie light into the far corners of the dark cell. In fiery greenness the ring shimmered in an aurora of violent power, but Ann paid no attention to it. She stepped back and smiled at him, her eyes bright. "Don't be frightened," she said softly, "and don't make any noise. I'm here to help you."
"But where did you come from?" The question forced itself out in a sort of strangled gasp.
"We have--means of going where we want to. And we want you to come with us." She pointed at the glowing ring. "We want to take you back to the time-area from which you came."
Roger goggled at her, confusion welling strong into his mind again. "Ann," he said weakly. "What kind of trick is this?"
She smiled again. "No trick," she said. "Don't ask questions, darling. I know you're confused, but there isn't much time. You'll just have to do what I say right now." She turned to the glowing ring. "We just step through here. Be careful that you don't touch the substance of the portal going through."
Roger Strang approached the glowing ring curiously, peered through, blinked, peered again. It was like staring at an inscrutable flat-black surface in the shadow. No light reflected through it; nothing could be seen. He heard a faint whining as he stood close to the ring, and he looked up at Ann, his eyes wide. "You can't see through it!" he exclaimed.
Ann was crouching on the floor near a small metallic box, gently turning knobs, checking the dial reading against a small chronometer on her wrist. "Steady, darling," she said. "Just follow me, carefully, and don't be afraid. We're going back home--to the time-area where we belong. You and I. I know--you don't remember. And you'll be puzzled, and confused, because the memory substitution job was very thorough. But you'll remember Martin Drengo, and John Morrel, and me. And I was your wife there, too--Are you ready?"
Roger stared at the ring for a moment. "Where are we going?" he asked. "How far ahead? Or behind--?"
"Ahead," she said. "Eighty years ahead--as far as we can go. That will bring us to the present time, the real present time, as far as we, and you, are concerned."
She turned abruptly, and stepped through the ring, and vanished as effectively as if she had disintegrated into vapor. Roger felt fear catch at his throat; then he followed her through.
They were standing in a ruins. The cell was gone, the prison, the Barrier Base. The dark sky above was bespeckled with a myriad of stars, and a cool night breeze swept over Roger's cheek. Far in the distance a low rumble came to his ears. "Sounds like a storm coming," he muttered to Ann, pulling his jacket closer around him.
"No storm," she said grimly. "Look!" She pointed a finger toward the northern horizon. Brazen against the blackness the yellow-orange of fire was rising, great spurts of multi-colored flames licking at the horizon. The rumble became a drone, a roar. Ann grasped Roger's arm and pulled him down to cover in the rubble as the invisible squadron swished across the sky, trailing jet streams of horrid orange behind them. Then to the south, in the direction of the flight, the drone of the engines gave way to the hollow boom-booming of bombing, and the southern horizon flared. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the rumble died away, leaving the flames licking the sky to the north and south.
Roger shivered. "War," he said. "Eurasia?"
She shook her head. "If only it were. There is no Eurasia now. The dictator took care of that. Nothing but gutted holes, and rubble." She stood up, helping Roger to his feet. Together they filed through the rubbish down to a roadway. Ann dialed a small wrist radio; in a few moments, out of the dark sky, the dim-out lights of a small 'copter came into view, and the machine settled delicately to the road. Two strange men were inside; they saluted Ann, and helped Roger aboard. Swiftly they clamped down the hatch tight, and the ship rose again silently into the air.
"Where are we going?" asked Roger Strang.
"We have a headquarters. Our data must be checked first. We can't reach a decision without checking. Then we can talk."
The 'copter swung high over the blazing inferno of a city far below. Strang glanced from the window, eyes widening at the holocaust. The crater holes were mammoth, huge spires of living flame rising to the sky, leaving mushroom columns of gray-black smoke that glowed an evil red from the furnace on the ground. "Not Eurasia?" Roger asked suddenly, his mind twisting in amazement. "But who? This is America, isn't it?"
"Yes. This is America. There is no Eurasia now. Soon there may not be an America. Nor even an Earth."
Roger looked up at Ann, eyes wide. "But those jet-planes--the bombing--who is doing the bombing?"
Ann Strang stared down at the sullen red fires of the city for a moment, her quiet eyes sad. "Those are Martian planes," she said.
* * * * *
The 'copter settled silently down into the heart of the city, glowing red from the flames and bombing. They hovered over the shining Palace, still tall, and superb, and intact, gleaming like a blood-streaked jewel in the glowing night. The 'copter settled on the roof of a low building across a large courtyard from the glittering Palace. Ann Strang stepped out, and motioned Roger to follow down a shaft and stairway into a small room below. She knocked at a door, and a strange man dressed in the curious glowing fabric opened it. His face lit up in a smile.
"Roger!" he cried. "We were afraid we couldn't locate you. We weren't expecting the Security to meddle. Someone got suspicious, somewhere, and began checking your references from their sources--and of course they were false. We were lucky to get you back at all, after Security got you." He clapped Roger on the back, and led him into the room.
John Morrel and Martin Drengo were standing near the rounded window, their faces thrown into grotesque relief against the red-orange glow outside. They turned and saluted, and Roger almost cried out, his mind spinning, a thousand questions cutting into his consciousness, demanding answers. But quite suddenly he was feeling a new power, a new effectiveness in his thinking, in his activity. He turned to Martin Drengo, his eyes questioning but no longer afraid. "What year is this?" he asked.
"This is 2165. March, 2165, and you're in New Albany, in the United States of North America. This is the city where you were born, the city you loved--and look at it!"
Roger walked to the window. The court below was full of people now, ragged people, some of them screaming, a disconsolate muttering rising from a thousand throats--burned people, mangled people. They milled about the mammoth courtyard before the glorious Palace, aimlessly, mindlessly. Far down the avenue leading from the Palace Roger could see the people evacuating the city, a long, desolate line of people, strange autos, carts, even animals, running down the broad avenue to escape from the flaming city.
"We're not in danger here," said Drengo, at his elbow. "No fire nor bomb can reach us here--that is the result of your mighty Atlantic Coast Barrier. Nothing more. It never was perfected in time, before the great Eastern Invasion and the second Atomic War. That was due to occur three years after the time-area where we visited. We were trying to stem it, to turn it aside. We don't know yet whether we succeeded or not."
He turned to the tall man standing at the door. "Markson, all the calculations are prepared. The Calc is evaluating the data against the Equation now, figuring all the variables. If our work did any good, we should know it soon." He sighed and pointed to the Palace. "But our fine Dictator is still alive, and the attack on Mars should be starting any minute--If we didn't succeed, nothing in all Time will stop him."
Roger lit a cigarette, his eyes questioning Drengo. "Dictator?"
Drengo sat down and stretched his legs. "The Dictator appeared four years ago, a nobody, a man from the masses of people on the planet. He rose into public favor like a sky-rocket, a remarkable man, an amazing man--a man who could talk to you, and control your thoughts in a single interview. There has never been a man with such personal magnetism and power, Roger, in all the history of Earth. A man who raised himself from nothing into absolute Dictatorship, and has handled the world according to his whim ever since.
"He is only a young man, Roger, just 32 years of age, but an irresistible man who can win anything from anybody. He writhed into the presidency first, and then deliberately set about rearranging the government to suit himself. And the people let him get away with it, followed him like sheep. And then he was Dictator, and he began turning the social and economic balance of the planet into a whirlwind. And then came Mars."
Martin stretched again, and lit a cigarette, his thin face grave in the darkened room. "The first landing was thirty years ago, and the possibilities for rich and peaceful commerce between Earth and Mars were clear from the first. Mars had what Earth lacked: the true civilization, the polished culture, the lasting socio-economic balance, the permanent peace. Mars could have taught us so much. She could have guided us out of the mire of war and hatred that we have been wallowing in for centuries. But the Dictator put an end to those possibilities." Drengo shrugged. "He was convinced that the Martians were weak, backward, decadent. He saw their uranium, their gold, their jewelry, their labor--and started on a vast impossible imperialism. If he had had his way, he would have stripped the planet in three years, but the Martians fought against us, turned from peace to suspicion, and finally to open revolt. And the Dictator could not see. He mobilized Earth for total war against Mars, draining our resources, decimating our population, building rockets, bombs, guns--" He stopped for a moment, breathing deeply. "But the Dictator didn't know what he was doing. He had never been on Mars. He has never seen Martians. He had no idea what they think, what they are capable of doing. He doesn't know what we know--that the Martians will win. He doesn't realize that the Martians can carry out a war for years without shaking their economy one iota, while he has drained our planet to such a degree that a war of more than two or three months will break us in half. He doesn't know that Mars can win, and that the Earth can't--"
Roger walked across the room, thoughtfully, his mind fitting pieces into place. "But where do I come in? David--Ann--I don't understand--"
Drengo looked Roger straight in the eye. "The Dictator's name," he said, "is Farrel Strang."
Roger stopped still. "Strang?" he echoed.
"Your son, Roger. Yours and Ann's."
"But--you said the Dictator was only 32--" Roger trailed off, regarding Ann in amazement.
Martin smiled. "People don't grow old so quickly nowadays," he said. "You are 57 years old, Roger. Ann is 53." He leaned back in his chair, his gaunt smile fading. "The Dictator has not been without opposition. You, his parents, opposed him at the very start, and he cast you off. People wiser than the crowds were able to rebuff his powerful personal appeal, to see through the robe of glory he had wrapped around himself. He has opposition, but he has built himself an impregnable fortress, and dealt swift death to any persons suspected of treason. A few have escaped--scientists, technologists, sociologists, physicists. The work of one group of men gave us a weapon which we hoped to use to destroy the Dictator. We found a way to move back in Time. We could leave the normal time-stream and move to any area of past time. So four of us went back, searching for the core of the economic and social upheaval on Earth, and trying to destroy the Dictator before he was born. Given Time travel, it should have been possible. So we went back--myself, John Morrel, Ann Strang, and you."
Roger shook his head, a horrible thought forming in his mind. "You were trying to kill David--my son--" he stopped short. "David couldn't have been my son!" He whirled on Martin Drengo. "Who was that boy?"
Martin looked away then, his face white. "The boy was your father," he said.
* * * * *
The drone of the jet bombers came again, whining into the still room. Roger Strang stood very still, staring at the gaunt man. Slowly the puzzle was beginning to fit together, and horror filtered into his mind. "My father--" he said. "Only twelve years old, but he was to be my father." He stared helplessly at the group in the room. "You were trying--to kill him!"
Martin Drengo stood up, his lean face grave. "We were faced with a terrific problem. Once we returned to a time-area, we had no way of knowing to what extent we could effect people and events that had already happened. We had to go back, to fit in, somehow, in an area where we never had been, to make things happen that had never happened before. We knew that if there was any way of doing it, we had to destroy Farrel Strang. But the patterns of history which had allowed him to rise had to be altered, too; destroying the man would not have been enough. So we tried to destroy him in the time-area where the leading time-patterns of our time had been formed. We had to kill his grandfather."
Roger shivered. "But if you had killed David--what would have happened to me?"
"Presumably the same thing that would have happened to the Dictator. In theory, if we had succeeded in killing your father, David, both you and the Dictator would have ceased to exist." Drengo took a deep breath. "The idea was yours, Roger. You knew the terrible damage your son was doing as Dictator. It was a last resort, and Ann and John and I pleaded with you to reconsider. But it was the obvious step."
Ann walked over to Roger, her face pale. "You insisted, Roger. So we did what we could to make it easy. We used the Dictator's favorite trick--a psycho-purge--to clear your mind of all conscious and subconscious memory of your true origin and environment, replacing it with a history and memory of the past-time area where we were going. We chose the contact-time carefully, so that we appeared in New York in the confusion of the bombing of 2078, making sure that your records would stand up under all but the closest examination. From then on, when Martin carried you out from the fire, you stored your own memory of that time-area and became a legitimate member of that society."
"But how could we pose as David's parents, if he was my father?"
Ann smiled. "Both David's parents were killed in the New York bombing; we knew that David survived, and we knew where he could be found. There was a close physical resemblance between you and the boy, though actually the resemblance was backwards, and he accepted you as a foster-father without question. With you equipped with a complete memory of your marriage to me in that time, of David's birth, and of your own history before and after the bombing of New York, you fit in well and played the part to perfection. Also, you acted as a control, to guide us, since you had no conscious knowledge beyond that time-area. Martin and Morrel were to be the assassins, the Intruders, and I was to keep tabs on you--"
"And the success of the attempt?"
Ann's face fell. "We don't know yet. We don't know what we accomplished, whether we stemmed the war or not--"
The tall man who had stepped into the room moved forward and threw a sheaf of papers on the floor, his face heavy with anger, his voice hoarse. "Yes, I'm afraid we do know," he said bitterly.
Martin Drengo whirled on him, his face white. "What do you mean, Markson?"
The tall man sank down in a chair tiredly. "We've lost, Martin. We don't need these calculations to tell. The word was just broadcast on the telecast. Farrel Strang's armada has just begun its attack on Mars--"
* * * * *
For a moment the distant bombing was the only sound in the room. Then Martin Drengo said, "So he gave the order. And we've lost."
"We only had a theory to work on," said Morrel, staring gloomily at the curved window. "A theory and an equation. The theory said that a man returning through time could alter the social and technological trends of the people and times to which he returned, in order to change history that was already past. The theory said that if we could turn the social patterns and technological trends just slightly away from what they were, we could alter the entire makeup of society in our own time. And the Equation was the tool, the final check on any change. The Equation which evaluates the sum of social, psychological and energy factors in any situation, any city or nation or human society. The Equation has been proven, checked time and time again, but the theory didn't fit it. The theory was wrong."
Roger Strang sat up, suddenly alert. "That boy," he said, his voice sharp. "You nearly made a sieve of him, trying to shoot him. Why didn't he die?"
"Because he was on a high-order variable. Picture it this way: From any point in time, the possible future occurrences could be seen as vectors, an infinite number of possible vectors. Every activity that makes an alteration, or has any broad effect on the future is a high-order variable, but many activities have no grave implications for future time, and could be considered unimportant, or low-order variables. If a man turns a corner and sees something that stimulates him into writing a world-shaking manifesto, the high-order variable would have started when he decided to turn the corner instead of going the other way. But if he took one way home instead of another, and nothing of importance occurred as a result of the decision, a low-order variable would be set up.
"We found that the theory of alterations held quite well, for low-order variables. Wherever we appeared, whatever we did, we set up a definite friction in the normal time-stream, a distortion, like pulling a taut rubber band out. And we could produce changes--on low-order variables. But the elasticity of the distortion was so great as to warp the change back into the time-stream without causing any lasting alteration. When it came to high-order changes, we simply couldn't make any. We tried putting wrong data into the machines that were calculating specifications for the Barrier, and the false data went in, but the answers that came out were answers that should have appeared with the right data. We tried to commit a murder, to kill David Strang, and try as we would we couldn't do it. Because it would have altered a high-order variable, and they simply wouldn't be altered!"
"But you, Morrel," Roger exclaimed. "How about you? You were top man in the Barrier Base Security office. You must have made an impression."
Morrel smiled tiredly. "I really thought I had, time after time. I would start off a series of circumstances that should have had a grave alterative effect, and it would look for awhile as if a long-range change was going to be affected--and then it would straighten itself out again, with no important change occurring. It was maddening. We worked for five years trying to make even a small alteration--and brought back our data--" He pointed to the papers on the floor. "There are the calculations, applied on the Equation. Meaningless. We accomplished nothing. And the Dictator is still there."
Drengo slumped in his chair. "And he's started the war. The real attack. This bombardment outside is nothing. There are fifteen squadrons of space-destroyers already unloading atomic bombs on the surface of Mars, and that's the end, for us. Farrel Strang has started a war he can never finish--"
Roger Strang turned sharply to Drengo. "This Dictator," he said. "Where is he? Why can't he be reached now, and destroyed?"
"The Barrier. He can't be touched in the Palace. He has all his offices there, all his controls, and he won't let anyone in since the attempted assassination three months ago. He's safe there, and we can't touch him."
Roger scowled at the control panel on the wall. "How does this time-portal work?" he asked. "You say it can take us back--why not forward?"
"No good. The nature of Time itself makes that impossible. At the present instant of Time, everything that has happened has happened. The three-dimensional world in which we live has passed through the fourth temporal dimension, and nothing can alter it. But at this instant there are an infinite number of things that could happen next. The future is an infinite series of variables, and there's no conceivable way to predict which variable will actually be true."
Roger Strang sat up straight, staring at Drengo. "Will that portal work both ways?" he asked tensely.
Drengo stared at him blankly. "You mean, can it be reverse-wired? I suppose so. But--anyone trying to move into the future would necessarily become an infinity of people--he couldn't maintain his identity, because he'd have to have a body in every one of an infinite number of places he might be--"
"--until the normal time stream caught up with him in the future! And then he'd be in whatever place he fit!" Roger's voice rose excitedly. "Martin, can't you see the implications? Send me ahead--just a little ahead, an hour or so--and let me go into the Palace. If I moved my consciousness to the place where the Palace should be, where the Dictator should be, then when normal time caught up with me, I could kill him!"
Drengo was on his feet, staring at Roger with rising excitement. Suddenly he glanced at his watch. "By God!" he muttered. "Maybe you could--"
* * * * *
Blackness.
He had no body, no form. There was no light, no shape, nothing but eternal, dismal, unbroken blackness. This was the Void, the place where time had not yet come. Roger Strang shuddered, and felt the cold chill of the blackness creep into his marrow. He had to move. He wanted to move, to find the right place, moving with the infinity of possible bodies. A stream of consciousness was all he could grasp, for the blackness enclosed everything. A sort of death, but he knew he was not dead. Blackness was around him, and in him, and through him.
He could feel the timelessness, the total absence of anything. Suddenly he felt the loneliness, for he knew there was no going back. He had to transfer his consciousness, his mind, to the place where the Dictator was, hoping against hope that he could find the place before time caught him wedged in the substance of the stone walls of the Palace. He reached the place that should be right, and waited--
And waited. There was no time in this place, and he had to wait for the normal time stream. The blackness worked at his mind, filling him with fear, choking him, making him want to scream in frightened agony--waiting--
And suddenly, abruptly, he was standing in a brightly lighted room. The arched dome over his head sparkled with jewels, and through paneled windows the red glow of the city's fires flickered grimly. He was in the Palace!
He looked about swiftly, and crossed the room toward a huge door. In an instant he had thrown it open. The bright lights of the office nearly blinded him, and the man behind the desk rose angrily, caught Roger's eye full--
Roger gasped, his eyes widening. For a moment he thought he was staring into a mirror. For the man behind the desk, clothed in a rich glowing tunic was a living image of--himself!
The Dictator's face opened into startled surprise and fear as he recognized Roger, and a frightened cry came from his lips. There was no one else in the room, but his eyes ran swiftly to the visiphone. With careful precision Roger Strang brought the heat-pistol to eye level, and pulled the trigger. Farrel Strang crumpled slowly from the knees, a black hole scorched in his chest.
Roger ran to the fallen man, stared into his face incredulously. His son--and himself, as alike as twin dolls, for all the age difference. Drengo's words rose in Roger's mind: "Medicine is advanced, you know. People don't grow old so soon these days--"
Swiftly Roger slipped from his clothes, an impossibly bold idea translating itself into rapid action. He stripped the glowing tunic from the man's flaccid body, and slipped his arms into the sleeves, pulling the cape in close to cover the burned spot.
He heard a knock on the door. Frantically he forced the body under the heavy desk, and sat down in the chair behind it, eyes wide with fear. "Come in," he croaked.
A young deputy stepped through the door, approached the desk deferentially. "The first reports, sir," he said, looking straight at Roger. Not a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. "The attack is progressing as expected."
"Turn all reports over to my private teletype," Roger snapped. The man saluted. "Immediately, sir!" He turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Roger panted, closing his eyes in relief. He could pass! Turning to the file, he examined the detailed plans for the Martian attack; the numbers of ships, the squadron leaders, the zero hours--then he was at the teletype keyboard, passing on the message of peace, the message to stop the War with Mars, to make an armistice; ALL SQUADRONS AND SHIPS ATTENTION: CEASE AND DESIST IN ATTACK PLANS: RETURN TO TERRA IMMEDIATELY: BY ORDER OF FARREL STRANG.
Wildly he tore into the files, ripping out budget reports, stabilization plans, battle plans, evacuation plans. It would be simple to dispose of the Dictator's body as that of an imposter, an assassin--and simply take control himself in Farrel's place. They would carry on with his plans, his direction. And an era of peace, and stability and rich commerce would commence at long last. The sheaf of papers grew larger and larger as Roger emptied out the files: plans of war, plans of conquest, of slavery--he aimed the heat-pistol at the pile, saw it spring into yellow flame, and circle up to the vaulted ceiling in blue smoke.
* * * * *
And then he sat down, panting, and flipped the visiphone switch. "Send one man, unarmed, to the building across the courtyard. Have him bring Martin Drengo to me."
The deputy's eyes widened on the screen. "Unarmed, sir?"
"Unarmed," Roger repeated. "By order of your Dictator."
LETTER OF THE LAW
by Alan E. Nourse
The place was dark and damp, and smelled like moldy leaves. Meyerhoff followed the huge, bear-like Altairian guard down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing. His foot slipped on the slimy flags from time to time, and finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg. "How much farther is it?" he shouted angrily.
The guard waved a heavy paw vaguely into the blackness ahead. Quite suddenly the corridor took a sharp bend, and the Altairian stopped, producing a huge key ring from some obscure fold of his hairy hide. "I still don't see any reason for all the fuss," he grumbled in a wounded tone. "We've treated him like a brother."
One of the huge steel doors clicked open. Meyerhoff peered into the blackness, catching a vaguely human outline against the back wall. "Harry?" he called sharply.
There was a startled gasp from within, and a skinny, gnarled little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque, twisted ghost out of the blackness. Wide blue eyes regarded Meyerhoff from beneath uneven black eyebrows, and then the little man's face broke into a crafty grin. "Paul! So they sent you! I knew I could count on it!" He executed a deep, awkward bow, motioning Meyerhoff into the dark cubicle. "Not much to offer you," he said slyly, "but it's the best I can do under the circumstances."
Meyerhoff scowled, and turned abruptly to the guard. "We'll have some privacy now, if you please. Interplanetary ruling. And leave us the light."
The guard grumbled, and started for the door. "It's about time you showed up!" cried the little man in the cell. "Great day! Lucky they sent you, pal. Why, I've been in here for years--"
"Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your pal," Meyerhoff snapped. "And you've been here for two weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying the truth around." He peered through the dim light at the gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoff's face softened a little. "So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again," he said. "You look as if they'd treated you like a brother."
The little man snorted. "These overgrown teddy-bears don't know what brotherhood means, nor humanity, either. Bread and water I've been getting, nothing more, and then only if they feel like bringing it down." He sank wearily down on the rock bench along the wall. "I thought you'd never get here! I sent an appeal to the Terran Consulate the first day I was arrested. What happened? I mean, all they had to do was get a man over here, get the extradition papers signed, and provide transportation off the planet for me. Why so much time? I've been sitting here rotting--" He broke off in mid-sentence and stared at Meyerhoff. "You brought the papers, didn't you? I mean, we can leave now?"
Meyerhoff stared at the little man with a mixture of pity and disgust. "You are a prize fool," he said finally. "Did you know that?"
Zeckler's eyes widened. "What do you mean, fool? So I spend a couple of weeks in this pneumonia trap. The deal was worth it! I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick them up. Three million credits--do you hear? That's enough to set me up for life!"
Meyerhoff nodded grimly. "If you live long enough to walk in and pick them up, that is."
"What do you mean, if?"
Meyerhoff sank down beside the man, his voice a tense whisper in the musty cell. "I mean that right now you are practically dead. You may not know it, but you are. You walk into a newly opened planet with your smart little bag of tricks, walk in here with a shaky passport and no permit, with no knowledge of the natives outside of two paragraphs of inaccuracies in the Explorer's Guide, and even then you're not content to come in and sell something legitimate, something the natives might conceivably be able to use. No, nothing so simple for you. You have to pull your usual high-pressure stuff. And this time, buddy, you're paying the piper."
"You mean I'm not being extradited?"
Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. "I mean precisely that. You've committed a crime here--a major crime. The Altairians are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial--and these natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're going to get you."
Zeckler stood up shakily. "You can't believe anything the natives say," he said uneasily. "They're pathological liars. Why, you should see what they tried to sell me! You've never seen such a pack of liars as these critters." He glanced up at Meyerhoff. "They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let me go."
"A little fine of one Terran neck." Meyerhoff grinned nastily. "You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are over."
Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette, and lighted it with trembling fingers. "It's bad, then," he said finally.
"It's bad, all right."
Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's face. "Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over," he said weakly. "Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial."
"Lawyer? Not me! Oh, no. Sorry, but no thanks." Meyerhoff chuckled. "I'm your advisor, old boy. Nothing else. I'm here to keep you from botching things up still worse for the Trading Commission, that's all. I wouldn't get tangled up in a mess with those creatures for anything!" He shook his head. "You're your own lawyer, Mr. Super-salesman. It's all your show. And you'd better get your head out of the sand, or you're going to lose a case like it's never been lost before!"
* * * * *
Meyerhoff watched the man's pale face, and shook his head. In a way, he thought, it was a pity to see such a change in the rosy-cheeked, dapper, cocksure little man who had talked his way glibly in and out of more jams than Meyerhoff could count. Trading brought scalpers; it was almost inevitable that where rich and unexploited trading ground was uncovered, it would first fall prey to the fast-trading boys. They spread out from Terra with the first wave of exploration--the slick, fast-talking con-men who could work new territories unfettered by the legal restrictions that soon closed down the more established planets. The first men in were the richest out, and through some curious quirk of the Terrestrial mind, they knew they could count on Terran protection, however crooked and underhand their methods.
But occasionally a situation arose where the civilization and social practices of the alien victims made it unwise to tamper with them. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, three-eyed inhabitants--warned specifically against the confidence tactics so frequently used--but there was always somebody, Meyerhoff reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word.
Zeckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face a study in troubled concentration. "But I didn't do anything!" he exploded finally. "So I pulled an old con game. So what? Why should they get so excited? So I clipped a few thousand credits, pulled a little fast business." He shrugged eloquently, spreading his hands. "Everybody's doing it. They do it to each other without batting an eye. You should see these critters operate on each other. Why, my little scheme was peanuts by comparison."
Meyerhoff pulled a pipe from his pocket, and began stuffing the bowl with infinite patience. "And precisely what sort of con game was it?" he asked quietly.
Zeckler shrugged again. "The simplest, tiredest, moldiest old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land--this gooey, slimy swamp they call 'farm land.' So I gave them what they wanted. I just sold them some land."
Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. "You sure did. A hundred square kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos to a dozen different natives." Suddenly he threw back his hands and roared. "Of all the things you shouldn't have done--"
"But what's a chunk of land?"
Meyerhoff shook his head hopelessly. "If you hadn't been so greedy, you'd have found out what a chunk of land was to these natives before you started peddling it. You'd have found out other things about them, too. You'd have learned that in spite of all their bumbling and fussing and squabbling they're not so dull. You'd have found out that they're marsupials, and that two out of five of them get thrown out of their mother's pouch before they're old enough to survive. You'd have realized that they have to start fighting for individual rights almost as soon as they're born. Anything goes, as long as it benefits them as individuals."
Meyerhoff grinned at the little man's horrified face. "Never heard of that, had you? And you've never heard of other things, too. You've probably never heard that there are just too many Altairians here for the food their planet can supply, and their diet is so finicky that they just can't live on anything that doesn't grow here. And consequently, land is the key factor in their economy, not money; nothing but land. To get land, it's every man for himself, and the loser starves, and their entire legal and monetary system revolves on that principle. They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with land as the value behind the credit. That explains the lying--of course they're liars, with an economy like that. They've completely missed the concept of truth. Pathological? You bet they're pathological! Only a fool would tell the truth when his life depended on his being a better liar than the next guy! Lying is the time-honored tradition, with their entire legal system built around it."
Zeckler snorted. "But how could they possibly have a legal system? I mean, if they don't recognize the truth when it slaps them in the face?"
Meyerhoff shrugged. "As we understand legal systems, I suppose they don't have one. They have only the haziest idea what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as impossible and useless." He chuckled maliciously. "So you went out and found a chunk of ground in the uplands, and sold it to a dozen separate, self-centered, half-starved natives! Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds." Meyerhoff sighed. "You've got twelve mad Altairians in your hair. You've got a mad planet in your hair. And in the meantime, Terra's most valuable uranium source in five centuries is threatening to cut off supply unless they see your blood splattered liberally all the way from here to the equator."
Zeckler was visibly shaken. "Look," he said weakly, "so I wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could I defend myself in a legal setup like this?"
Meyerhoff smiled coolly. "You're going to get your sly little con-man brain to working, I think," he said softly. "By Interplanetary Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal form--judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They think it's a big joke--after all, what could a judicial oath mean to them?--but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted little wits of yours clicking--and if you try to implicate me, even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know what happened."
With that Meyerhoff walked to the door. He jerked it inward sharply, and spilled two guards over on their faces. "Privacy," he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor.
* * * * *
It certainly looked like a courtroom, at any rate. In the front of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind it, and a small straight chair to the right. To the left was a stand with twelve chairs--larger chairs, with a railing running along the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door with seats facing the bench. Zeckler followed the shaggy-haired guard into the room, nodding approvingly. "Not such a bad arrangement," he said. "They must have gotten the idea fast."
Meyerhoff wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and shot the little con-man a stony glance. "At least you've got a courtroom, a judge, and a jury for this mess. Beyond that--" He shrugged eloquently. "I can't make any promises."
In the back of the room a door burst open with a bang. Loud, harsh voices were heard as half a dozen of the huge Altairians attempted to push through the door at once. Zeckler clamped on the headset to his translator unit, and watched the hubbub in the anteroom with growing alarm. Finally the question of precedent seemed to be settled, and a group of the Altairians filed in, in order of stature, stalking across the room in flowing black robes, pug-nosed faces glowering with self-importance. They descended upon the jury box, grunting and scrapping with each other for the first-row seats, and the judge took his place with obvious satisfaction behind the heavy wooden bench. Finally, the prosecuting attorney appeared, flanked by two clerks, who took their places beside him. The prosecutor eyed Zeckler with cold malevolence, then turned and delivered a sly wink at the judge.
In a moment the room was a hubbub as it filled with the huge, bumbling, bear-like creatures, jostling each other and fighting for seats, growling and complaining. Two small fights broke out in the rear, but were quickly subdued by the group of gendarmes guarding the entrance. Finally the judge glared down at Zeckler with all three eyes, and pounded the bench top with a wooden mallet until the roar of activity subsided. The jurymen wriggled uncomfortably in their seats, exchanging winks, and finally turned their attention to the front of the court.
"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I," the judge's voice roared out, "against one Harry Zeckler--" he paused for a long, impressive moment--"Terran." The courtroom immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge pounded the bench five or six times more. "This--creature--is hereby accused of the following crimes," the judge bellowed. "Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the lesser gods to cause the unprecedented drought in the Dermatti section of our fair globe. Obscene exposure of his pouch-marks in a public square. Four separate and distinct charges of jail-break and bribery--" The judge pounded the bench for order--"Espionage with the accursed scum of Altair II in preparation for interplanetary invasion."
The little con-man's jaw sagged lower and lower, the color draining from his face. He turned, wide-eyed, to Meyerhoff, then back to the judge.
"The Chairman of the Jury," said the Judge succinctly, "will read the verdict."
The little native in the front of the jury-box popped up like a puppet on a string. "Defendant found guilty on all counts," he said.
"Defendant is guilty! The court will pronounce sentence--"
"Now wait a minute!" Zeckler was on his feet, wild-eyed. "What kind of railroad job--"
The judge blinked disappointedly at Paul Meyerhoff. "Not yet?" he asked, unhappily.
"No." Meyerhoff's hands twitched nervously. "Not yet, Your Honor. Later, Your Honor. The trial comes first."
The judge looked as if his candy had been stolen. "But you said I should call for the verdict."
"Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the verdict."
The Altairian shrugged indifferently. "Now--later--" he muttered.
"Have the prosecutor call his first witness," said Meyerhoff.
Zeckler leaned over, his face ashen. "These charges," he whispered. "They're insane!"
"Of course they are," Meyerhoff whispered back.
"But what am I going to--"
"Sit tight. Let them set things up."
"But those lies. They're liars, the whole pack of them--" He broke off as the prosecutor roared a name.
The shaggy brute who took the stand was wearing a bright purple hat which sat rakishly over one ear. He grinned the Altairian equivalent of a hungry grin at the prosecutor. Then he cleared his throat and started. "This Terran riffraff--"
"The oath," muttered the judge. "We've got to have the oath."
The prosecutor nodded, and four natives moved forward, carrying huge inscribed marble slabs to the front of the court. One by one the chunks were reverently piled in a heap at the witness's feet. The witness placed a huge, hairy paw on the cairn, and the prosecutor said, "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you--" he paused to squint at the paper in his hand, and finished on a puzzled note, "--Goddess?"
The witness removed the paw from the rock pile long enough to scratch his ear. Then he replaced it, and replied, "Of course," in an injured tone.
"Then tell this court what you have seen of the activities of this abominable wretch."
The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third as if in meditation. "I think it happened on the fourth night of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast a drought upon it)--or was it the seventh night of the fourth crossing?--" he grinned apologetically at the judge--"when I was making my way back through town toward my blessed land-plot, minding my own business, Your Honor, after weeks of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Suddenly from the shadow of the building, this creature--" he waved a paw at Zeckler--"stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my voice he forced me back against the wall. I could see by the cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy in his heart, that I was--"
"Objection!" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his feet. "This witness can't even remember what night he's talking about!"
The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through his bundle of notes. "Overruled," he said abruptly. "Continue, please."
The witness glowered at Zeckler. "As I was saying before this loutish interruption," he muttered, "I could see that I was face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his ears. I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place of our blessed Goddess--"
"I never saw him before in my life," Zeckler moaned to Meyerhoff. "Listen to him! Why should I care where their Goddess--"
Meyerhoff gave him a stony look. "The Goddess runs things around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's insulted her. It's very simple."
"But how can I fight testimony like that?"
"I doubt if you can fight it."
"But they can't prove a word of it--" He looked at the jury, who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the stand. This one was testifying regarding the butcherous slaughter of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "But it's not true," he whispered to Meyerhoff.
"Of course it isn't! Can't you understand? These people have no regard for truth. It's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they are."
Zeckler jerked around abruptly as he heard his name bellowed out. "Does the defendant have anything to say before the jury delivers the verdict?"
"Do I have--" Zeckler was across the room in a flash, his pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down gingerly on the witness chair, facing the judge, his eyes bright with fear and excitement. "Your--Your Honor, I--I have a statement to make which will have a most important bearing on this case. You must listen with the greatest care." He glanced quickly at Meyerhoff, and back to the judge. "Your Honor," he said in a hushed voice. "You are in gravest of danger. All of you. Your lives--your very land is at stake."
The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly as a murmur arose in the court. "Our land?"
"Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear," Zeckler said quickly, licking his lips nervously. "You must try to understand me--" he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder "now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what I am about to tell you--"
The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets to hear his words. "These charges," he continued, "all of them--they're perfectly true. At least, they seem to be perfectly true. But in every instance, I was working with heart and soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet."
There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zeckler frowned and rubbed his hands together. "It was my misfortune," he said, "to go to the wrong planet when I first came to Altair from my homeland on Terra. I--I landed on Altair II, a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error. Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place, I made certain contacts." His voice trembled, and sank lower. "I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade her to cast your land into the fiery furnace of a ten-year-drought--"
Somebody in the middle of the court burst out laughing. One by one the natives nudged one another, and booed, and guffawed, until the rising tide of racket drowned out Zeckler's words. "The defendant is obviously lying," roared the prosecutor over the pandemonium. "Any fool knows that the Goddess can't be bribed. How could she be a Goddess if she could?"
Zeckler grew paler. "But--perhaps they were very clever--"
"And how could they flatter her, when she knows, beyond doubt, that she is the most exquisitely radiant creature in all the Universe? And you dare to insult her, drag her name in the dirt."
The hisses grew louder, more belligerent. Cries of "Butcher him!" and "Scald his bowels!" rose from the courtroom. The judge banged for silence, his eyes angry.
"Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious time with these ridiculous lies, the jury--"
"Wait! Your Honor, I request a short recess before I present my final plea."
"Recess?"
"A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my case."
The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. "Do I have to?" he asked Meyerhoff.
Meyerhoff nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his shoulder to the anteroom. "You can go in there," he said.
Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness stand, amid riotous boos and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom.
* * * * *
Zeckler puffed hungrily on a cigarette, and looked up at Meyerhoff with haunted eyes. "It--it doesn't look so good," he muttered.
Meyerhoff's eyes were worried, too. For some reason, he felt a surge of pity and admiration for the haggard con-man. "It's worse than I'd anticipated," he admitted glumly. "That was a good try, but you just don't know enough about them and their Goddess." He sat down wearily. "I don't see what you can do. They want your blood, and they're going to have it. They just won't believe you, no matter how big a lie you tell."
Zeckler sat in silence for a moment. "This lying business," he said finally, "exactly how does it work?"
"The biggest, most convincing liar wins. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter how outlandish a whopper you tell. Unless, of course, they've made up their minds that you just naturally aren't as big a liar as they are. And it looks like that's just what they've done. It wouldn't make any difference to them what you say--unless, somehow, you could make them believe it."
Zeckler frowned. "And how do they regard the--the biggest liar? I mean, how do they feel toward him?"
Meyerhoff shifted uneasily. "It's hard to say. It's been my experience that they respect him highly--maybe even fear him a little. After all, the most convincing liar always wins in any transaction, so he gets more land, more food, more power. Yes, I think the biggest liar could go where he pleased without any interference."
Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. "Wait a minute," he said tensely. "To tell them a lie that they'd have to believe--a lie they simply couldn't help but believe--" He turned on Meyerhoff, his hands trembling. "Do they think the way we do? I mean, with logic, cause and effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusions that we have to draw?"
Meyerhoff blinked. "Well--yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly logical."
Zeckler's eyes flashed, and a huge grin broke out on his sallow face. His thin body fairly shook. He started hopping up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. "If I could only think--" he muttered. "Somebody--somewhere--something I read."
"Whatever are you talking about?"
"It was a Greek, I think--"
Meyerhoff stared at him. "Oh, come now. Have you gone off your rocker completely? You've got a problem on your hands, man."
"No, no, I've got a problem in the bag!" Zeckler's cheeks flushed. "Let's go back in there--I think I've got an answer!"
The courtroom quieted the moment they opened the door, and the judge banged the gavel for silence. As soon as Zeckler had taken his seat on the witness stand, the judge turned to the head juryman. "Now, then," he said with happy finality. "The jury--"
"Hold on! Just one minute more."
The judge stared down at Zeckler as if he were a bug on a rock. "Oh, yes. You had something else to say. Well, go ahead and say it."
Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. "You want to convict me," he said softly, "in the worst sort of way. Isn't that right?"
Eyes swung toward him. The judge broke into an evil grin. "That's right."
"But you can't really convict me until you've considered carefully any statement I make in my own defense. Isn't that right?"
The judge looked uncomfortable. "If you've got something to say, go ahead and say it."
"I've got just one statement to make. Short and sweet. But you'd better listen to it, and think it out carefully before you decide that you really want to convict me." He paused, and glanced slyly at the judge. "You don't think much of those who tell the truth, it seems. Well, put this statement in your record, then." His voice was loud and clear in the still room. "All Earthmen are absolutely incapable of telling the truth."
Puzzled frowns appeared on the jury's faces. One or two exchanged startled glances, and the room was still as death. The judge stared at him, and then at Meyerhoff, then back. "But you"--he stammered. "You're"--He stopped in mid-sentence, his jaw sagging.
One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement to soak in.
And then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.
* * * * *
"Really," said Harry Zeckler loftily, "it was so obvious I'm amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing." He settled himself down comfortably in the control cabin of the Interplanetary Rocket and grinned at the outline of Altair IV looming larger in the view screen.
Paul Meyerhoff stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed angrily. "You might at least have told me what you were planning."
"And take the chance of being overheard? Don't be silly. It had to come as a bombshell. I had to establish myself as a liar--the prize liar of them all, but I had to tell the sort of lie that they simply could not cope with. Something that would throw them into such utter confusion that they wouldn't dare convict me." He grinned impishly at Meyerhoff. "The paradox of Epimenides the Cretan. It really stopped them cold. They knew I was an Earthmen, which meant that my statement that Earthmen were liars was a lie, which meant that maybe I wasn't a liar, in which case--oh, it was tailor-made."
"It sure was." Meyerhoff's voice was a snarl.
"Well, it made me out a liar in a class they couldn't approach, didn't it?"
Meyerhoff's face was purple with anger. "Oh, indeed it did! And it put all Earthmen in exactly the same class, too."
"So what's honor among thieves? I got off, didn't I?"
Meyerhoff turned on him fiercely. "Oh, you got off just fine. You scared the living daylights out of them. And in an eon of lying they never have run up against a short-circuit like that. You've also completely botched any hope of ever setting up a trading alliance with Altair I, and that includes uranium, too. Smart people don't gamble with loaded dice. You scared them so badly they don't want anything to do with us."
Zeckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously. "Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was your outlook, wasn't it? What a pity!" He clucked his tongue sadly. "Me, I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting for me--enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation."
Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee appeared in his eyes. "Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, either."
"Eh?"
Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. He brushed an imaginary lint fleck from his lapel, and looked up at Zeckler slyly. "That--uh--jury trial. The Altairians weren't any too happy to oblige. They wanted to execute you outright. Thought a trial was awfully silly--until they got their money back, of course. Not too much--just three million credits."
Zeckler went white. "But that money was in banking custody!"
"Is that right? My goodness. You don't suppose they could have lost those papers, do you?" Meyerhoff grinned at the little con-man. "And incidentally, you're under arrest, you know."
A choking sound came from Zeckler's throat. "Arrest!"
"Oh, yes. Didn't I tell you? Conspiring to undermine the authority of the Terran Trading Commission. Serious charge, you know. Yes, I think we'll take a nice long vacation together, straight back to Terra. And there I think you'll face a jury trial."
Zeckler spluttered. "There's no evidence--you've got nothing on me! What kind of a frame are you trying to pull?"
"A lovely frame. Airtight. A frame from the bottom up, and you're right square in the middle. And this time--" Meyerhoff tapped a cigarette on his thumb with happy finality--"this time I don't think you'll get off."
GENESIS
By H. Beam Piper
Was this ill-fated expedition the end of a proud, old race--or the beginning of a new one?
There are strange gaps in our records of the past. We find traces of man-like things--but, suddenly, man appears, far too much developed to be the "next step" in a well-linked chain of evolutionary evidence. Perhaps something like the events of this story furnishes the answer to the riddle.
Aboard the ship, there was neither day nor night; the hours slipped gently by, as vistas of star-gemmed blackness slid across the visiscreens. For the crew, time had some meaning--one watch on duty and two off. But for the thousand-odd colonists, the men and women who were to be the spearhead of migration to a new and friendlier planet, it had none. They slept, and played, worked at such tasks as they could invent, and slept again, while the huge ship followed her plotted trajectory.
Kalvar Dard, the army officer who would lead them in their new home, had as little to do as any of his followers. The ship's officers had all the responsibility for the voyage, and, for the first time in over five years, he had none at all. He was finding the unaccustomed idleness more wearying than the hectic work of loading the ship before the blastoff from Doorsha. He went over his landing and security plans again, and found no probable emergency unprepared for. Dard wandered about the ship, talking to groups of his colonists, and found morale even better than he had hoped. He spent hours staring into the forward visiscreens, watching the disc of Tareesh, the planet of his destination, grow larger and plainer ahead.
Now, with the voyage almost over, he was in the cargo-hold just aft of the Number Seven bulkhead, with six girls to help him, checking construction material which would be needed immediately after landing. The stuff had all been checked two or three times before, but there was no harm in going over it again. It furnished an occupation to fill in the time; it gave Kalvar Dard an excuse for surrounding himself with half a dozen charming girls, and the girls seemed to enjoy being with him. There was tall blonde Olva, the electromagnetician; pert little Varnis, the machinist's helper; Kyna, the surgeon's-aide; dark-haired Analea; Dorita, the accountant; plump little Eldra, the armament technician. At the moment, they were all sitting on or around the desk in the corner of the store-room, going over the inventory when they were not just gabbling.
"Well, how about the rock-drill bitts?" Dorita was asking earnestly, trying to stick to business. "Won't we need them almost as soon as we're off?"
"Yes, we'll have to dig temporary magazines for our explosives, small-arms and artillery ammunition, and storage-pits for our fissionables and radioactives," Kalvar Dard replied. "We'll have to have safe places for that stuff ready before it can be unloaded; and if we run into hard rock near the surface, we'll have to drill holes for blasting-shots."
"The drilling machinery goes into one of those prefabricated sheds," Eldra considered. "Will there be room in it for all the bitts, too?"
Kalvar Dard shrugged. "Maybe. If not, we'll cut poles and build racks for them outside. The bitts are nono-steel; they can be stored in the open."
"If there are poles to cut," Olva added.
"I'm not worrying about that," Kalvar Dard replied. "We have a pretty fair idea of conditions on Tareesh; our astronomers have been making telescopic observations for the past fifteen centuries. There's a pretty big Arctic ice-cap, but it's been receding slowly, with a wide belt of what's believed to be open grassland to the south of it, and a belt of what's assumed to be evergreen forest south of that. We plan to land somewhere in the northern hemisphere, about the grassland-forest line. And since Tareesh is richer in water that Doorsha, you mustn't think of grassland in terms of our wire-grass plains, or forests in terms of our brush thickets. The vegetation should be much more luxuriant."
"If there's such a large polar ice-cap, the summers ought to be fairly cool, and the winters cold," Varnis reasoned. "I'd think that would mean fur-bearing animals. Colonel, you'll have to shoot me something with a nice soft fur; I like furs."
Kalvar Dard chuckled. "Shoot you nothing, you can shoot your own furs. I've seen your carbine and pistol scores," he began.
* * * * *
There was a sudden suck of air, disturbing the papers on the desk. They all turned to see one of the ship's rocket-boat bays open; a young Air Force lieutenant named Seldar Glav, who would be staying on Tareesh with them to pilot their aircraft, emerged from an open airlock.
"Don't tell me you've been to Tareesh and back in that thing," Olva greeted him.
Seldar Glav grinned at her. "I could have been, at that; we're only twenty or thirty planetary calibers away, now. We ought to be entering Tareeshan atmosphere by the middle of the next watch. I was only checking the boats, to make sure they'll be ready to launch.... Colonel Kalvar, would you mind stepping over here? There's something I think you should look at, sir."
Kalvar Dard took one arm from around Analea's waist and lifted the other from Varnis' shoulder, sliding off the desk. He followed Glav into the boat-bay; as they went through the airlock, the cheerfulness left the young lieutenant's face.
"I didn't want to say anything in front of the girls, sir," he began, "but I've been checking boats to make sure we can make a quick getaway. Our meteor-security's gone out. The detectors are deader then the Fourth Dynasty, and the blasters won't synchronize.... Did you hear a big thump, about a half an hour ago, Colonel?"
"Yes, I thought the ship's labor-crew was shifting heavy equipment in the hold aft of us. What was it, a meteor-hit?"
"It was. Just aft of Number Ten bulkhead. A meteor about the size of the nose of that rocket-boat."
Kalvar Dard whistled softly. "Great Gods of Power! The detectors must be dead, to pass up anything like that.... Why wasn't a boat-stations call sent out?"
"Captain Vlazil was unwilling to risk starting a panic, sir," the Air Force officer replied. "Really, I'm exceeding my orders in mentioning it to you, but I thought you should know...."
Kalvar Dard swore. "It's a blasted pity Captain Vlazil didn't try thinking! Gold-braided quarter-wit! Maybe his crew might panic, but my people wouldn't.... I'm going to call the control-room and have it out with him. By the Ten Gods...!"
* * * * *
He ran through the airlock and back into the hold, starting toward the intercom-phone beside the desk. Before he could reach it, there was another heavy jar, rocking the entire ship. He, and Seldar Glav, who had followed him out of the boat-bay, and the six girls, who had risen on hearing their commander's angry voice, were all tumbled into a heap. Dard surged to his feet, dragging Kyna up along with him; together, they helped the others to rise. The ship was suddenly filled with jangling bells, and the red danger-lights on the ceiling were flashing on and off.
"Attention! Attention!" the voice of some officer in the control-room blared out of the intercom-speaker. "The ship has just been hit by a large meteor! All compartments between bulkheads Twelve and Thirteen are sealed off. All persons between bulkheads Twelve and Thirteen, put on oxygen helmets and plug in at the nearest phone connection. Your air is leaking, and you can't get out, but if you put on oxygen equipment immediately, you'll be all right. We'll get you out as soon as we can, and in any case, we are only a few hours out of Tareeshan atmosphere. All persons in Compartment Twelve, put on...."
Kalvar Dard was swearing evilly. "That does it! That does it for good!... Anybody else in this compartment, below the living quarter level?"
"No, we're the only ones," Analea told him.
"The people above have their own boats; they can look after themselves. You girls, get in that boat, in there. Glav, you and I'll try to warn the people above...."
There was another jar, heavier than the one which had preceded it, throwing them all down again. As they rose, a new voice was shouting over the public-address system:
"Abandon ship! Abandon ship! The converters are backfiring, and rocket-fuel is leaking back toward the engine-rooms! An explosion is imminent! Abandon ship, all hands!"
Kalvar Dard and Seldar Glav grabbed the girls and literally threw them through the hatch, into the rocket-boat. Dard pushed Glav in ahead of him, then jumped in. Before he had picked himself up, two or three of the girls were at the hatch, dogging the cover down.
"All right, Glav, blast off!" Dard ordered. "We've got to be at least a hundred miles from this ship when she blows, or we'll blow with her!"
"Don't I know!" Seldar Glav retorted over his shoulder, racing for the controls. "Grab hold of something, everybody; I'm going to fire all jets at once!"
An instant later, while Kalvar Dard and the girls clung to stanchions and pieces of fixed furniture, the boat shot forward out of its housing. When Dard's head had cleared, it was in free flight.
"How was that?" Glav yelled. "Everybody all right?" He hesitated for a moment. "I think I blacked out for about ten seconds."
Kalvar Dard looked the girls over. Eldra was using a corner of her smock to stanch a nosebleed, and Olva had a bruise over one eye. Otherwise, everybody was in good shape.
"Wonder we didn't all black out, permanently," he said. "Well, put on the visiscreens, and let's see what's going on outside. Olva, get on the radio and try to see if anybody else got away."
"Set course for Tareesh?" Glav asked. "We haven't fuel enough to make it back to Doorsha."
"I was afraid of that," Dard nodded. "Tareesh it is; northern hemisphere, daylight side. Try to get about the edge of the temperate zone, as near water as you can...."
2
They were flung off their feet again, this time backward along the boat. As they picked themselves up, Seldar Glav was shaking his head, sadly. "That was the ship going up," he said; "the blast must have caught us dead astern."
"All right." Kalvar Dard rubbed a bruised forehead. "Set course for Tareesh, then cut out the jets till we're ready to land. And get the screens on, somebody; I want to see what's happened."
The screens glowed; then full vision came on. The planet on which they would land loomed huge before them, its north pole toward them, and its single satellite on the port side. There was no sign of any rocket-boat in either side screen, and the rear-view screen was a blur of yellow flame from the jets.
"Cut the jets, Glav," Dard repeated. "Didn't you hear me?"
"But I did, sir!" Seldar Glav indicated the firing-panel. Then he glanced at the rear-view screen. "The gods help us! It's yellow flame; the jets are burning out!"
Kalvar Dard had not boasted idly when he had said that his people would not panic. All the girls went white, and one or two gave low cries of consternation, but that was all.
"What happens next?" Analea wanted to know. "Do we blow, too?"
"Yes, as soon as the fuel-line burns up to the tanks."
"Can you land on Tareesh before then?" Dard asked.
"I can try. How about the satellite? It's closer."
"It's also airless. Look at it and see for yourself," Kalvar Dard advised. "Not enough mass to hold an atmosphere."
Glav looked at the army officer with new respect. He had always been inclined to think of the Frontier Guards as a gang of scientifically illiterate dirk-and-pistol bravos. He fiddled for a while with instruments on the panel; an automatic computer figured the distance to the planet, the boat's velocity, and the time needed for a landing.
"We have a chance, sir," he said. "I think I can set down in about thirty minutes; that should give us about ten minutes to get clear of the boat, before she blows up."
"All right; get busy, girls," Kalvar Dard said. "Grab everything we'll need. Arms and ammunition first; all of them you can find. After that, warm clothing, bedding, tools and food."
With that, he jerked open one of the lockers and began pulling out weapons. He buckled on a pistol and dagger, and handed other weapon-belts to the girls behind him. He found two of the heavy big-game rifles, and several bandoliers of ammunition for them. He tossed out carbines, and boxes of carbine and pistol cartridges. He found two bomb-bags, each containing six light anti-personnel grenades and a big demolition-bomb. Glancing, now and then, at the forward screen, he caught glimpses of blue sky and green-tinted plains below.
"All right!" the pilot yelled. "We're coming in for a landing! A couple of you stand by to get the hatch open."
There was a jolt, and all sense of movement stopped. A cloud of white smoke drifted past the screens. The girls got the hatch open; snatching up weapons and bedding-wrapped bundles they all scrambled up out of the boat.
There was fire outside. The boat had come down upon a grassy plain; now the grass was burning from the heat of the jets. One by one, they ran forward along the top of the rocket-boat, jumping down to the ground clear of the blaze. Then, with every atom of strength they possessed they ran away from the doomed boat.
* * * * *
The ground was rough, and the grass high, impeding them. One of the girls tripped and fell; without pausing, two others pulled her to her feet, while another snatched up and slung the carbine she had dropped. Then, ahead, Kalvar Dard saw a deep gully, through which a little stream trickled.
They huddled together at the bottom of it, waiting, for what seemed like a long while. Then a gentle tremor ran through the ground, and swelled to a sickening, heaving shock. A roar of almost palpable sound swept over them, and a flash of blue-white light dimmed the sun above. The sound, the shock, and the searing light did not pass away at once; they continued for seconds that seemed like an eternity. Earth and stones pelted down around them; choking dust rose. Then the thunder and the earth-shock were over; above, incandescent vapors swirled, and darkened into an overhanging pall of smoke and dust.
For a while, they crouched motionless, too stunned to speak. Then shaken nerves steadied and jarred brains cleared. They all rose weakly. Trickles of earth were still coming down from the sides of the gully, and the little stream, which had been clear and sparkling, was roiled with mud. Mechanically, Kalvar Dard brushed the dust from his clothes and looked to his weapons.
"That was just the fuel-tank of a little Class-3 rocket-boat," he said. "I wonder what the explosion of the ship was like." He thought for a moment before continuing. "Glav, I think I know why our jets burned out. We were stern-on to the ship when she blew; the blast drove our flame right back through the jets."
"Do you think the explosion was observed from Doorsha?" Dorita inquired, more concerned about the practical aspects of the situation. "The ship, I mean. After all, we have no means of communication, of our own."
"Oh, I shouldn't doubt it; there were observatories all around the planet watching our ship," Kalvar Dard said. "They probably know all about it, by now. But if any of you are thinking about the chances of rescue, forget it. We're stuck here."
"That's right. There isn't another human being within fifty million miles," Seldar Glav said. "And that was the first and only space-ship ever built. It took fifty years to build her, and even allowing twenty for research that wouldn't have to be duplicated, you can figure when we can expect another one."
"The answer to that one is, never. The ship blew up in space; fifty years' effort and fifteen hundred people gone, like that." Kalvar Dard snapped his fingers. "So now, they'll try to keep Doorsha habitable for a few more thousand years by irrigation, and forget about immigrating to Tareesh."
"Well, maybe, in a hundred thousand years, our descendants will build a ship and go to Doorsha, then," Olva considered.
"Our descendants?" Eldra looked at her in surprize. "You mean, then...?"
* * * * *
Kyna chuckled. "Eldra, you are an awful innocent, about anything that doesn't have a breech-action or a recoil-mechanism," she said. "Why do you think the women on this expedition outnumbered the men seven to five, and why do you think there were so many obstetricians and pediatricians in the med. staff? We were sent out to put a human population on Tareesh, weren't we? Well, here we are."
"But.... Aren't we ever going to...?" Varnis began. "Won't we ever see anybody else, or do anything but just live here, like animals, without machines or ground-cars or aircraft or houses or anything?" Then she began to sob bitterly.
Analea, who had been cleaning a carbine that had gotten covered with loose earth during the explosion, laid it down and went to Varnis, putting her arm around the other girl and comforting her. Kalvar Dard picked up the carbine she had laid down.
"Now, let's see," he began. "We have two heavy rifles, six carbines, and eight pistols, and these two bags of bombs. How much ammunition, counting what's in our belts, do we have?"
They took stock of their slender resources, even Varnis joining in the task, as he had hoped she would. There were over two thousand rounds for the pistols, better than fifteen hundred for the carbines, and four hundred for the two big-game guns. They had some spare clothing, mostly space-suit undergarments, enough bed-robes, one hand-axe, two flashlights, a first-aid kit, and three atomic lighters. Each one had a combat-dagger. There was enough tinned food for about a week.
"We'll have to begin looking for game and edible plants, right away," Glav considered. "I suppose there is game, of some sort; but our ammunition won't last forever."
"We'll have to make it last as long as we can; and we'll have to begin improvising weapons," Dard told him. "Throwing-spears, and throwing-axes. If we can find metal, or any recognizable ore that we can smelt, we'll use that; if not, we'll use chipped stone. Also, we can learn to make snares and traps, after we learn the habits of the animals on this planet. By the time the ammunition's gone, we ought to have learned to do without firearms."
"Think we ought to camp here?"
Kalvar Dard shook his head. "No wood here for fuel, and the blast will have scared away all the game. We'd better go upstream; if we go down, we'll find the water roiled with mud and unfit to drink. And if the game on this planet behave like the game-herds on the wastelands of Doorsha, they'll run for high ground when frightened."
Varnis rose from where she had been sitting. Having mastered her emotions, she was making a deliberate effort to show it.
"Let's make up packs out of this stuff," she suggested. "We can use the bedding and spare clothing to bundle up the food and ammunition."
They made up packs and slung them, then climbed out of the gully. Off to the left, the grass was burning in a wide circle around the crater left by the explosion of the rocket-boat. Kalvar Dard, carrying one of the heavy rifles, took the lead. Beside and a little behind him, Analea walked, her carbine ready. Glav, with the other heavy rifle, brought up in the rear, with Olva covering for him, and between, the other girls walked, two and two.
Ahead, on the far horizon, was a distance-blue line of mountains. The little company turned their faces toward them and moved slowly away, across the empty sea of grass.
3
They had been walking, now, for five years. Kalvar Dard still led, the heavy rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm and a sack of bombs slung from his shoulder, his eyes forever shifting to right and left searching for hidden danger. The clothes in which he had jumped from the rocket-boat were patched and ragged; his shoes had been replaced by high laced buskins of smoke-tanned hide. He was bearded, now, and his hair had been roughly trimmed with the edge of his dagger.
Analea still walked beside him, but her carbine was slung, and she carried three spears with chipped flint heads; one heavy weapon, to be thrown by hand or used for stabbing, and two light javelins to be thrown with the aid of the hooked throwing-stick Glav had invented. Beside her trudged a four-year old boy, hers and Dard's, and on her back, in a fur-lined net bag, she carried their six-month-old baby.
In the rear, Glav still kept his place with the other big-game gun, and Olva walked beside him with carbine and spears; in front of them, their three-year-old daughter toddled. Between vanguard and rearguard, the rest of the party walked: Varnis, carrying her baby on her back, and Dorita, carrying a baby and leading two other children. The baby on her back had cost the life of Kyna in childbirth; one of the others had been left motherless when Eldra had been killed by the Hairy People.
* * * * *
That had been two years ago, in the winter when they had used one of their two demolition-bombs to blast open a cavern in the mountains. It had been a hard winter; two children had died, then--Kyna's firstborn, and the little son of Kalvar Dard and Dorita. It had been their first encounter with the Hairy People, too.
Eldra had gone outside the cave with one of the skin water-bags, to fill it at the spring. It had been after sunset, but she had carried her pistol, and no one had thought of danger until they heard the two quick shots, and the scream. They had all rushed out, to find four shaggy, manlike things tearing at Eldra with hands and teeth, another lying dead, and a sixth huddled at one side, clutching its abdomen and whimpering. There had been a quick flurry of shots that had felled all four of the assailants, and Seldar Glav had finished the wounded creature with his dagger, but Eldra was dead. They had built a cairn of stones over her body, as they had done over the bodies of the two children killed by the cold. But, after an examination to see what sort of things they were, they had tumbled the bodies of the Hairy People over the cliff. These had been too bestial to bury as befitted human dead, but too manlike to skin and eat as game.
Since then, they had often found traces of the Hairy People, and when they met with them, they killed them without mercy. These were great shambling parodies of humanity, long-armed, short-legged, twice as heavy as men, with close-set reddish eyes and heavy bone-crushing jaws. They may have been incredibly debased humans, or perhaps beasts on the very threshold of manhood. From what he had seen of conditions on this planet, Kalvar Dard suspected the latter to be the case. In a million or so years, they might evolve into something like humanity. Already, the Hairy ones had learned the use of fire, and of chipped crude stone implements--mostly heavy triangular choppers to be used in the hand, without helves.
Twice, after that night, the Hairy People had attacked them--once while they were on the march, and once in camp. Both assaults had been beaten off without loss to themselves, but at cost of precious ammunition. Once they had caught a band of ten of them swimming a river on logs; they had picked them all off from the bank with their carbines. Once, when Kalvar Dard and Analea had been scouting alone, they had come upon a dozen of them huddled around a fire and had wiped them out with a single grenade. Once, a large band of Hairy People hunted them for two days, but only twice had they come close, and both times, a single shot had sent them all scampering. That had been after the bombing of the group around the fire. Dard was convinced that the beings possessed the rudiments of a language, enough to communicate a few simple ideas, such as the fact that this little tribe of aliens were dangerous in the extreme.
* * * * *
There were Hairy People about now; for the past five days, moving northward through the forest to the open grasslands, the people of Kalvar Dard had found traces of them. Now, as they came out among the seedling growth at the edge of the open plains, everybody was on the alert.
They emerged from the big trees and stopped among the young growth, looking out into the open country. About a mile away, a herd of game was grazing slowly westward. In the distance, they looked like the little horse-like things, no higher than a man's waist and heavily maned and bearded, that had been one of their most important sources of meat. For the ten thousandth time, Dard wished, as he strained his eyes, that somebody had thought to secure a pair of binoculars when they had abandoned the rocket-boat. He studied the grazing herd for a long time.
The seedling pines extended almost to the game-herd and would offer concealment for the approach, but the animals were grazing into the wind, and their scent was much keener than their vision. This would prelude one of their favorite hunting techniques, that of lurking in the high grass ahead of the quarry. It had rained heavily in the past few days, and the undermat of dead grass was soaked, making a fire-hunt impossible. Kalvar Dard knew that he could stalk to within easy carbine-shot, but he was unwilling to use cartridges on game; and in view of the proximity of Hairy People, he did not want to divide his band for a drive hunt.
"What's the scheme?" Analea asked him, realizing the problem as well as he did. "Do we try to take them from behind?"
"We'll take them from an angle," he decided. "We'll start from here and work in, closing on them at the rear of the herd. Unless the wind shifts on us, we ought to get within spear-cast. You and I will use the spears; Varnis can come along and cover for us with a carbine. Glav, you and Olva and Dorita stay here with the children and the packs. Keep a sharp lookout; Hairy People around, somewhere." He unslung his rifle and exchanged it for Olva's spears. "We can only eat about two of them before the meat begins to spoil, but kill all you can," he told Analea; "we need the skins."
Then he and the two girls began their slow, cautious, stalk. As long as the grassland was dotted with young trees, they walked upright, making good time, but the last five hundred yards they had to crawl, stopping often to check the wind, while the horse-herd drifted slowly by. Then they were directly behind the herd, with the wind in their faces, and they advanced more rapidly.
"Close enough?" Dard whispered to Analea.
"Yes; I'm taking the one that's lagging a little behind."
"I'm taking the one on the left of it." Kalvar Dard fitted a javelin to the hook of his throwing-stick. "Ready? Now!"
He leaped to his feet, drawing back his right arm and hurling, the throwing-stick giving added velocity to the spear. Beside him, he was conscious of Analea rising and propelling her spear. His missile caught the little bearded pony in the chest; it stumbled and fell forward to its front knees. He snatched another light spear, set it on the hook of the stick and darted it at another horse, which reared, biting at the spear with its teeth. Grabbing the heavy stabbing-spear, he ran forward, finishing it off with a heart-thrust. As he did, Varnis slung her carbine, snatched a stone-headed throwing axe from her belt, and knocked down another horse, then ran forward with her dagger to finish it.
By this time, the herd, alarmed, had stampeded and was galloping away, leaving the dead and dying behind. He and Analea had each killed two; with the one Varnis had knocked down, that made five. Using his dagger, he finished off one that was still kicking on the ground, and then began pulling out the throwing-spears. The girls, shouting in unison, were announcing the successful completion of the hunt; Glav, Olva, and Dorita were coming forward with the children.
* * * * *
It was sunset by the time they had finished the work of skinning and cutting up the horses and had carried the hide-wrapped bundles of meat to the little brook where they had intended camping. There was firewood to be gathered, and the meal to be cooked, and they were all tired.
"We can't do this very often, any more," Kalvar Dard told them, "but we might as well, tonight. Don't bother rubbing sticks for fire; I'll use the lighter."
He got it from a pouch on his belt--a small, gold-plated, atomic lighter, bearing the crest of his old regiment of the Frontier Guards. It was the last one they had, in working order. Piling a handful of dry splinters under the firewood, he held the lighter to it, pressed the activator, and watched the fire eat into the wood.
The greatest achievement of man's civilization, the mastery of the basic, cosmic, power of the atom--being used to kindle a fire of natural fuel, to cook unseasoned meat killed with stone-tipped spears. Dard looked sadly at the twinkling little gadget, then slipped it back into its pouch. Soon it would be worn out, like the other two, and then they would gain fire only by rubbing dry sticks, or hacking sparks from bits of flint or pyrites. Soon, too, the last cartridge would be fired, and then they would perforce depend for protection, as they were already doing for food, upon their spears.
And they were so helpless. Six adults, burdened with seven little children, all of them requiring momently care and watchfulness. If the cartridges could be made to last until they were old enough to fend for themselves.... If they could avoid collisions with the Hairy People.... Some day, they would be numerous enough for effective mutual protection and support; some day, the ratio of helpless children to able adults would redress itself. Until then, all that they could do would be to survive; day after day, they must follow the game-herds.
4
For twenty years, now, they had been following the game. Winters had come, with driving snow, forcing horses and deer into the woods, and the little band of humans to the protection of mountain caves. Springtime followed, with fresh grass on the plains and plenty of meat for the people of Kalvar Dard. Autumns followed summers, with fire-hunts, and the smoking and curing of meat and hides. Winters followed autumns, and springtimes came again, and thus until the twentieth year after the landing of the rocket-boat.
Kalvar Dard still walked in the lead, his hair and beard flecked with gray, but he no longer carried the heavy rifle; the last cartridge for that had been fired long ago. He carried the hand-axe, fitted with a long helve, and a spear with a steel head that had been worked painfully from the receiver of a useless carbine. He still had his pistol, with eight cartridges in the magazine, and his dagger, and the bomb-bag, containing the big demolition-bomb and one grenade. The last shred of clothing from the ship was gone, now; he was clad in a sleeveless tunic of skin and horsehide buskins.
Analea no longer walked beside him; eight years before, she had broken her back in a fall. It had been impossible to move her, and she stabbed herself with her dagger to save a cartridge. Seldar Glav had broken through the ice while crossing a river, and had lost his rifle; the next day he died of the chill he had taken. Olva had been killed by the Hairy People, the night they had attacked the camp, when Varnis' child had been killed.
They had beaten off that attack, shot or speared ten of the huge sub-men, and the next morning they buried their dead after their custom, under cairns of stone. Varnis had watched the burial of her child with blank, uncomprehending eyes, then she had turned to Kalvar Dard and said something that had horrified him more than any wild outburst of grief could have.
"Come on, Dard; what are we doing this for? You promised you'd take us to Tareesh, where we'd have good houses, and machines, and all sorts of lovely things to eat and wear. I don't like this place, Dard; I want to go to Tareesh."
From that day on, she had wandered in merciful darkness. She had not been idiotic, or raving mad; she had just escaped from a reality that she could no longer bear.
Varnis, lost in her dream-world, and Dorita, hard-faced and haggard, were the only ones left, beside Kalvar Dard, of the original eight. But the band had grown, meanwhile, to more than fifteen. In the rear, in Seldar Glav's old place, the son of Kalvar Dard and Analea walked. Like his father, he wore a pistol, for which he had six rounds, and a dagger, and in his hand he carried a stone-headed killing-maul with a three-foot handle which he had made for himself. The woman who walked beside him and carried his spears was the daughter of Glav and Olva; in a net-bag on her back she carried their infant child. The first Tareeshan born of Tareeshan parents; Kalvar Dard often looked at his little grandchild during nights in camp and days on the trail, seeing, in that tiny fur-swaddled morsel of humanity, the meaning and purpose of all that he did. Of the older girls, one or two were already pregnant, now; this tiny threatened beachhead of humanity was expanding, gaining strength. Long after man had died out on Doorsha and the dying planet itself had become an arid waste, the progeny of this little band would continue to grow and to dominate the younger planet, nearer the sun. Some day, an even mightier civilization than the one he had left would rise here....
* * * * *
All day the trail had wound upward into the mountains. Great cliffs loomed above them, and little streams spumed and dashed in rocky gorges below. All day, the Hairy People had followed, fearful to approach too close, unwilling to allow their enemies to escape. It had started when they had rushed the camp, at daybreak; they had been beaten off, at cost of almost all the ammunition, and the death of one child. No sooner had the tribe of Kalvar Dard taken the trail, however, than they had been pressing after them. Dard had determined to cross the mountains, and had led his people up a game-trail, leading toward the notch of a pass high against the skyline.
The shaggy ape-things seemed to have divined his purpose. Once or twice, he had seen hairy brown shapes dodging among the rocks and stunted trees to the left. They were trying to reach the pass ahead of him. Well, if they did.... He made a quick mental survey of his resources. His pistol, and his son's, and Dorita's, with eight, and six, and seven rounds. One grenade, and the big demolition bomb, too powerful to be thrown by hand, but which could be set for delayed explosion and dropped over a cliff or left behind to explode among pursuers. Five steel daggers, and plenty of spears and slings and axes. Himself, his son and his son's woman, Dorita, and four or five of the older boys and girls, who would make effective front-line fighters. And Varnis, who might come out of her private dream-world long enough to give account for herself, and even the tiniest of the walking children could throw stones or light spears. Yes, they could force the pass, if the Hairy People reached it ahead of them, and then seal it shut with the heavy bomb. What lay on the other side, he did not know; he wondered how much game there would be, and if there were Hairy People on that side, too.
Two shots slammed quickly behind him. He dropped his axe and took a two-hand grip on his stabbing-spear as he turned. His son was hurrying forward, his pistol drawn, glancing behind as he came.
"Hairy People. Four," he reported. "I shot two; she threw a spear and killed another. The other ran."
The daughter of Seldar Glav and Olva nodded in agreement.
"I had no time to throw again," she said, "and Bo-Bo would not shoot the one that ran."
Kalvar Dard's son, who had no other name than the one his mother had called him as a child, defended himself. "He was running away. It is the rule: use bullets only to save life, where a spear will not serve."
Kalvar Dard nodded. "You did right, son," he said, taking out his own pistol and removing the magazine, from which he extracted two cartridges. "Load these into your pistol; four rounds aren't enough. Now we each have six. Go back to the rear, keep the little ones moving, and don't let Varnis get behind."
"That is right. _We must all look out for Varnis, and take care of her_," the boy recited obediently. "That is the rule."
He dropped to the rear. Kalvar Dard holstered his pistol and picked up his axe, and the column moved forward again. They were following a ledge, now; on the left, there was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, and on the right a cliff rose above them, growing higher and steeper as the trail slanted upward. Dard was worried about the ledge; if it came to an end, they would all be trapped. No one would escape. He suddenly felt old and unutterably weary. It was a frightful weight that he bore--responsibility for an entire race.
* * * * *
Suddenly, behind him, Dorita fired her pistol upward. Dard sprang forward--there was no room for him to jump aside--and drew his pistol. The boy, Bo-Bo, was trying to find a target from his position in the rear. Then Dard saw the two Hairy People; the boy fired, and the stone fell, all at once.
It was a heavy stone, half as big as a man's torso, and it almost missed Kalvar Dard. If it had hit him directly, it would have killed him instantly, mashing him to a bloody pulp; as it was, he was knocked flat, the stone pinning his legs.
At Bo-Bo's shot, a hairy body plummeted down, to hit the ledge. Bo-Bo's woman instantly ran it through with one of her spears. The other ape-thing, the one Dorita had shot, was still clinging to a rock above. Two of the children scampered up to it and speared it repeatedly, screaming like little furies. Dorita and one of the older girls got the rock off Kalvar Dard's legs and tried to help him to his feet, but he collapsed, unable to stand. Both his legs were broken.
This was it, he thought, sinking back. "Dorita, I want you to run ahead and see what the trail's like," he said. "See if the ledge is passable. And find a place, not too far ahead, where we can block the trail by exploding that demolition-bomb. It has to be close enough for a couple of you to carry or drag me and get me there in one piece."
"What are you going to do?"
"What do you think?" he retorted. "I have both legs broken. You can't carry me with you; if you try it, they'll catch us and kill us all. I'll have to stay behind; I'll block the trail behind you, and get as many of them as I can, while I'm at it. Now, run along and do as I said."
She nodded. "I'll be back as soon as I can," she agreed.
The others were crowding around Dard. Bo-Bo bent over him, perplexed and worried. "What are you going to do, father?" he asked. "You are hurt. Are you going to go away and leave us, as mother did when she was hurt?"
"Yes, son; I'll have to. You carry me on ahead a little, when Dorita gets back, and leave me where she shows you to. I'm going to stay behind and block the trail, and kill a few Hairy People. I'll use the big bomb."
"The big bomb? The one nobody dares throw?" The boy looked at his father in wonder.
"That's right. Now, when you leave me, take the others and get away as fast as you can. Don't stop till you're up to the pass. Take my pistol and dagger, and the axe and the big spear, and take the little bomb, too. Take everything I have, only leave the big bomb with me. I'll need that."
Dorita rejoined them. "There's a waterfall ahead. We can get around it, and up to the pass. The way's clear and easy; if you put off the bomb just this side of it, you'll start a rock-slide that'll block everything."
"All right. Pick me up, a couple of you. Don't take hold of me below the knees. And hurry."
* * * * *
A hairy shape appeared on the ledge below them; one of the older boys used his throwing-stick to drive a javelin into it. Two of the girls picked up Dard; Bo-Bo and his woman gathered up the big spear and the axe and the bomb-bag.
They hurried forward, picking their way along the top of a talus of rubble at the foot of the cliff, and came to where the stream gushed out of a narrow gorge. The air was wet with spray there, and loud with the roar of the waterfall. Kalvar Dard looked around; Dorita had chosen the spot well. Not even a sure-footed mountain-goat could make the ascent, once that gorge was blocked.
"All right; put me down here," he directed. "Bo-Bo, take my belt, and give me the big bomb. You have one light grenade; know how to use it?"
"Of course, you have often showed me. I turn the top, and then press in the little thing on the side, and hold it in till I throw. I throw it at least a spear-cast, and drop to the ground or behind something."
"That's right. And use it only in greatest danger, to save everybody. Spare your cartridges; use them only to save life. And save everything of metal, no matter how small."
"Yes. Those are the rules. I will follow them, and so will the others. And we will always take care of Varnis."
"Well, goodbye, son." He gripped the boy's hand. "Now get everybody out of here; don't stop till you're at the pass."
"You're not staying behind!" Varnis cried. "Dard, you promised us! I remember, when we were all in the ship together--you and I and Analea and Olva and Dorita and Eldra and, oh, what was that other girl's name, Kyna! And we were all having such a nice time, and you were telling us how we'd all come to Tareesh, and we were having such fun talking about it...."
"That's right, Varnis," he agreed. "And so I will. I have something to do, here, but I'll meet you on top of the mountain, after I'm through, and in the morning we'll all go to Tareesh."
She smiled--the gentle, childlike smile of the harmlessly mad--and turned away. The son of Kalvar Dard made sure that she and all the children were on the way, and then he, too, turned and followed them, leaving Dard alone.
Alone, with a bomb and a task. He'd borne that task for twenty years, now; in a few minutes, it would be ended, with an instant's searing heat. He tried not to be too glad; there were so many things he might have done, if he had tried harder. Metals, for instance. Somewhere there surely must be ores which they could have smelted, but he had never found them. And he might have tried catching some of the little horses they hunted for food, to break and train to bear burdens. And the alphabet--why hadn't he taught it to Bo-Bo and the daughter of Seldar Glav, and laid on them an obligation to teach the others? And the grass-seeds they used for making flour sometimes; they should have planted fields of the better kinds, and patches of edible roots, and returned at the proper time to harvest them. There were so many things, things that none of those young savages or their children would think of in ten thousand years....
Something was moving among the rocks, a hundred yards away. He straightened, as much as his broken legs would permit, and watched. Yes, there was one of them, and there was another, and another. One rose from behind a rock and came forward at a shambling run, making bestial sounds. Then two more lumbered into sight, and in a moment the ravine was alive with them. They were almost upon him when Kalvar Dard pressed in the thumbpiece of the bomb; they were clutching at him when he released it. He felt a slight jar....
* * * * *
When they reached the pass, they all stopped as the son of Kalvar Dard turned and looked back. Dorita stood beside him, looking toward the waterfall too; she also knew what was about to happen. The others merely gaped in blank incomprehension, or grasped their weapons, thinking that the enemy was pressing close behind and that they were making a stand here. A few of the smaller boys and girls began picking up stones.
Then a tiny pin-point of brilliance winked, just below where the snow-fed stream vanished into the gorge. That was all, for an instant, and then a great fire-shot cloud swirled upward, hundreds of feet into the air; there was a crash, louder than any sound any of them except Dorita and Varnis had ever heard before.
"He did it!" Dorita said softly.
"Yes, he did it. My father was a brave man," Bo-Bo replied. "We are safe, now."
Varnis, shocked by the explosion, turned and stared at him, and then she laughed happily. "Why, there you are, Dard!" she exclaimed. "I was wondering where you'd gone. What did you do, after we left?"
"What do you mean?" The boy was puzzled, not knowing how much he looked like his father, when his father had been an officer of the Frontier Guards, twenty years before.
His puzzlement worried Varnis vaguely. "You.... You are Dard, aren't you?" she asked. "But that's silly; of course you're Dard! Who else could you be?"
"Yes. I am Dard," the boy said, remembering that it was the rule for everybody to be kind to Varnis and to pretend to agree with her. Then another thought struck him. His shoulders straightened. "Yes. I am Dard, son of Dard," he told them all. "I lead, now. Does anybody say no?"
He shifted his axe and spear to his left hand and laid his right hand on the butt of his pistol, looking sternly at Dorita. If any of them tried to dispute his claim, it would be she. But instead, she gave him the nearest thing to a real smile that had crossed her face in years.
"You are Dard," she told him; "you lead us, now."
"But of course Dard leads! Hasn't he always led us?" Varnis wanted to know. "Then what's all the argument about? And tomorrow he's going to take us to Tareesh, and we'll have houses and ground-cars and aircraft and gardens and lights, and all the lovely things we want. Aren't you, Dard?"
"Yes, Varnis; I will take you all to Tareesh, to all the wonderful things," Dard, son of Dard, promised, for such was the rule about Varnis.
Then he looked down from the pass into the country beyond. There were lower mountains, below, and foothills, and a wide blue valley, and, beyond that, distant peaks reared jaggedly against the sky. He pointed with his father's axe.
"We go down that way," he said.
* * * * *
So they went, down, and on, and on, and on. The last cartridge was fired; the last sliver of Doorshan metal wore out or rusted away. By then, however, they had learned to make chipped stone, and bone, and reindeer-horn, serve their needs. Century after century, millennium after millennium, they followed the game-herds from birth to death, and birth replenished their numbers faster than death depleted. Bands grew in numbers and split; young men rebelled against the rule of the old and took their women and children elsewhere.
They hunted down the hairy Neanderthalers, and exterminated them ruthlessly, the origin of their implacable hatred lost in legend. All that they remembered, in the misty, confused, way that one remembers a dream, was that there had once been a time of happiness and plenty, and that there was a goal to which they would some day attain. They left the mountains--were they the Caucasus? The Alps? The Pamirs?--and spread outward, conquering as they went.
We find their bones, and their stone weapons, and their crude paintings, in the caves of Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi and Altimira and Mas-d'Azil; the deep layers of horse and reindeer and mammoth bones at their feasting-place at Solutre. We wonder how and whence a race so like our own came into a world of brutish sub-humans.
Just as we wonder, too, at the network of canals which radiate from the polar caps of our sister planet, and speculate on the possibility that they were the work of hands like our own. And we concoct elaborate jokes about the "Men From Mars"--ourselves.
The End
GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS
By H. Beam Piper
Despite Mr. Shakespeare, wealth and name are both dross compared with the theft of hope-- and Maxwell had to rob a whole planet of it!
Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes--twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to--until he'd have to face it.
Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as "sir," he turned.
"I beg your pardon?"
It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere.
"Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir," the ship's officer repeated. "You'll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side."
"Yes, I know. Thank you."
The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. "Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list."
"Certainly." He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two; trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing.
"Yes, that's everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff."
He noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all freight and express manifests. "Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"
"You're the only one in first-class, sir," the mate replied. "About forty farm-laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield's the end of the run. You know anything about the place?"
"I was born there. I've been away at school for the last five years."
"On Baldur?"
"Terra. University of Montevideo." Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully.
The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. "Of course; I should have known. You're Rodney Maxwell's son, aren't you? Your father's one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately." He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: "Sorry, I've got to go. Lot of things to attend to before landing." He touched the visor of his cap and turned away.
The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two space voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past.
But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would learn--microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value....
The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.
They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized.
That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet--Poictesme--told that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell.
* * * * *
Funny how much was coming back to him now--things he had picked up from the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.
The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology--Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything.
Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets.
Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.
Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it.
Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting.
Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete--empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation's Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem during the System States War.
* * * * *
Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poictesme; tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had spent trillions of sols on Poictesme, piled up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations.
Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal.
Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old--and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.
The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose--bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.
He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family. Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now.
But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth.
* * * * *
The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city. Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors.
Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle-stump in a puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace, and the Mall....
At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them.
For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father's letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynne.
The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:
_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty and swing with tiny screams._
There was more to it, but he couldn't remember; something about empty gardens under an empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the Sol System, before the Interstellar Era, that hadn't turned out any better than Poictesme. Then he stopped trying to remember as the ship turned toward the Airport Building and a couple of tugs--Terran Federation contragravity tanks, with derrick-booms behind and push-poles where the guns had been--came up to bring her down.
He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first mate and a couple of airmen were getting open.
* * * * *
Most of the population of top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the dock. He recognized old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above the others. It took a few seconds for him to pick out his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize that the handsome young man beside Flora was his brother Charley. Charley had been thirteen when Conn had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzi, the mayor of Litchfield, and there was Lynne, beside him, her red-lipped face tilted upward with a cloud of bright hair behind it.
He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then everybody was waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and making way for them.
The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off contragravity, and they got the gangway open and the steps swung out, and he started down toward the people who had gathered to greet him.
His father was wearing the same black best-suit he had worn when they had parted five years ago. It had been new then; now it was shabby and had acquired a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol-butt. Charley was carrying a gun, too; the belt and holster looked as though he had made them himself. His mother's dress was new and so was Flora's--probably made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the Terran Federation services had provided the material, but Charley's shirt was Medical Service sterilon.
Ashamed that he was noticing and thinking of such things at a time like this, he clasped his father's hand and kissed his mother and Flora. Everybody was talking at once, saying things that he heard only as happy sounds. His brother's words were the first that penetrated as words.
"You didn't know me," Charley was accusing. "Don't deny it; I saw you standing there wondering if I was Flora's new boy friend or what."
"Well, how in Niflheim'd you expect me to? You've grown up since the last time I saw you. You're looking great, kid!" He caught the gleam of Lynne's golden hair beyond Charley's shoulder and pushed him gently aside. "Lynne!"
"Conn, you look just wonderful!" Her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him. "Am I still your girl, Conn?"
He crushed her against him and returned her kisses, assuring her that she was. He wasn't going to let it make a bit of difference how her father took the news--if she didn't.
She babbled on: "You didn't get mixed up with any of those girls on Terra, did you? If you did, don't tell me about it. All I care about is that you're back. Oh, Conn, you don't know how much I missed you ... Mother, Dad, doesn't he look just splendid?"
Kurt Fawzi, a little thinner, his face more wrinkled, his hair grayer, shook his hand.
"I'm just as glad to see you as anybody, Conn," he said, "even if I'm not being as demonstrative about it as Lynne. Judge, what do you think of our returned wanderer? Franz, shake hands with him, but save the interview for the News for later. Professor, here's one student Litchfield Academy won't need to be ashamed of."
He shook hands with them--old Judge Ledue; Franz Veltrin, the newsman; Professor Kellton; a dozen others, some of whom he had not thought of in five years. They were all cordial and happy--how much, he wondered, because he was their neighbor, Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he would tell them? Kurt Fawzi, edging him out of the crowd, was the first to voice that.
"Conn, what did you find out?" he asked breathlessly. "Do you know where it is?"
Conn hesitated, looking about desperately; this was no time to start talking to Kurt Fawzi about it. His father was turning toward him from one side, and from the other Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff were approaching more slowly, the older man leaning on a silver-headed cane.
"Don't bother him about it now, Kurt," Rodney Maxwell scolded the mayor. "He's just gotten off the ship; he hasn't had time to say hello to everybody yet."
"But, Rod, I've been waiting to hear what he's found out ever since he went away," Fawzi protested in a hurt tone.
Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff joined them. They were close friends, probably because neither of them was a native of Poictesme.
The town marshal had always been reticent about his origins, but Conn guessed it was Hathor. Brangwyn's heavy-muscled body, and his ease and grace in handling it, marked him as a man of a high-gravity planet. Besides, Hathor had a permanent cloud-envelope, and Tom Brangwyn's skin had turned boiled-lobster red under the dim orange sunlight of Alpha Gartner.
Old Klem Zareff never hesitated to tell anybody where he came from--he was from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a division that had been blasted down to about regimental strength, in the Alliance army.
"Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a trembling hand. "Glad you're home. We all missed you."
"We sure did, Conn," the town marshal agreed, clasping Conn's hand as soon as the old man had released it. "Find out anything definite?"
Kurt Fawzi looked at his watch. "Conn, we've planned a little celebration for you. We only had since day before yesterday, when the spaceship came into radio range, but we're having a dinner party for you at Senta's this evening."
"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd have to have a meal at Senta's before really feeling that I'd come home."
"Well, here's what I have in mind. It'll be three hours till dinner's ready. Suppose we all go up to my office in the meantime. It'll give the ladies a chance to go home and fix up for the party, and we can have a drink and a talk."
"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked, a trifle doubtfully. "If you'd rather go home first..."
Something in his father's voice and manner disturbed him vaguely; however, he nodded agreement. After a couple of drinks, he'd be better able to tell them.
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn said. "I know you're all anxious, but it's a long story. This'll be a good chance to tell you."
Fawzi turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shout instructions to a couple of dockhands who were floating the baggage off the ship on a contragravity-lifter. Conn's father had sent Charley off with a message to his mother and Flora.
Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "I noticed extra workers coming out from the hiring agencies in Storisende, and the crop was all in across the Calders. Big wine-pressing this year?"
"Yes, we're up to our necks in melons," the old planter grumbled. "Gehenna of a big crop. Price'll drop like a brick of collapsium, and this time next year we'll be using brandy to wash our feet in."
"If you can't get good prices, hang onto it and age it. I wish you could see what the bars on Terra charge for a drink of ten-year-old Poictesme."
"This isn't Terra and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place we can sell brandy is at Storisende spaceport, and we have to take what the trading-ship captains offer. You've been on a rich planet for the last five years, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a poorhouse. And that's what Poictesme is."
"Things'll be better from now on, Klem," the mayor said, putting one hand on the old man's shoulder and the other on Conn's. "Our boy's home. With what he can tell us, we'll be able to solve all our problems. Come on, let's go up and hear about it."
They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the dock-level floor of the Airport Building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen others had joined them, all the important men of Litchfield. Inside, Kurt Fawzi's laborers were floating out cargo for the ship--casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and marked with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and the gold triangle of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance Service. Long cases of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns, crated auto-cannon and rockets.
"Where'd that stuff come from?" Conn asked his father. "You dig it up?"
His father chuckled. "That happened since the last time I wrote you. Remember the big underground headquarters complex in the Calders? Everybody thought it had been all cleaned out years ago. You know, it's never a mistake to take a second look at anything that everybody believes. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had never been entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters defense armories. I have a gang getting the stuff out. Charley and I flew in after lunch, and I'm going back the first thing tomorrow."
"But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child on Poictesme!" Conn objected. "Where are we going to sell this?"
"Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly colonized planets that haven't been industrialized yet. They don't pay much, but it doesn't cost much to get it out, and I've been clearing about three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That's not bad, you know."
Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504 submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a used one was worth a hundred sols. Conn started to say something about that, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it.
He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father, and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, and the government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made few demands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a favored loafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only over the big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows.
As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun speaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi's office.
Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his.
That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.
Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it; maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly wasn't because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did to maintain order.
After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwyn took over the bartending, getting out glasses and filling a pitcher of brandy from a keg in the corner.
"Everybody supplied?" Fawzi was asking. "Well, let's drink to our returned emissary. We're all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn. Gentlemen, here's to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!"
"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi--"
"No, let's not have any of this mister foolishness! You're one of the gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we don't have anything else."
"You telling us, Kurt?" somebody demanded. One of the distillery company; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. "When this crop gets pressed and fermented--"
"When I start pressing, I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat the stuff till it ferments," Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You won't be able to handle all of it."
"Now, now!" Fawzi reproved. "Let's not start moaning about our troubles. Not the day Conn's come home. Not when he's going to tell us how to find the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."
"You did find out where the Brain is, didn't you, Conn?" Brangwyn asked anxiously.
That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after the toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward, looking at Conn fixedly.
"What did you find out, Conn?"
"It's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?"
"Did you find out where it is?"
He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He couldn't, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand.
"Wait a minute, gentlemen." He finished the brandy, and held out the glass to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. "I hope none of you expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where the Brain is. I can't. I can't even give the approximate location of the thing."
Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some of them were looking troubled; Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of his mustache, and Judge Ledue's hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar. Conn stole a quick side-glance at his father; Rodney Maxwell was watching him curiously, as though wondering what he was going to say next.
"But it is still here on Poictesme?" Fawzi questioned. "They didn't take it away when they evacuated, did they?"
Conn finished his second drink. This time he picked up the pitcher and refilled for himself.
"I'm going to have to do a lot of talking," he said, "and it's going to be thirsty work. I'll have to tell you the whole thing from the beginning, and if you start asking questions at random, you'll get me mixed up and I'll miss the important points."
"By all means!" Judge Ledue told him. "Give it in your own words, in what you think is the proper order."
"Thank you, Judge."
Conn drank some more brandy, hoping he could get his courage up without getting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report; all of them had contributed something toward sending him to Terra.
"The main purpose in my going to the University was to learn computer theory and practice. It wouldn't do any good for us to find the Brain if none of us are able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able to operate, program and service any computer in existence, and train assistants. During my last year at the University, I had a part-time paid job programming the big positron-neutrino-photon computer in the astrophysics department. When I graduated, I was offered a position as instructor in positronic computer theory."
"You never mentioned that in your letters, son," his father said.
"It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the same ship I did. Beside, it wasn't very important."
"I think it was." There was a catch in old Professor Kellton's voice. "One of my boys, from the Academy, offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He poured himself a second drink, something he almost never did.
"Conn means it wasn't important because it didn't have anything to do with the Brain," Fawzi explained and then looked at Conn expectantly.
All right; now he'd tell them. "I went over all the records of the Third Fleet-Army Force's occupation of Poictesme that are open to the public. On one pretext or another, I got permission to examine the non-classified files that aren't open to public examination. I even got a few peeps at some of the stuff that's still classified secret. I have maps and plans of all the installations that were built on this planet--literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, we haven't more than scratched the surface of what the Federation left behind here. For instance, all the important installations exist in duplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliance space attack."
"Space attack!" Colonel Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time when the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poictesme, even if an offensive outside our own space-area had been part of our policy. We just didn't have the ships. It took over a year to move a million and a half troops from Ashmodai to Marduk, and the fleet that was based on Amaterasu was blasted out of existence in the spaceports and in orbit. Hell, at the time of the surrender, we didn't have--"
"They weren't taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."
For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming of the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow.
"Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time, frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. "But you must have! A thing like that--"
"Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war," somebody else said. "But in forty years, you'd expect something to leak out."
"Why, during the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even the Alliance knew about it; that's how Klem heard of it."
"Well, Conn couldn't just walk into the secret files and read whatever he wanted to. Just because he couldn't find anything--"
"Don't tell me about security!" Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly they still have it classified; staff-brass'd rather lose an eye than declassify anything. If you'd seen the lengths our staff went to--hell, we lost battles because the staff wouldn't release information the troops in the field needed. I remember once--"
"But there was a Brain," Judge Ledue was saying, to reassure himself and draw agreement from the others. "It was capable of combining data, and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming association patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was more than a positronic brain--it was a positronic super-mind."
"We'd have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people--and we were on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made was known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that without something like the Brain?"
"Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of space would you say the Brain would have to occupy?" Professor Kellton asked.
Professor Kellton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking the most practical question.
"Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the University occupies a total of about one million cubic feet," Conn began. This was his chance; they'd take anything he told them about computers as gospel. "It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain, being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem--mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I'd say that a hundred million cubic feet would be the smallest even conceivable."
They all nodded seriously. They were willing to accept that--or anything else, except one thing.
"Lot of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden," Tom Brangwyn said, undismayed. "A planet's a mighty big place."
"It could be under water, in one of the seas," Piet Dawes, the banker, suggested. "An underwater dome city wouldn't be any harder to build than a dome city on a poison-atmosphere planet like Tubal-Cain."
"It might even be on Tubal-Cain," a melon-planter said. "Or Hiawatha, or even one of the Beta or Gamma planets. The Third Force was occupying the whole Trisystem, you know." He thought for a moment. "If I'd been in charge, I'd have put it on one of the moons of Pantagruel."
"But that's clear out in the Alpha System," Judge Ledue objected. "We don't have a spaceship on the planet, certainly nothing with a hyperdrive engine. And it would take a lifetime to get out to the Gamma System and back on reaction drive."
Conn put his empty brandy glass on the table and sat erect. A new thought had occurred to him, chasing out of his mind all the worries and fears he had brought with him all the way from Terra.
"Then we'll have to build a ship," he said calmly. "I know, when the Federation evacuated Poictesme, they took every hyperdrive ship with them. But they had plenty of shipyards and spaceports on this planet, and I have maps showing the location of all of them, and barely a third of them have been discovered so far. I'm sure we can find enough hulks, and enough hyperfield generator parts, to assemble a ship or two, and I know we'll find the same or better on some of the other planets.
"And here's another thing," he added. "When we start looking into some of the dome-city plants on Tubal-Cain and Hiawatha and Moruna and Koshchei, we may find the plant or plants where the components for the Brain were fabricated, and if we do, we may find records of where they were shipped, and that'll be it."
"You're right!" Professor Kellton cried, quivering with excitement. "We've been hunting at random for the Brain, so it would only be an accident if we found it. We'll have to do this systematically, and with Conn to help us--Conn, why not build a computer? I don't mean another Brain; I mean a computer to help us find the Brain."
"We can, but we may not even need to build one. When we get out to the industrial planets, we may find one ready except for perhaps some minor alterations."
"But how are we going to finance all this?" Klem Zareff demanded querulously. "We're poorer than snakes, and even one hyperdrive ship's going to cost like Gehenna."
"I've been thinking about that, Klem," Fawzi said. "If we can find material at these shipyards Conn knows about, most of our expense will be labor. Well, haven't we ten workmen competing for every job? They don't really need money, only the things money can buy. We can raise food on the farms and provide whatever else they need out of Federation supplies."
"Sure. As soon as it gets around that we're really trying to do something about this, everybody'll want in on it," Tom Brangwyn predicted.
"And I have no doubt that the Planetary Government at Storisende will give us assistance, once we show that this is a practical and productive enterprise," Judge Ledue put in. "I have some slight influence with the President and--"
"I'm not too sure we want the Government getting into this," Kurt Fawzi replied. "Give them half a chance and that gang at Storisende'll squeeze us right out."
"We can handle this ourselves," Brangwyn agreed. "And when we get some kind of a ship and get out to the other two systems, or even just to Tubal-Cain or Hiawatha, first thing you know, we'll be the Planetary Government."
"Well, now, Tom," Fawzi began piously, "the Brain is too big a thing for a few of us to try to monopolize; it'll be for all Poictesme. Of course, it's only proper that we, who are making the effort to locate it, should have the direction of that effort...."
While Fawzi was talking, Rodney Maxwell went to the table, rummaged his pistol out of the pile and buckled it on. The mayor stopped short.
"You leaving us, Rod?"
"Yes, it's getting late. Conn and I are going for a little walk; we'll be at Senta's in half an hour. The fresh air will do both of us good and we have a lot to talk about. After all, we haven't seen each other for over five years."
* * * * *
They were silent, however, until they were away from the Airport Building and walking along High Garden Terrace in the direction of the Mall. Conn was glad; his own thoughts were weighing too heavily within him: I didn't do it. I was going to do it; every minute, I was going to do it, and I didn't, and now it's too late.
"That was quite a talk you gave them, son," his father said. "They believed every word of it. A couple of times, I even caught myself starting to believe it."
Conn stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at him.
"Why didn't you tell them the truth?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
The question angered Conn. It was what he had been asking himself.
"Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot the lot of them?" he retorted. "It would have killed them quicker and wouldn't have hurt as much."
His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it. "The truth must be pretty bad then. There is no Brain. Is that it, son?"
"There never was one. I'm not saying that only because I know it would be impossible to build such a computer. I'm telling you what the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know told me--the man who commanded the Third Force during the War."
"Foxx Travis! I didn't know he was still alive. You actually talked to him?"
"Yes. He's on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a couple of years, and I was afraid he'd die before I got to him, but I finally managed to see him."
"What did he tell you?"
"That no such thing as the Brain ever existed." They started walking again, more slowly, toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red and orange in front of them. "The story was all through the Third Force, but it was just one of those wild tales that get started, nobody knows how, among troops. The High Command never denied or even discouraged it. It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good psychological warfare."
"Klem Zareff says that everybody in the Alliance army heard of the Brain," his father said. "That was why he came here in the first place." He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. "You said a computer like the Brain would be an impossibility. Why? Wouldn't it be just another computer, only a lot bigger and a lot smarter?"
"Dad, computermen don't like to hear computers called smart," Conn said. "They aren't. The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows what's fed to it. They can hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory, they can combine it faster, they don't get tired or absent-minded. But they can't imagine, they can't create, and they can't do anything a human brain can't."
"You know, I'd wondered about just that," said his father. "And none of the histories of the War even as much as mentioned the Brain. And I couldn't see why, after the War, they didn't build dozens of them to handle all these Galactic political and economic problems that nobody seems able to solve. A thing like the Brain wouldn't only be useful for war; the people here aren't trying to find it for war purposes."
"You didn't mention any of these doubts to the others, did you?"
"They were just doubts. You knew for sure, and you couldn't tell them."
"I'd come home intending to--tell them there was no Brain, tell them to stop wasting their time hunting for it and start trying to figure out the answers themselves. But I couldn't. They don't believe in the Brain as a tool, to use; it's a machine god that they can bring all their troubles to. You can't take a thing like that away from people without giving them something better."
"I noticed you suggested building a spaceship and agreed with the professor about building a computer. What was your idea? To take their minds off hunting for the Brain and keep them busy?"
Conn shook his head. "I'm serious about the ship--ships. You and Colonel Zareff gave me that idea."
His father looked at him in surprise. "I never said a word in there, and Klem didn't even once mention--"
"Not in Kurt's office; before we went up from the docks. There was Klem, moaning about a good year for melons as though it were a plague, and you selling arms and ammunition by the ton. Why, on Terra or Baldur or Uller, a glass of our brandy brings more than these freighter-captains give us for a cask, and what do you think a colonist on Agramma, or Sekht, or Hachiman, who has to fight for his life against savages and wild animals, would pay for one of those rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition?"
His father objected. "We can't base the whole economy of a planet on brandy. Only about ten per cent of the arable land on Poictesme will grow wine-melons. And if we start exporting Federation salvage the way you talk of, we'll be selling pieces instead of job lots. We'll net more, but--"
"That's just to get us started. The ships will be used, after that, to get to Tubal-Cain and Hiawatha and the planets of the Beta and Gamma Systems. What I want to see is the mines and factories reopened, people employed, wealth being produced."
"And where'll we sell what we produce? Remember, the mines closed down because there was no more market."
"No more interstellar market, that's true. But there are a hundred and fifty million people on Poictesme. That's a big enough market and a big enough labor force to exploit the wealth of the Gartner Trisystem. We can have prosperity for everybody on our own resources. Just what do we need that we have to get from outside now?"
His father stopped again and sat down on the edge of a fountain--the same one, possibly, from which Conn had seen dust blowing as the airship had been coming in.
"Conn, that's a dangerous idea. That was what brought on the System States War. The Alliance planets took themselves outside the Federation economic orbit and the Federation crushed them."
Conn swore impatiently. "You've been listening to old Klem Zareff ranting about the Lost Cause and the greedy Terran robber barons holding the Galaxy in economic serfdom while they piled up profits. The Federation didn't fight that war for profits; there weren't any profits to fight for. They fought it because if the System States had won, half of them would be at war among themselves now. Make no mistake about it, politically I'm all for the Federation. But economically, I want to see our people exploiting their own resources for themselves, instead of grieving about lost interstellar trade, and bewailing bumper crops, and searching for a mythical robot god."
"You think, if you can get something like that started, that they'll forget about the Brain?" his father asked skeptically.
"That crowd up in Kurt Fawzi's office? Niflheim, no! They'll go on hunting for the Brain as long as they live, and every day they'll be expecting to find it tomorrow. That'll keep them happy. But they're all old men. The ones I'm interested in are the boys of Charley's age. I'm going to give them too many real things to do--building ships, exploring the rest of the Trisystem, opening mines and factories, producing wealth--for them to get caught in that empty old dream."
He looked down at the dusty fountain on which his father sat. "That ghost-dream haunts this graveyard. I want to give them living dreams that they can make come true."
Conn's father sat in silence for a while, his cigar smoke red in the sunset. "If you can do all that, Conn.... You know, I believe you can. I'm with you, as far as I can help, and we'll have a talk with Charley. He's a good boy, Conn, and he has a lot of influence among the other youngsters." He looked at his watch. "We'd better be getting along. You don't want to be late for your own coming-home party."
Rodney Maxwell slid off the edge of the fountain to his feet, hitching at the gunbelt under his coat. Have to dig out his own gun and start wearing it, Conn thought. A man simply didn't go around in public without a gun in Litchfield. It wasn't decent. And he'd be spending a lot of time out in the brush, where he'd really need one.
First thing in the morning, he'd unpack that trunk and go over all those maps. There were half a dozen spaceports and maintenance shops and shipyards within a half-day by airboat, none of which had been looted. He'd look them all over; that would take a couple of weeks. Pick the best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzi'd be the man to recruit labor. Professor Kellton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't know beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research.
They came to the edge of High Garden Terrace at the escalator, long motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the Mall, and at the bottom of it was Senta's, the tables under the open sky.
A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwyn, and there was Kurt Fawzi and his wife, and Lynne. And there was Senta herself, fat and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red-and-purple dresses, bustling about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next.
The dinner, Conn knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years, and afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Senta's. Another bit from Eirrarsson's poem came back to him:
_We sit in the twilight, the shadows among, And we talk of the happy days when we were brave and young._
That was for the old ones, for Colonel Zareff and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton, maybe even for Tom Brangwyn and Franz Veltrin and for his father. But his brother Charley and the boys of his generation would have a future to talk about. And so would he, and Lynne Fawzi.
DOGFIGHT--1973
By Mack Reynolds
Flying at 1600 m.p.h. you act with split-second timing after you sight the enemy. And you're allowed only one mistake--your last!
My radar picked him up when he was about five hundred miles to my north-northeast and about forty-five miles above me. I switched the velocity calculator on him as fast as I could reach it.
The enemy ship was doing sixteen, possibly even sixteen and a half. I took the chance that it was most likely an Ivar Interceptor, at that speed, and punched out a temporary evasion pattern with my right hand while with my left I snapped an Ivar K-12 card into my calculator along with his estimated speed, altitude and distance. It wasn't much to go on as yet but he couldn't have much more on me, if as much; inwardly I congratulated myself on the quick identification I'd managed.
He was near enough now for my visor screen to pick him up. At least he was alone, that was something. My nearest squadron mate was a good minute and a half away. It might as well have been a century.
Now, this is what is always hard to get over to a civilian; the time element. Understand, it will take me a while to tell this but it all took less than sixty seconds to happen.
He had guessed my evasion pattern already--either guessed it or had some new calculator that was far and beyond anything our techs were turning out. I could tell he'd anticipated me by the Bong-Sonic roll he slipped into.
I quickly punched up a new pattern based on the little material I had in the calculator. At least I'd caught the roll. I punched that up, hurriedly, slipped it into the IBM, guessed that his next probability was a pass, took a chance on that and punched it in.
I was wrong there. He didn't take his opportunity for a front-on pass. He was either newly out of their academy or insultingly confident. My lips felt tight as I canceled the frontal pass card, punched up two more to take its place.
The base supervisor cut in on the phone. "It looks like old Dmitri himself, Jerry, and he's flying one of the new K-12a models. Go get him, boy!"
I felt like snapping back. He knew better than to break in on me at a time like this. I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Did he say K-12a? Did he say K-12a?
I squinted at the visor screen. The high tail, the canopy, the oddly shaped wing tanks.
I'd gone off on the identification!
I slapped another evasion pattern into the controls, a standard set, I had no time to punch up an improvisation. But he was on me like a wasp. I rejected it, threw in another set. Reject. Another!
Even as I worked, I kicked the release on my own calculator, dumped it all, selected like a flash an Ivar K-12a card, and what other estimations I could make while my mind was busy with the full-time job of evasion.
My hands were still making the motions, my fingers were flicking here, there, my feet touching here, there. But my heart wasn't in it.
He already had such an advantage that it was all I could do to keep him in my visor screen. He was to the left, to the right. I got him for a full quarter-second in the wires, but the auto gunner was too far behind, much too far.
His own guns flicked red.
I punched half a dozen buttons, slapped levers, tried to scoot for home.
To the left of my cubicle two lights went yellowish and at the same time my visor screen went dead. I was blind.
I sank back in my chair, helpless.
* * * * *
The speed indicator wavered, went slowly, deliberately to zero; the altimeter died; the fuel gauge. Finally, even the dozen or so trouble-indicators here, there, everywhere about the craft. Fifteen million dollars worth of warcraft was being shot into wreckage.
I sat there for a long, long minute and took it.
Then I got to my feet and wearily opened the door of my cubicle. Sergeant Walters and the rest of the maintenance crew were standing there. They could read in my face what had happened.
The sergeant began, "Captain, I ..."
I grunted at him. "Never mind, Sergeant. It had nothing to do with the ship's condition." I turned to head for the operations office.
Bill Dickson strolled over from the direction of his own cubicle. "Somebody said you just had a scramble with old Dmitri himself."
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know if it was him or not. Maybe some of you guys can tell a man's flying but I can't."
He grinned at me. "Shot you down, eh?"
I didn't answer.
He said, "What happened?"
"I thought it was an Ivar K-12, and I put that card in my calculator. Turned out it was one of those new models, K-12a. That was enough, of course."
Bill grinned at me again. "That's two this week. That flak got you near that bridge and now you get ..."
"Shut up," I told him.
He counted up on his fingers elaborately. "The way I figure it, you lose one more ship and you're an enemy ace."
He was irrepressible. "Damn it," I said, "will you cut it out! I've got enough to worry about without you working me over. This means I'll have to spend another half an hour in operations going over the fight. And that means I'll be late for dinner again. And you know Molly."
Bill sobered. "Gee," he said, "I'm sorry. War is hell, isn't it?"
FREEDOM
by MACK REYNOLDS
Freedom is a very dangerous thing indeed. It is so catching--like a plague--even the doctors get it.
Colonel Ilya Simonov tooled his Zil aircushion convertible along the edge of Red Square, turned right immediately beyond St. Basil's Cathedral, crossed the Moscow River by the Moskvocetski Bridge and debouched into the heavy, and largely automated traffic of Pyarnikskaya. At Dobryninskaya Square he turned west to Gorki Park which he paralleled on Kaluga until he reached the old baroque palace which housed the Ministry.
There were no flags, no signs, nothing to indicate the present nature of the aged Czarist building.
He left the car at the curb, slamming its door behind him and walking briskly to the entrance. Hard, handsome in the Slavic tradition, dedicated, Ilya Simonov was young for his rank. A plainclothes man, idling a hundred feet down the street, eyed him briefly then turned his attention elsewhere. The two guards at the gate snapped to attention, their eyes straight ahead. Colonel Simonov was in mufti and didn't answer the salute.
The inside of the old building was well known to him. He went along marble halls which contained antique statuary and other relics of the past which, for unknown reason, no one had ever bothered to remove. At the heavy door which entered upon the office of his destination he came to a halt and spoke briefly to the lieutenant at the desk there.
"The Minister is expecting me," Simonov clipped.
The lieutenant did the things receptionists do everywhere and looked up in a moment to say, "Go right in, Colonel Simonov."
Minister Kliment Blagonravov looked up from his desk at Simonov's entrance. He was a heavy-set man, heavy of face and he still affected the shaven head, now rapidly disappearing among upper-echelons of the Party. His jacket had been thrown over the back of a chair and his collar loosened; even so there was a sheen of sweat on his face.
He looked up at his most trusted field man, said in the way of greeting, "Ilya," and twisted in his swivel chair to a portable bar. He swung open the door of the small refrigerator and emerged with a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. He plucked two three-ounce glasses from a shelf and pulled the bottle's cork with his teeth. "Sit down, sit down, Ilya," he grunted as he filled the glasses. "How was Magnitogorsk?"
Ilya Simonov secured his glass before seating himself in one of the room's heavy leathern chairs. He sighed, relaxed, and said, "Terrible, I loath those ultra-industrialized cities. I wonder if the Americans do any better with Pittsburgh or the British with Birmingham."
"I know what you mean," the security head rumbled. "How did you make out with you assignment, Ilya?"
Colonel Simonov frowned down into the colorlessness of the vodka before dashing it back over his palate. "It's all in my report, Kliment." He was the only man in the organization who called Blagonravov by his first name.
His chief grunted again and reached forward to refill the glass. "I'm sure it is. Do you know how many reports go across this desk daily? And did you know that Ilya Simonov is the most long-winded, as the Americans say, of my some two hundred first-line operatives?"
The colonel shifted in his chair. "Sorry," he said. "I'll keep that in mind."
His chief rumbled his sour version of a chuckle. "Nothing, nothing, Ilya. I was jesting. However, give me a brief of your mission."
Ilya Simonov frowned again at his refilled vodka glass but didn't take it up for a moment. "A routine matter," he said. "A dozen or so engineers and technicians, two or three fairly high-ranking scientists, and three or four of the local intelligentsia had formed some sort of informal club. They were discussing national and international affairs."
Kliment Blagonravov's thin eyebrows went up but he waited for the other to go on.
Ilya said impatiently, "It was the ordinary. They featured complete freedom of opinion and expression in their weekly get-togethers. They began by criticizing without extremism, local affairs, matters concerned with their duties, that sort of thing. In the beginning, they even sent a few letters of protest to the local press, signing the name of the club. After their ideas went further out, they didn't dare do that, of course."
He took up his second drink and belted it back, not wanting to give it time to lose its chill.
His chief filled in. "And they delved further and further into matters that should be discussed only within the party--if even there--until they arrived at what point?"
Colonel Simonov shrugged. "Until they finally got to the point of discussing how best to overthrow the Soviet State and what socio-economic system should follow it. The usual thing. I've run into possible two dozen such outfits in the past five years."
His chief grunted and tossed back his own drink. "My dear Ilya," he rumbled sourly, "I've run into, as you say, more than two hundred."
Simonov was taken back by the figure but he only looked at the other.
Blagonravov said, "What did you do about it?"
"Several of them were popular locally. In view of Comrade Zverev's recent pronouncements of increased freedom of press and speech, I thought it best not to make a public display. Instead, I took measures to charge individual members with inefficiency in their work, with corruption or graft, or with other crimes having nothing to do with the reality of the situation. Six or seven in all were imprisoned, others demoted. Ten or twelve I had switched to other cities, principally into more backward areas in the virgin lands."
"And the ringleaders?" the security head asked.
"There were two of them, one a research chemist of some prominence, the other a steel plane manager. They were both, ah, unfortunately killed in an automobile accident while under the influence of drink."
"I see," Blagonravov nodded. "So actually the whole rat's nest was stamped out without attention being brought to it so far as the Magnitogorsk public is concerned." He nodded heavily again. "You can almost always be depended upon to do the right thing, Ilya. If you weren't so confoundedly good a field man, I'd make you my deputy."
Which was exactly what Simonov would have hated, but he said nothing.
"One thing," his chief said. "The origin of this, ah, club which turned into a tiny underground all of its own. Did you detect the finger of the West, stirring up trouble?"
"No." Simonov shook his head. "If such was the case, the agents involved were more clever than I'd ordinarily give either America or Common Europe credit for. I could be wrong, of course."
"Perhaps," the police head growled. He eyed the bottle before him but made no motion toward it. He wiped the palm of his right hand back over his bald pate, in unconscious irritation. "But there is something at work that we are not getting at." Blagonravov seemed to change subjects. "You can speak Czech, so I understand."
"That's right. My mother was from Bratislava. My father met her there during the Hitler war."
"And you know Czechoslovakia?"
"I've spent several vacations in the Tatras at such resorts as Tatranski Lomnica since the country's been made such a tourist center of the satellites." Ilya Simonov didn't understand this trend of the conversation.
"You have some knowledge of automobiles, too?"
Simonov shrugged. "I've driven all my life."
His chief rumbled thoughtfully, "Time isn't of essence. You can take a quick course at the Moskvich plant. A week or two would give you all the background you need."
Ilya laughed easily. "I seem to have missed something. Have my shortcomings caught up with me? Am I to be demoted to automobile mechanic?"
Kliment Blagonravov became definite. "You are being given the most important assignment of your career, Ilya. This rot, this ever growing ferment against the Party, must be cut out, liquidated. It seems to fester worse among the middle echelons of ... what did that Yugoslavian Djilas call us?... the New Class. Why? That's what we must know."
He sat farther back in his chair and his heavy lips made a mout. "Why, Ilya?" he repeated. "After more than half a century the Party has attained all its goals. Lenin's millennium is here; the end for which Stalin purged ten millions and more, is reached; the sacrifices demanded by Khrushchev in the Seven-Year Plans have finally paid off, as the Yankees say. Our gross national product, our per capita production, our standard of living, is the highest in the world. Sacrifices are no longer necessary."
There had been an almost whining note in his voice. But now he broke it off. He poured them still another drink. "At any rate, Ilya, I was with Frol Zverev this morning. Number One is incensed. It seems that in the Azerbaijan Republic, for one example, that even the Komsomols were circulating among themselves various proscribed books and pamphlets. Comrade Zverev instructed me to concentrate on discovering the reason for this disease."
Colonel Simonov scowled. "What's this got to do with Czechoslovakia--and automobiles?"
The security head waggled a fat finger at him. "What we've been doing, thus far, is dashing forth upon hearing of a new conflagration and stamping it out. Obviously, that's no answer. We must find who is behind it. How it begins. Why it begins. That's your job?"
"Why Czechoslovakia?"
"You're unknown as a security agent there, for one thing. You will go to Prague and become manager of the Moskvich automobile distribution agency. No one, not even the Czech unit of our ministry will be aware of your identity. You will play it by ear, as the Americans say."
"To whom do I report?"
"Only to me, until the task is completed. When it is, you will return to Moscow and report fully." A grimace twisted Blagonravov's face. "If I am still here. Number One is truly incensed, Ilya."
* * * * *
There had been some more. Kliment Blagonravov had evidently chosen Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, as the seat of operations in a suspicion that the wave of unrest spreading insidiously throughout the Soviet Complex owed its origins to the West. Thus far, there had been no evidence of this but the suspicion refused to die. If not the West, then who? The Cold War was long over but the battle for men's minds continued even in peace.
Ideally, Ilya Simonov was to infiltrate whatever Czech groups might be active in the illicit movement and then, if he discovered there was a higher organization, a center of the movement, he was to attempt to become a part of it. If possible he was to rise in the organisation to as high a point as he could.
Blagonravov, Minister of the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, was of the opinion that if this virus of revolt was originating from the West, then it would be stronger in the satellite countries than in Russia itself. Simonov held no opinion as yet. He would wait and see. However, there was an uncomfortable feeling about the whole assignment. The group in Magnitogorsk, he was all but sure, had no connections with Western agents, nor anyone else, for that matter. Of course, it might have been an exception.
He left the Ministry, his face thoughtful as he climbed into his waiting Zil. This assignment was going to be a lengthy one. He'd have to wind up various affairs here in Moscow, personal as well as business. He might be away for a year or more.
There was a sheet of paper on the seat of his aircushion car. He frowned at it. It couldn't have been there before. He picked it up.
It was a mimeographed throw-away.
It was entitled, FREEDOM, and it began: Comrades, more than a hundred years ago the founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, explained that the State was incompatible with liberty, that the State was an instrument of repression of one class by another. They explained that for true freedom ever to exist the State must wither away.
Under the leadership of Lenin, Stalin, Krushchev and now Zverev, the State has become ever stronger. Far from withering away, it continues to oppress us. Fellow Russians, it is time we take action! We must....
Colonel Simonov bounced from his car again, shot his eyes up and down the street. He barely refrained from drawing the 9 mm automatic which nestled under his left shoulder and which he knew how to use so well.
He curtly beckoned to the plainclothes man, still idling against the building a hundred feet or so up the street. The other approached him, touched the brim of his hat in a half salute.
Simonov snapped, "Do you know who I am?"
"Yes, colonel."
Ilya Simonov thrust the leaflet forward. "How did this get into my car?"
The other looked at it blankly. "I don't know, Colonel Simonov."
"You've been here all this time?"
"Why, yes colonel."
"With my car in plain sight?"
That didn't seem to call for an answer. The plainclothesman looked apprehensive but blank.
Simonov turned on his heel and approached the two guards at the gate. They were not more than thirty feet from where he was parked. They came to the salute but he growled, "At ease. Look here, did anyone approach my vehicle while I was inside?"
One of the soldiers said, "Sir, twenty or thirty people have passed since the Comrade colonel entered the Ministry."
The other one said, "Yes, sir."
Ilya Simonov looked from the guards to the plainclothes man and back, in frustration. Finally he spun on his heel again and re-entered the car. He slapped the elevation lever, twisted the wheel sharply, hit the jets pedal with his foot and shot into the traffic.
The plainclothes man looked after him and muttered to the guards, "Blagonravov's hatchetman. He's killed more men than the plague. A bad one to have down on you."
Simonov bowled down the Kaluga at excessive speed. "Driving like a young stilyagi," he growled in irritation at himself. But, confound it, how far had things gone when subversive leaflets were placed in cars parked in front of the ministry devoted to combating counter revolution.
* * * * *
He'd been away from Moscow for over a month and the amenities in the smog, smoke and coke fumes blanketing industrial complex of Magnitogorsk hadn't been particularly of the best. Ilya Simonov headed now for Gorki Street and the Baku Restaurant. He had an idea that it was going to be some time before the opportunity would be repeated for him to sit down to Zakouski, the salty, spicy Russian hors d'oeuvres, and to Siberian pilmeny and a bottle of Tsinandali.
The restaurant, as usual, was packed. In irritation, Ilya Simonov stood for a while waiting for a table, then, taking the head waiter's advice, agreed to share one with a stranger.
The stranger, a bearded little man, who was dwaddling over his Gurievskaya kasha dessert while reading Izvestia, glanced up at him, unseemingly, bobbed his head at Simonov's request to share his table, and returned to the newspaper.
The harried waiter took his time in turning up with a menu. Ilya Simonov attempted to relax. He had no particular reason to be upset by the leaflet found in his car. Obviously, whoever had thrown it there was distributing haphazardly. The fact that it was mimeographed, rather than printed, was an indication of lack of resources, an amateur affair. But what in the world did these people want? What did they want?
The Soviet State was turning out consumer's goods, homes, cars as no nation in the world. Vacations were lengthy, working hours short. A four-day week, even! What did they want? What motivates a man who is living on a scale unknown to a Czarist boyar to risk his position, even his life! in a stupidly impossible revolt against the country's government?
The man across from him snorted in contempt.
He looked over the top of his paper at Smirnov and said, "The election in Italy. Ridiculous!"
Ilya Simonov brought his mind back to the present. "How did they turn out? I understand the depression is terrible there."
"So I understand," the other said. "The vote turned out as was to be expected."
Simonov's eyebrows went up. "The Party has been voted into power?"
"Ha!" the other snorted. "The vote for the Party has fallen off by more than a third."
The security colonel scowled at him. "That doesn't sound reasonable, if the economic situation is as bad as has been reported."
His table mate put down the paper. "Why not? Has there ever been a country where the Party was voted into power? Anywhere--at any time during the more than half a century since the Bolsheviks first took over here in Russia?"
Simonov looked at him.
The other was talking out opinions he'd evidently formed while reading the Izvestia account of the Italian elections, not paying particular attention to the stranger across from him.
He said, his voice irritated, "Nor will there ever be. They know better. In the early days of the revolution the workers might have had illusions about the Party and it goals. Now they've lost them. Everywhere, they've lost them."
Ilya Simonov said tightly, "How do you mean?"
"I mean the Party has been rejected. With the exception of China and Yugoslavia, both of whom have their own varieties, the only countries that have adopted our system have done it under pressure from outside--not by their own efforts. Not by the will of the majority."
Colonel Simonov said flatly, "You seem to think that Marxism will never dominate the world."
"Marxism!" the other snorted. "If Marx were alive in Russia today, Frol Zverev would have him in a Siberian labor camp within twenty-four hours."
Ilya Simonov brought forth his wallet and opened it to his police credentials. He said coldly, "Let me see your identification papers. You are under arrest."
The other stared at him for a moment, then snorted his contempt. He brought forth his own wallet and handed it across the table.
Simonov flicked it open, his face hard. He looked at the man. "Konstantin Kasatkin."
"Candidate member of the Academy of Sciences," the other snapped. "And bearer of the Hero of the Soviet Union award."
Simonov flung the wallet back to him in anger. "And as such, practically immune."
The other grinned nastily at him. "Scientists, my police friend, cannot be bothered with politics. Where would the Soviet Complex be if you took to throwing biologists such as myself into prison for making unguarded statements in an absent-minded moment?"
Simonov slapped a palm down on the table. "Confound it, Comrade," he snapped, "how is the Party to maintain discipline in the country if high ranking persons such as yourself speak open subversion to strangers."
The other sported his contempt. "Perhaps there's too much discipline in Russia, Comrade policeman."
"Rather, far from enough," Simonov snapped back.
The waiter, at last, approached and extended a menu to the security officer. But Ilya Simonov had come to his feet. "Never mind," he clipped in disgust. "There is an air of degenerate decay about here."
The waiter stared at him. The biologist snorted and returned to his paper. Simonov turned and stormed out. He could find something to eat and drink in his own apartment.
* * * * *
The old, old town of Prague, the Golden City of a Hundred Spires was as always the beautifully stolid medieval metropolis which even a quarter of a century and more of Party rule could not change. The Old Town, nestled in a bend of the Vltava River, as no other city in Europe, breathed its centuries, its air of yesteryear.
Colonel Ilya Simonov, in spite of his profession, was not immune to beauty. He deliberately failed to notify his new office of his arrival, flew in on a Ceskoslovenskè Aerolinie Tupolev rocket liner and spent his first night at the Alcron Hotel just off Wenceslas Square. He knew that as the new manager of the local Moskvich distribution agency he'd have fairly elaborate quarters, probably in a good section of town, but this first night he wanted to himself.
He spent it wandering quietly in the old quarter, dropping in to the age-old beer halls for a half liter of Pilsen Urquell here, a foaming stein of Smichov Lager there. Czech beer, he was reminded all over again, is the best in the world. No argument, no debate, the best in the world.
He ate in the endless automated cafeterias that line the Viclavské Námesi the entertainment center of Prague. Ate an open sandwich here, some crabmeat salad there, a sausage and another glass of Pilsen somewhere else again. He was getting the feel of the town and of its people. Of recent years, some of the tension had gone out of the atmosphere in Moscow and the other Soviet centers; with the coming of economic prosperity there had also come a relaxation. The fear, so heavy in the Stalin era, had fallen off in that of Khrushchev and still more so in the present reign of Frol Zverev. In fact, Ilya Simonov was not alone in Party circles in wondering whether or not discipline had been allowed to slip too far. It is easier, the old Russian proverb goes, to hang onto the reins than to regain them once dropped.
But if Moscow had lost much of its pall of fear, Prague had certainly gone even further. In fact, in the U Pinkasu beer hall Simonov had idly picked up a magazine left by some earlier wassailer. It was a light literary publication devoted almost exclusively to humor. There were various cartoons, some of them touching political subjects. Ilya Simonov had been shocked to see a caricature of Frol Zverev himself. Zverev, Number One! Ridiculed in a second-rate magazine in a satellite country!
Ilya Simonov made a note of the name and address of the magazine and the issue.
Across the heavy wooden community table from him, a beer drinker grinned, in typically friendly Czech style. "A good magazine," he said. "You should subscribe."
A waiter, bearing an even dozen liter-size steins of beer hurried along, spotted the fact that Simonov's mug was empty, slipped a full one into its place, gave the police agent's saucer a quick mark of a pencil, and hurried on again. In the U Pinkasu, it was supposed that you wanted another beer so long as you remained sitting. When you finally staggered to your feet, the nearest waiter counted the number of pencil marks on your saucer and you paid up.
Ilya Simonov said cautiously to his neighbor, "Seems to be quite, ah, brash." He tapped the magazine with a finger.
The other shrugged and grinned again. "Things loosen up as the years go by," he said. "What a man wouldn't have dared say to his own wife five years ago, they have on TV today."
"I'm surprised the police don't take steps," Simonov said, trying to keep his voice expressionless.
The other took a deep swallow of his Pilsen Urquell. He pursed his lips and thought about it. "You know, I wonder if they'd dare. Such a case brought into the People's Courts might lead to all sort of public reaction these days."
It had been some years since Ilya Simonov had been in Prague and even then he'd only gone through on the way to the ski resorts in the mountains. He was shocked to find the Czech state's control had fallen off to this extent. Why, here he was, a complete stranger, being openly talked to on political subjects.
His cross-the-table neighbor shook his head, obviously pleased. "If you think Prague is good, you ought to see Warsaw. It's as free as Paris! I saw a Tri-D cinema up there about two months ago. You know what it was about? The purges in Moscow back in the 1930s."
"A rather unique subject," Simonov said.
"Um-m-m, made a very strong case for Bukharin, in particular."
Simonov said, very slowly, "I don't understand. You mean this ... this film supported the, ah, Old Bolsheviks?"
"Of course. Why not? Everybody knows they weren't guilty." The Czech snorted deprecation. "At least not guilty of what they were charged with. They were in Stalin's way and he liquidated them." The Czech thought about it for a while. "I wonder if he was already insane, that far back."
Had he taken up his mug of beer and dashed it into Simonov's face, he couldn't have surprised the Russian more.
Ilya Simonov had to take control of himself. His first instinct was to show his credentials, arrest the man and have him hauled up before the local agency of Simonov's ministry.
But obviously that was out of the question. He was in Czechoslovakia and, although Moscow still dominated the Soviet Complex, there was local autonomy and the Czech police just didn't enjoy their affairs being meddled with unless in extreme urgency.
Besides, this man was obviously only one among many. A stranger in a beer hall. Ilya Simonov suspected that if he continued his wanderings about the town, he'd meet in the process of only one evening a score of persons who would talk the same way.
Besides, still again, he was here in Prague incognito, his job to trace the sources of this dry rot, not to run down individual Czechs.
But the cinema, and TV! Surely anti-Party sentiment hadn't been allowed to go this far!
He got up from the table shakily, paid up for his beer and forced himself to nod good-bye in friendly fashion to the subversive Czech he'd been talking to.
In the morning he strolled over to the offices of the Moskvich Agency which was located only a few blocks from his hotel on Celetna Hybernski. The Russian car agency, he knew, was having a fairly hard go of it in Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, long before the Party took over in 1948, had been a highly industrialized, modern nation. They consequently had their own automobile works, such as Skoda, and their models were locally more popular than the Russian Moskvich, Zim and Pobeda.
Theoretically, the reason Ilya Simonov was the newly appointed agency head was to push Moskvich sales among the Czechs. He thought, half humorously, half sourly, to himself, even under the Party we have competition and pressure for higher sales. What was it that some American economist had called them? a system of State-Capitalism.
At the Moskvich offices he found himself in command of a staff that consisted of three fellow Russians, and a dozen or so Czech assistants. His immediate subordinate was a Catherina Panova, whose dossier revealed her to be a party member, though evidently not a particularly active one, at least not since she'd been assigned here in Prague.
She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, a graduate of the University of Moscow, and although she'd been in the Czech capital only a matter of six months or so, had already adapted to the more fashionable dress that the style-conscious women of this former Western capital went in for. Besides that, Catherina Panova managed to be one of the downright prettiest girls Ilya Simonov had ever seen.
His career had largely kept him from serious involvement in the past. Certainly the dedicated women you usually found in Party ranks seldom were of the type that inspired you to romance but he wondered now, looking at this new assistant of his, if he hadn't let too much of his youth go by without more investigation into the usually favorite pastime of youth.
He wondered also, but only briefly, if he should reveal his actual identity to her. She was, after all, a party member. But then he checked himself. Kliment Blagonravov had stressed the necessity of complete secrecy. Not even the local offices of the ministry were to be acquainted with his presence.
He let Catherina introduce him around, familiarize him with the local methods of going about their business affairs and the problems they were running into.
She ran a hand back over her forehead, placing a wisp of errant hair, and said, "I suppose, as an expert from Moscow, you'll be installing a whole set of new methods."
It was far from his intention to spend much time at office work. He said, "Not at all. There is no hurry. For a time, we'll continues your present policies, just to get the feel of the situation. Then perhaps in a few months, we'll come up with some ideas."
She obviously liked his use of "we" rather than "I." Evidently, the staff had been a bit nervous upon his appointment as new manager. He already felt, vaguely, that the three Russians here had no desire to return to their homeland. Evidently, there was something about Czechoslovakia that appealed to them all. The fact irritated him but somehow didn't surprise.
Catherina said, "As a matter of fact, I have some opinions on possible changes myself. Perhaps if you'll have dinner with me tonight, we can discuss them informally."
Ilya Simonov was only mildly surprised at her suggesting a rendezvous with him. Party members were expected to ignore sex and be on an equal footing. She was as free to suggest a dinner date to him, as he was to her. Of course, she wasn't speaking as a Party member now. In fact, he hadn't even revealed to her his own membership.
As it worked out, they never got around to discussing distribution of the new Moskvich aircushion jet car. They became far too busy enjoying food, drink, dancing--and each other.
They ate at the Budapest, in the Prava Hotel, complete with Hungarian dishes and Riesling, and they danced to the inevitable gypsy music. It occurred to Ilya Simonov that there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the fact that your feminine companion was the most beautiful woman in the establishment and one of the most attractively dressed. There was a certain lift to be enjoyed when you realized that the eyes of half the other males present were following you in envy.
One thing led to another. He insisted on introducing her to barack, the Hungarian national spirit, in the way of a digestive. The apricot brandy, distilled to the point of losing all sweetness and fruit flavor, required learning. It must be tossed back just so. By the time Catherina had the knack, neither of them were feeling strain. In fact, it became obviously necessary for him to be given a guided tour of Prague's night spots.
It turned out that Prague offered considerably more than Moscow, which even with the new relaxation was still one of the most staid cities in the Soviet Complex.
They took in the vaudeville at the Alhambra, and the variety at the Prazské Varieté.
They took in the show at the U Sv Tomíse, the age old tavern which had been making its own smoked black beer since the fifteenth century. And here Catherina with the assistance of revelers from neighboring tables taught him the correct pronunciation of Na zdraví! the Czech toast. It seemed required to go from heavy planked table to table practicing the new salutation to the accompaniment of the pungent borovika gin.
Somewhere in here they saw the Joseph Skupa puppets, and at this stage, Ilya Simonov found only great amusement at the political innuendoes involved in half the skits. It would never had one in Moscow or Leningrad, of course, but here it was very amusing indeed. There was even a caricature of a security police minister who could only have been his superior Kliment Blagonravov.
They wound up finally at the U Kalicha, made famous by Hasek in "The Good Soldier Schweik." In fact various illustrations from the original classic were framed on the walls.
They had been laughing over their early morning snack, now Ilya Simonov looked at her approvingly. "See here," he said. "We must do this again."
"Fine," she laughed.
"In fact, tomorrow," he insisted. He looked at his watch. "I mean tonight."
She laughed at him. "Our great expert from Moscow. Far from improving our operations, there'll be less accomplished than ever if you make a nightly practice of carrying on like we did this evening."
He laughed too. "But tonight," he said insistently.
She shook her head. "Sorry, but I'm already booked up for this evening."
He scowled for the first time in hours. He'd seemingly forgotten that he hardly knew this girl. What her personal life was, he had no idea. For that matter, she might be engaged or even married. The very idea irritated him.
He said stiffly, "Ah, you have a date?"
Catherina laughed again. "My, what a dark face. If I didn't know you to be an automobile distributor expert, I would suspect you of being a security police agent." She shook her head. "Not a date. If by that you mean another man. There is a meeting that I would like to attend."
"A meeting! It sounds dry as--"
She was shaking her head. "Oh, no. A group I belong to. Very interesting. We're to be addressed by an American journalist."
Suddenly he was all but sober.
He tried to smooth over the short space of silence his surprise had precipitated. "An American journalist? Under government auspices?"
"Hardly." She smiled at him over her glass of Pilsen. "I forget," she said. "If you're from Moscow, you probably aren't aware of how open things are here in Prague. A whiff of fresh air."
"I don't understand. Is this group of yours, ah, illegal?"
She shrugged impatiently. "Oh, of course not. Don't be silly. We gather to hear various speakers, to discuss world affairs. That sort of thing. Oh, of course, theoretically it's illegal, but for that matter even the head of the Skoda plant attended last week. It's only for the more advanced intellectuals, of course. Very advanced. But, for that matter, I know a dozen or so Party members, both Czech and Russian, who attend."
"But an American journalist? What's he doing in the country? Is he accredited?"
"No, no. You misunderstand. He entered as a tourist, came across some Prague newspapermen and as an upshot he's to give a talk on freedom of the press."
"I see," Simonov said.
She was impatient with him. "You don't understand at all. See here, why don't you come along tonight? I'm sure I can get you in."
"It sounds like a good idea," Ilya Simonov said. He was completely sober now.
* * * * *
He made a written report to Kliment Blagonravov before turning in. He mentioned the rather free discussion of matters political in the Czech capital, using the man he'd met in the beer hall as an example. He reported--although, undoubtedly, Blagonravov would already have the information--hearing of a Polish Tri-D film which had defended the Old Bolsheviks purged in the 1930s. He mentioned the literary magazine, with its caricature of Frol Zverev, and, last of all, and then after hesitation, he reported party member Catherina Panova, who evidently belonged to a group of intellectuals who were not above listening to a talk given by a foreign journalist who was not speaking under the auspices of the Czech Party nor the government.
At the office, later, Catherina grinned at him and made a face. She ticked it off on her fingers. "Riesling, barack, smoked black beer, and borovika gin--we should have know better."
He went along with her, putting one hand to his forehead. "We should have stuck to vodka."
"Well," she said, "tonight we can be virtuous. An intellectual evening, rather than a carouse."
Actually, she didn't look at all the worse for wear. Evidently, Catherina Panova was still young enough that she could pub crawl all night, and still look fresh and alert in the morning. His own mouth felt lined with improperly tanned suede.
He was quickly fitting into the routine of the office. Actually, it worked smoothly enough that little effort was demanded of him. The Czech employees handled almost all the details. Evidently, the word of his evening on the town had somehow spread, and the fact that he was prone to a good time had relieved their fears of a martinet sent down from the central offices. They were beginning to relax in his presence.
In fact, they relaxed to the point where one of the girls didn't even bother to hide the book she was reading during a period where there was a lull in activity. It was Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago."
He frowned remembering vaguely the controversy over the book a couple of decades earlier. Ilya Simonov said, "Pasternak. Do they print his works here in Czechoslovakia?"
The girl shrugged and looked at the back of the cover. "German publisher," she said idly. "Printed in Frankfurt."
He kept his voice from registering either surprise or disapproval. "You mean such books are imported? By whom?"
"Oh, not imported by an official agency, but we Czechs are doing a good deal more travel than we used to. Business trips, tourist trips, vacations. And, of course, we bring back books you can't get here." She shrugged again. "Very common."
Simonov said blankly. "But the customs. The border police--"
She smiled in a manner that suggested he lacked sophistication. "They never bother any more. They're human, too."
Ilya Simonov wandered off. He was astonished at the extent to which controls were slipping in a satellite country. There seemed practically no discipline, in the old sense, at all. He began to see one reason why his superior had sent him here to Prague. For years, most of his work had been either in Moscow or in the newly opened industrial areas in Siberia. He had lost touch with developments in this part of the Soviet Complex.
It came to him that this sort of thing could work like a geometric progression. Give a man a bit of rope one day, and he expects, and takes, twice as much the next, and twice that the next. And as with individuals, so with whole populations.
This was going to have to be stopped soon, or Party control would disappear. Ilya Simonov felt an edge of uncertainty. Nikita Khrushchev should never have made those first motions of liberalization following Stalin's death. Not if they eventually culminated in this sort of thing.
He and Catherina drove to her meeting place that evening after dinner.
She explained as they went that the group was quite informal, usually meeting at the homes of group members who had fairly large places in the country. She didn't seem to know how it had originally begun. The meetings had been going on for a year of more before she arrived in Prague. A Czech friend had taken her along one night, and she'd been attending ever since. There were other, similar groups, in town.
"But what's the purpose of the organization?" Simonov asked her.
She was driving her little aircushion Moskvich. They crossed over the Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, "I wonder if he was insane from the first."
He hadn't understood her change of subject. "How do you mean?" he said.
"Stalin. I wonder how early it was in his career that he went insane."
This was the second time in the past few days that Ilya Simonov had run into this matter of the former dictator's mental condition. He said now, "I've heard the opinion before. Where did you pick it up?"
"Oh, it's quite commonly believed in the Western countries."
"But, have you ever been, ah, West?"
"Oh, from time to time! Berlin, Vienna, Geneva. Even Paris twice, on vacation, you know, and to various conferences. But that's not what I mean. In the western magazines and newspapers. You can get them here in Prague now. But to get back to your question. There is no particular purpose of the organization."
She turned the car left on Budenská and sped up into the Holesovice section of town.
* * * * *
The nonchalance of it all was what stopped Ilya Simonov. Here was a Party member calmly discussing whether or not the greatest Russian of them all, after Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a man as unbalanced as Czar Peter the Great.
They pulled up before a rather large house that would have been called a dacha back in Moscow. Evidently, Ilya Simonov decided, whoever was sponsoring this night's get together, was a man of prominence. He grimaced inwardly. A lot of high placed heads were going to roll before he was through.
It turned out that the host was Leos Dvorak, the internationally famed cinema director and quite an idol of Ilya Simonov in his earlier days when he'd found more time for entertainment. It was a shock to meet the man under these circumstances.
Catherina Panova was obviously quite popular among this gathering. Their host gave her an affectionate squeeze in way of greeting, then shook hands with Simonov when Catherina introduced him.
"Newly from Moscow, eh?" the film director said, squinting at the security agent. He had a sharp glance, almost, it seemed to Simonov, as though he detected the real nature of the newcomer. "It's been several years since I've been to Moscow. Are things loosening up there?"
"Loosening up?" Simonov said.
Leos Dvorak laughed and said to Catherina, "Probably not. I've always been of the opinion that the Party's influence would shrivel away first at its extremities. Membership would fall off abroad, in the neutral countries and in Common Europe and the Americas. Then in the so-called satellite countries. Last of all in Russia herself. But, very last, Moscow--the dullest, stodgiest, most backward intellectually, capital city in the world." The director laughed again and turned away to greet a new guest.
This was open treason. Ilya Simonov had been lucky. Within the first few days of being in the Czech capital he'd contacted one of the groups which he'd been sent to unmask.
Now he said mildly to Catherina Panova, "He seems rather outspoken."
She chuckled. "Leos is quite strongly opinionated. His theory is that the more successful the Party is in attaining the goals it set half a century ago, the less necessary it becomes. He's of the opinion that it will eventually atrophy, shrivel away to the point that all that will be needed will be the slightest of pushes to end its domination."
Ilya Simonov said, "And the rest of the group here, do they agree?"
Catherina shrugged. "Some do, some don't. Some of them are of the opinion that it will take another blood bath. That the party will attempt to hang onto its power and will have to be destroyed."
Simonov said evenly, "And you? What do you think?"
She frowned, prettily. "I'm not sure. I suppose I'm still in the process of forming an opinion."
Their host was calling them together and leading the way to the garden where chairs had been set up. There seemed to be about twenty-five persons present in all. Ilya Simonov had been introduced to no more than half of them. His memory was good and already he was composing a report to Kliment Blagonravov, listing those names he recalled. Some were Czechs, some citizens of other satellite countries, several, including Catherina, were actually Russians.
The American, a newspaperman named Dickson, had an open-faced freshness, hardly plausible in an agent from the West trying to subvert Party leadership. Ilya Simonov couldn't quite figure him out.
Dickson was introduced by Leos Dvorak who informed his guests that the American had been reluctant but had finally agreed to give them his opinion on the press on both sides of what had once been called the Iron Curtain.
Dickson grinned boyishly and said, "I'm not a public speaker, and, for that matter, I haven't had time to put together a talk for you. I think what I'll do is read a little clipping I've got here--sort of a text--and then, well, throw the meeting open to questions. I'll try to answer anything you have to ask."
He brought forth a piece of paper. "This is from the British writer, Huxley. I think it's pretty good." He cleared his voice and began to read.
Mass communication ... is simply a force and like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensible to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communications are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication-power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State Ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something to which a Jeffersonian democrat could approve.
Ilya Simonov looked blankly at Catherina and whispered, "Why, what he's reading is as much an attack on the West as it is on us."
She looked at him and whispered back, "Well, why not? This gathering is to discuss freedom of the press."
He said blankly, "But as an agent of the West--"
She frowned at him. "Mr. Dickson isn't an agent of the West. He's an American journalist."
"Surely you can't believe he has no connections with the imperialist governments."
"Certainly, he hasn't. What sort of meeting do you think this is? We're not interested in Western propaganda. We're a group of intellectuals searching for freedom of ideas."
Ilya Simonov was taken back once again.
* * * * *
Colonel Ilya Simonov dismissed his cab in front of the Ministry and walked toward the gate. Down the street the same plainclothes man, who had been lounging there the last time he'd reported, once again took him in, then looked away. The two guards snapped to attention, and the security agent strode by them unnoticing.
At the lieutenant's desk, before the offices of Kliment Blagonravov, he stopped and said, "Colonel Simonov. I have no appointment but I think the Minister will see me."
"Yes, Comrade Colonel," the lieutenant said. He spoke into an inter-office communicator, then looked up. "Minister Blagonravov will be able to see you in a few minutes, sir."
Ilya Simonov stared nervously and unseeingly out a window while he waited. Gorki Park lay across the way. It, like Moscow in general, had changed a good deal in Simonov's memory. Everything in Russia had changed a good deal, he realized. And was changing. And what was the end to be? Or was there ever an end? Of course not. There is no end, ever. Only new changes to come.
The lieutenant said, "The Minister is free now, Comrade Colonel."
Ilya Simonov muttered something to him and pushed his way through the heavy door.
Blagonravov looked up from his desk and rumbled affectionately, "Ilya! It's good to see you. Have a drink! You've lost weight, Ilya!"
His top field man sank into the same chair he'd occupied nine months before, and accepted the ice-cold vodka.
Blagonravov poured another drink for himself, then scowled at the other. "Where have you been? When you first went off to Prague, I got reports from you almost every day. These last few months I've hardly heard from you." He rumbled his version of a chuckle. "If I didn't know you better, I'd think there was a woman."
Ilya Simonov looked at him wanly. "That too, Kliment."
"You are jesting!"
"No. Not really. I had hoped to become engaged--soon."
"A party member? I never thought of you as the marrying type, Ilya."
Simonov said slowly, "Yes, a Party member. Catherina Panova, my assistant in the automobile agency in Prague."
Blagonravov scowled heavily at him, put forth his fat lips in a thoughtful pout. He came to his feet, approached a file cabinet, fishing from his pocket a key ring. He unlocked the cabinet, brought forth a sheaf of papers with which he returned to his desk. He fumbled though them for a moment, found the paper he wanted and read it. He scowled again and looked up at his agent.
"Your first report," he said. "Catherina Panova. From what you say here, a dangerous reactionary. Certainly she has no place in Party ranks."
Ilya Simonov said, "Is that the complete file of my assignment?"
"Yes. I've kept it here in my own office. I've wanted this to be ultra-undercover. No one except you and me. I had hopes of you working your way up into the enemy's organization, and I wanted no possible chance of you being betrayed. You don't seem to have been too successful."
"I was as successful as it's possible to be."
The security minister leaned forward. "Ah ha! I knew I could trust you to bring back results, Ilya. This will take Frol Zverev's pressure off me. Number One has been riding me hard." Blagonravov poured them both another drink. "You were able to insert yourself into their higher circles?"
Simonov said, "Kliment, there are no higher circles."
His chief glared at him. "Nonsense!" He tapped the file with a pudgy finger. "In your early reports you described several groups, small organizations, illegal meetings. There must be an upper organization, some movement supported from the West most likely."
Ilya Simonov was shaking his head. "No. They're all spontaneous."
His chief growled, "I tell you there are literally thousands of these little groups. That hardly sounds like a spontaneous phenomenon."
"Nevertheless, that is what my investigations have led me to believe."
Blagonravov glowered at him, uncertainly. Finally, he said, "Well, confound it, you've spent the better part of a year among them. What's it all about? What do they want?"
Ilya Simonov said flatly, "They want freedom, Kliment."
"Freedom! What do you mean, freedom? The Soviet Complex is the most highly industrialized area of the world. Our people have the highest standard of living anywhere. Don't they understand? We've met all the promises we ever made. We've reached far and beyond the point ever dreamed of by Utopians. The people, all of the people, have it made as the Americans say."
"Except for freedom," Simonov said doggedly. "These groups are springing up everywhere, spontaneously. Thus far, perhaps, our ministry has been able to suppress some of them. But the pace is accelerating. They aren't inter-organized now. But how soon they'll start to be, I don't know. Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a unifying idea. A new socio-political system to advocate a way of guaranteeing the basic liberties. Then, of course, the fat will be in the fire."
"Ilya! You've been working too hard. I've pushed you too much, relied on you too much. You need a good lengthy vacation."
Simonov shrugged. "Perhaps. But what I've just said is the truth."
His chief snorted heavily. "You half sound as though you agree with them."
"I do, Kliment."
"I am in no mood for gags, as the Yankees say."
Ilya Simonov looked at him wearily. He said slowly, "You sent me to investigate an epidemic, a spreading disease. Very well, I report that it's highly contagious."
* * * * *
Blagonravov poured himself more vodka angrily. "Explain yourself. What's this all about?"
His former best field man said, "Kliment--"
"I want no familiarities from you, colonel!"
"Yes, sir." Ilya Simonov went on doggedly. "Man never achieves complete freedom. It's a goal never reached, but one continually striven for. The moment as small a group as two or three gather together, all of them must give up some of the individual's freedom. When man associates with millions of his fellow men, he gives up a good many freedoms for the sake of the community. But always he works to retain as much liberty as possible, and to gain more. It's the nature of our species, I suppose."
"You sound as though you've become corrupted by Western ideas," the security head muttered dangerously.
Simonov shook his head. "No. The same thing applies over there. Even in countries such as Sweden and Switzerland, where institutions are as free as anywhere in the world, the people are continually striving for more. Governments and socio-economic systems seem continually to whittle away at individual liberty. But always man fights back and tries to achieve new heights for himself.
"In the name of developing our country, the Party all but eliminated freedom in the Soviet Complex, but now the goals have been reached and the people will no longer put up with us, sir."
"Us!" Kliment Blagonravov growled bitterly. "You are hardly to be considered in the Party's ranks any longer, Simonov. Why in the world did you ever return here?" He sneered fatly. "Your best bet would have been to escape over the border into the West."
Simonov looked at the file on the other's desk. "I wanted to regain those reports I made in the early days of my assignment. I've listed in them some fifty names, names of men and women who are now my friends."
The fat lips worked in and out. "It must be that woman. You've become soft in the head, Simonov." Blagonravov tapped the file beneath his heavy fingers. "Never fear, before the week is out these fifty persons will be either in prison or in their graves."
With a fluid motion, Ilya Simonov produced a small caliber gun, a special model designed for security agents. An unusual snout proclaimed its quiet virtues as guns go.
"No, Kliment," Ilya Simonov said.
"Are you mad!"
"No, Kliment, but I must have those reports." Ilya Simonov came to his feet and reached for them.
With a roar of rage, Kliment Blagonravov slammed open a drawer and dove a beefy paw into it. With shocking speed for so heavy a man, he scooped up a heavy military revolver.
And Colonel Ilya Simonov shot him neatly and accurately in the head. The silenced gun made no more sound than a pop.
Blagonravov, his dying eyes registering unbelieving shock, fell back into his heavy swivel chair.
* * * * *
Simonov worked quickly. He gathered up his reports, checked quickly to see they were all there. Struck a match, lit one of the reports and dropped it into the large ashtray on the desk. One by one he lit them all and when all were consumed, stirred the ashes until they were completely pulverized.
He poured himself another vodka, downed it, stiff wristed, then without turning to look at the dead man again, made his way to the door.
He slipped out and said to the lieutenant, "The Minister says that he is under no circumstances to be disturbed for the next hour."
The lieutenant frowned at him. "But he has an appointment."
Colonel Ilya Simonov shrugged. "Those were his instructions. Not to be bothered under any circumstances."
"But it was an appointment with Number One!"
That was bad. And unforeseen. Ilya Simonov said, "It's probably been canceled. All I'm saying is that Minister Blagonravov instructs you not to bother him under any circumstances for the next hour."
He left the other and strode down the corridor, keeping himself from too obvious, a quickened pace.
At the entrance to the Ministry, he shot his glance up and down the street. He was in the clutch now, and knew it. He had few illusions.
Not a cab in sight. He began to cross the road toward the park. In a matter of moments there, he'd be lost in the trees and shrubbery. He had rather vague plans. Actually, he was playing things as they came. There was a close friend in whose apartment he could hide, a man who owed him his life. He could disguise himself. Possibly buy or borrow a car. If he could get back to Prague, he was safe. Perhaps he and Catherina could defect to the West.
Somebody was screaming something from a window in the Ministry.
Ilya Simonov quickened his pace. He was nearly across the street now. He thought, foolishly, Whoever that is shouting is so excited he sounds more like a woman than a man.
Another voice took up the shout. It was the plainclothes man. Feet began pounding.
There were two more shouts. The guards. But he was across now. The shrubs were only a foot away.
The shattering blackness hit him in the back of the head. It was over immediately.
Afterwards, the plainclothes man and the two guards stood over him. Men began pouring from the Ministry in their direction.
Colonel Ilya Simonov was a meaningless, bloody heap on the edge of the park's grass.
The guard who had shot said, "He killed the Minister. He must have been crazy to think he could get away with it. What did he want?"
"Well, we'll never know now," the plainclothesman grunted.
THE END
NOVICE
by James H. Schmitz
A novice is one who is inexperienced--but that doesn't mean incompetent. Nor does it mean stupid!
There was, Telzey Amberdon thought, someone besides TT and herself in the garden. Not, of course, Aunt Halet, who was in the house waiting for an early visitor to arrive, and not one of the servants. Someone or something else must be concealed among the thickets of magnificently flowering native Jontarou shrubs about Telzey.
She could think of no other way to account for Tick-Tock's spooked behavior--nor, to be honest about it, for the manner her own nerves were acting up without visible cause this morning.
Telzey plucked a blade of grass, slipped the end between her lips and chewed it gently, her face puzzled and concerned. She wasn't ordinarily afflicted with nervousness. Fifteen years old, genius level, brown as a berry and not at all bad looking in her sunbriefs, she was the youngest member of one of Orado's most prominent families and a second-year law student at one of the most exclusive schools in the Federation of the Hub. Her physical, mental, and emotional health, she'd always been informed, was excellent. Aunt Halet's frequent cracks about the inherent instability of the genius level could be ignored; Halet's own stability seemed questionable at best.
But none of that made the present odd situation any less disagreeable....
The trouble might have begun, Telzey decided, during the night, within an hour after they arrived from the spaceport at the guest house Halet had rented in Port Nichay for their vacation on Jontarou. Telzey had retired at once to her second-story bedroom with Tick-Tock; but she barely got to sleep before something awakened her again. Turning over, she discovered TT reared up before the window, her forepaws on the sill, big cat-head outlined against the star-hazed night sky, staring fixedly down into the garden.
Telzey, only curious at that point, climbed out of bed and joined TT at the window. There was nothing in particular to be seen, and if the scents and minor night-sounds which came from the garden weren't exactly what they were used to, Jontarou was after all an unfamiliar planet. What else would one expect here?
But Tick-Tock's muscular back felt tense and rigid when Telzey laid her arm across it, and except for an absent-minded dig with her forehead against Telzey's shoulder, TT refused to let her attention be distracted from whatever had absorbed it. Now and then, a low, ominous rumble came from her furry throat, a half-angry, half-questioning sound. Telzey began to feel a little uncomfortable. She managed finally to coax Tick-Tock away from the window, but neither of them slept well the rest of the night. At breakfast, Aunt Halet made one of her typical nasty-sweet remarks.
"You look so fatigued, dear--as if you were under some severe mental strain ... which, of course, you might be," Halet added musingly. With her gold-blond hair piled high on her head and her peaches and cream complexion, Halet looked fresh as a daisy herself ... a malicious daisy. "Now wasn't I right in insisting to Jessamine that you needed a vacation away from that terribly intellectual school?" She smiled gently.
"Absolutely," Telzey agreed, restraining the impulse to fling a spoonful of egg yolk at her father's younger sister. Aunt Halet often inspired such impulses, but Telzey had promised her mother to avoid actual battles on the Jontarou trip, if possible. After breakfast, she went out into the back garden with Tick-Tock, who immediately walked into a thicket, camouflaged herself and vanished from sight. It seemed to add up to something. But what?
Telzey strolled about the garden a while, maintaining a pretense of nonchalant interest in Jontarou's flowers and colorful bug life. She experienced the most curious little chills of alarm from time to time, but discovered no signs of a lurking intruder, or of TT either. Then, for half an hour or more, she'd just sat cross-legged in the grass, waiting quietly for Tick-Tock to show up of her own accord. And the big lunk-head hadn't obliged.
Telzey scratched a tanned knee-cap, scowling at Port Nichay's park trees beyond the garden wall. It seemed idiotic to feel scared when she couldn't even tell whether there was anything to be scared about! And, aside from that, another unreasonable feeling kept growing stronger by the minute now. This was to the effect that she should be doing some unstated but specific thing....
In fact, that Tick-Tock wanted her to do some specific thing!
Completely idiotic!
Abruptly, Telzey closed her eyes, thought sharply, "Tick-Tock?" and waited--suddenly very angry at herself for having given in to her fancies to this extent--for whatever might happen.
* * * * *
She had never really established that she was able to tell, by a kind of symbolic mind-picture method, like a short waking dream, approximately what TT was thinking and feeling. Five years before, when she'd discovered Tick-Tock--an odd-looking and odder-behaved stray kitten then--in the woods near the Amberdons' summer home on Orado, Telzey had thought so. But it might never have been more than a colorful play of her imagination; and after she got into law school and grew increasingly absorbed in her studies, she almost forgot the matter again.
Today, perhaps because she was disturbed about Tick-Tock's behavior, the customary response was extraordinarily prompt. The warm glow of sunlight shining through her closed eyelids faded out quickly and was replaced by some inner darkness. In the darkness there appeared then an image of Tick-Tock sitting a little way off beside an open door in an old stone wall, green eyes fixed on Telzey. Telzey got the impression that TT was inviting her to go through the door, and, for some reason, the thought frightened her.
Again, there was an immediate reaction. The scene with Tick-Tock and the door vanished; and Telzey felt she was standing in a pitch-black room, knowing that if she moved even one step forwards, something that was waiting there silently would reach out and grab her.
Naturally, she recoiled ... and at once found herself sitting, eyes still closed and the sunlight bathing her lids, in the grass of the guest house garden.
She opened her eyes, looked around. Her heart was thumping rapidly. The experience couldn't have lasted more than four or five seconds, but it had been extremely vivid, a whole, compact little nightmare. None of her earlier experiments at getting into mental communication with TT had been like that.
It served her right, Telzey thought, for trying such a childish stunt at the moment! What she should have done at once was to make a methodical search for the foolish beast--TT was bound to be somewhere nearby--locate her behind her camouflage, and hang on to her then until this nonsense in the garden was explained! Talented as Tick-Tock was at blotting herself out, it usually was possible to spot her if one directed one's attention to shadow patterns. Telzey began a surreptitious study of the flowering bushes about her.
Three minutes later, off to her right, where the ground was banked beneath a six-foot step in the garden's terraces, Tick-Tock's outline suddenly caught her eye. Flat on her belly, head lifted above her paws, quite motionless, TT seemed like a transparent wraith stretched out along the terrace, barely discernible even when stared at directly. It was a convincing illusion; but what seemed to be rocks, plant leaves, and sun-splotched earth seen through the wraith-outline was simply the camouflage pattern TT had printed for the moment on her hide. She could have changed it completely in an instant to conform to a different background.
Telzey pointed an accusing finger.
"See you!" she announced, feeling a surge of relief which seemed as unaccountable as the rest of it.
The wraith twitched one ear in acknowledgment, the head outlines shifting as the camouflaged face turned towards Telzey. Then the inwardly uncamouflaged, very substantial looking mouth opened slowly, showing Tick-Tock's red tongue and curved white tusks. The mouth stretched in a wide yawn, snapped shut with a click of meshing teeth, became indistinguishable again. Next, a pair of camouflaged lids drew back from TT's round, brilliant-green eyes. The eyes stared across the lawn at Telzey.
Telzey said irritably, "Quit clowning around, TT!"
The eyes blinked, and Tick-Tock's natural bronze-brown color suddenly flowed over her head, down her neck and across her body into legs and tail. Against the side of the terrace, as if materializing into solidity at that moment, appeared two hundred pounds of supple, rangy, long-tailed cat ... or catlike creature. TT's actual origin had never been established. The best guesses were that what Telzey had found playing around in the woods five years ago was either a bio-structural experiment which had got away from a private laboratory on Orado, or some spaceman's lost pet, brought to the capital planet from one of the remote colonies beyond the Hub. On top of TT's head was a large, fluffy pompom of white fur, which might have looked ridiculous on another animal, but didn't on her. Even as a fat kitten, hanging head down from the side of a wall by the broad sucker pads in her paws, TT had possessed enormous dignity.
Telzey studied her, the feeling of relief fading again. Tick-Tock, ordinarily the most restful and composed of companions, definitely was still tensed up about something. That big, lazy yawn a moment ago, the attitude of stretched-out relaxation ... all pure sham!
"What is eating you?" she asked in exasperation.
The green eyes stared at her, solemn, watchful, seeming for that fleeting instant quite alien. And why, Telzey thought, should the old question of what Tick-Tock really was pass through her mind just now? After her rather alarming rate of growth began to taper off last year, nobody had cared any more.
For a moment, Telzey had the uncanny certainty of having had the answer to this situation almost in her grasp. An answer which appeared to involve the world of Jontarou, Tick-Tock, and of all unlikely factors--Aunt Halet.
She shook her head, TT's impassive green eyes blinked.
* * * * *
Jontarou? The planet lay outside Telzey's sphere of personal interests, but she'd read up on it on the way here from Orado. Among all the worlds of the Hub, Jontarou was the paradise for zoologists and sportsmen, a gigantic animal preserve, its continents and seas swarming with magnificent game. Under Federation law, it was being retained deliberately in the primitive state in which it had been discovered. Port Nichay, the only city, actually the only inhabited point on Jontarou, was beautiful and quiet, a pattern of vast but elegantly slender towers, each separated from the others by four or five miles of rolling parkland and interconnected only by the threads of transparent skyways. Near the horizon, just visible from the garden, rose the tallest towers of all, the green and gold spires of the Shikaris' Club, a center of Federation affairs and of social activity. From the aircar which brought them across Port Nichay the evening before, Telzey had seen occasional strings of guest houses, similar to the one Halet had rented, nestling along the park slopes.
Nothing very sinister about Port Nichay or green Jontarou, surely!
Halet? That blond, slinky, would-be Machiavelli? What could--?
Telzey's eyes narrowed reflectively. There'd been a minor occurrence--at least, it had seemed minor--just before the spaceliner docked last night. A young woman from one of the newscasting services had asked for an interview with the daughter of Federation Councilwoman Jessamine Amberdon. This happened occasionally; and Telzey had no objections until the newshen's gossipy persistence in inquiring about the "unusual pet" she was bringing to Port Nichay with her began to be annoying. TT might be somewhat unusual, but that was not a matter of general interest; and Telzey said so. Then Halet moved smoothly into the act and held forth on Tick-Tock's appearance, habits, and mysterious antecedents, in considerable detail.
Telzey had assumed that Halet was simply going out of her way to be irritating, as usual. Looking back on the incident, however, it occurred to her that the chatter between her aunt and the newscast woman had sounded oddly stilted--almost like something the two might have rehearsed.
Rehearsed for what purpose? Tick-Tock ... Jontarou.
Telzey chewed gently on her lower lip. A vacation on Jontarou for the two of them and TT had been Halet's idea, and Halet had enthused about it so much that Telzey's mother at last talked her into accepting. Halet, Jessamine explained privately to Telzey, had felt they were intruders in the Amberdon family, had bitterly resented Jessamine's political honors and, more recently, Telzey's own emerging promise of brilliance. This invitation was Halet's way of indicating a change of heart. Wouldn't Telzey oblige?
* * * * *
So Telzey had obliged, though she took very little stock in Halet's change of heart. She wasn't, in fact, putting it past her aunt to have some involved dirty trick up her sleeve with this trip to Jontarou. Halet's mind worked like that.
So far there had been no actual indications of purposeful mischief. But logic did seem to require a connection between the various puzzling events here.... A newscaster's rather forced looking interest in Tick-Tock--Halet could easily have paid for that interview. Then TT's disturbed behavior during their first night in Port Nichay, and Telzey's own formless anxieties and fancies in connection with the guest house garden.
The last remained hard to explain. But Tick-Tock ... and Halet ... might know something about Jontarou that she didn't know.
Her mind returned to the results of the half-serious attempt she'd made to find out whether there was something Tick-Tock "wanted her to do." An open door? A darkness where somebody waited to grab her if she took even one step forwards? It couldn't have had any significance. Or could it?
So you'd like to try magic, Telzey scoffed at herself. Baby games.... How far would you have got at law school if you'd asked TT to help with your problems?
Then why had she been thinking about it again?
She shivered, because an eerie stillness seemed to settle on the garden. From the side of the terrace, TT's green eyes watched her.
Telzey had a feeling of sinking down slowly into a sunlit dream, into something very remote from law school problems.
"Should I go through the door?" she whispered.
The bronze cat-shape raised its head slowly. TT began to purr.
Tick-Tock's name had been derived in kittenhood from the manner in which she purred--a measured, oscillating sound, shifting from high to low, as comfortable and often as continuous as the unobtrusive pulse of an old clock. It was the first time, Telzey realized now, that she'd heard the sound since their arrival on Jontarou. It went on for a dozen seconds or so, then stopped. Tick-Tock continued to look at her.
It appeared to have been an expression of definite assent....
The dreamlike sensation increased, hazing over Telzey's thoughts. If there was nothing to this mind-communication thing, what harm could symbols do? This time, she wouldn't let them alarm her. And if they did mean something....
She closed her eyes.
* * * * *
The sunglow outside faded instantly. Telzey caught a fleeting picture of the door in the wall, and knew in the same moment that she'd already passed through it.
She was not in the dark room then, but poised at the edge of a brightness which seemed featureless and without limit, spread out around her with a feeling-tone like "sea" or "sky." But it was an unquiet place. There was a sense of unseen things on all sides watching her and waiting.
Was this another form of the dark room--a trap set up in her mind? Telzey's attention did a quick shift. She was seated in the grass again; the sunlight beyond her closed eyelids seemed to shine in quietly through rose-tinted curtains. Cautiously, she let her awareness return to the bright area; and it was still there. She had a moment of excited elation. She was controlling this! And why not, she asked herself. These things were happening in her mind, after all!
She would find out what they seemed to mean; but she would be in no rush to....
An impression as if, behind her, Tick-Tock had thought, "Now I can help again!"
Then a feeling of being swept swiftly, irresistibly forwards, thrust out and down. The brightness exploded in thundering colors around her. In fright, she made the effort to snap her eyes open, to be back in the garden; but now she couldn't make it work. The colors continued to roar about her, like a confusion of excited, laughing, triumphant voices. Telzey felt caught in the middle of it all, suspended in invisible spider webs. Tick-Tock seemed to be somewhere nearby, looking on. Faithless, treacherous TT!
Telzey's mind made another wrenching effort, and there was a change. She hadn't got back into the garden, but the noisy, swirling colors were gone and she had the feeling of reading a rapidly moving microtape now, though she didn't actually see the tape.
The tape, she realized, was another symbol for what was happening, a symbol easier for her to understand. There were voices, or what might be voices, around her; on the invisible tape she seemed to be reading what they said.
A number of speakers, apparently involved in a fast, hot argument about what to do with her. Impressions flashed past....
* * * * *
Why waste time with her? It was clear that kitten-talk was all she was capable of!... Not necessarily; that was a normal first step. Give her a little time!... But what--exasperatedly--could such a small-bite possibly know that would be of significant value?
There was a slow, blurred, awkward-seeming interruption. Its content was not comprehensible to Telzey at all, but in some unmistakable manner it was defined as Tick-Tock's thought.
A pause as the circle of speakers stopped to consider whatever TT had thrown into the debate.
Then another impression ... one that sent a shock of fear through Telzey as it rose heavily into her awareness. Its sheer intensity momentarily displaced the tape-reading symbolism. A savage voice seemed to rumble:
"Toss the tender small-bite to me"--malevolent crimson eyes fixed on Telzey from somewhere not far away--"and let's be done here!"
Startled, stammering protest from Tick-Tock, accompanied by gusts of laughter from the circle. Great sense of humor these characters had, Telzey thought bitterly. That crimson-eyed thing wasn't joking at all!
More laughter as the circle caught her thought. Then a kind of majority opinion found sudden expression:
"Small-bite is learning! No harm to wait--We'll find out quickly--Let's...."
The tape ended; the voices faded; the colors went blank. In whatever jumbled-up form she'd been getting the impressions at that point--Telzey couldn't have begun to describe it--the whole thing suddenly stopped.
* * * * *
She found herself sitting in the grass, shaky, scared, eyes open. Tick-Tock stood beside the terrace, looking at her. An air of hazy unreality still hung about the garden.
She might have flipped! She didn't think so; but it certainly seemed possible! Otherwise ... Telzey made an attempt to sort over what had happened.
Something had been in the garden! Something had been inside her mind. Something that was at home on Jontarou.
There'd been a feeling of perhaps fifty or sixty of these ... well, beings. Alarming beings! Reckless, wild, hard ... and that red-eyed nightmare! Telzey shuddered.
They'd contacted Tick-Tock first, during the night. TT understood them better than she could. Why? Telzey found no immediate answer.
Then Tick-Tock had tricked her into letting her mind be invaded by these beings. There must have been a very definite reason for that.
She looked over at Tick-Tock. TT looked back. Nothing stirred in Telzey's thoughts. Between them there was still no direct communication.
Then how had the beings been able to get through to her?
Telzey wrinkled her nose. Assuming this was real, it seemed clear that the game of symbols she'd made up between herself and TT had provided the opening. Her whole experience just now had been in the form of symbols, translating whatever occurred into something she could consciously grasp.
"Kitten-talk" was how the beings referred to the use of symbols; they seemed contemptuous of it. Never mind, Telzey told herself; they'd agreed she was learning.
The air over the grass appeared to flicker. Again she had the impression of reading words off a quickly moving, not quite visible tape.
"You're being taught and you're learning," was what she seemed to read. "The question was whether you were capable of partial understanding as your friend insisted. Since you were, everything else that can be done will be accomplished very quickly."
A pause, then with a touch of approval, "You're a well-formed mind, small-bite! Odd and with incomprehensibilities, but well-formed--"
One of the beings, and a fairly friendly one--at least not unfriendly. Telzey framed a tentative mental question. "Who are you?"
"You'll know very soon." The flickering ended; she realized she and the question had been dismissed for the moment. She looked over at Tick-Tock again.
"Can't you talk to me now, TT?" she asked silently.
A feeling of hesitation.
"Kitten-talk!" was the impression that formed itself with difficulty then. It was awkward, searching; but it came unquestionably from TT. "Still learning too, Telzey!" TT seemed half anxious, half angry. "We--"
* * * * *
A sharp buzz-note reached Telzey's ears, wiping out the groping thought-impression. She jumped a little, glanced down. Her wrist-talker was signaling. For a moment, she seemed poised uncertainly between a world where unseen, dangerous-sounding beings referred to one as small-bite and where TT was learning to talk, and the familiar other world where wrist-communicators buzzed periodically in a matter-of-fact manner. Settling back into the more familiar world, she switched on the talker.
"Yes?" she said. Her voice sounded husky.
"Telzey, dear," Halet murmured honey-sweet from the talker, "would you come back into the house, please? The living room--We have a visitor who very much wants to meet you."
Telzey hesitated, eyes narrowing. Halet's visitor wanted to meet her?
"Why?" she asked.
"He has something very interesting to tell you, dear." The edge of triumphant malice showed for an instant, vanished in murmuring sweetness again. "So please hurry!"
"All right." Telzey stood up. "I'm coming."
"Fine, dear!" The talker went dead.
Telzey switched off the instrument, noticed that Tick-Tock had chosen to disappear meanwhile.
Flipped? She wondered, starting up towards the house. It was clear Aunt Halet had prepared some unpleasant surprise to spring on her, which was hardly more than normal behavior for Halet. The other business? She couldn't be certain of anything there. Leaving out TT's strange actions--which might have a number of causes, after all--that entire string of events could have been created inside her head. There was no contradictory evidence so far.
But it could do no harm to take what seemed to have happened at face value. Some pretty grim event might be shaping up, in a very real way, around here....
"You reason logically!" The impression now was of a voice speaking to her, a voice that made no audible sound. It was the same being who'd addressed her a minute or two ago.
The two worlds between which Telzey had felt suspended seemed to glide slowly together and become one.
"I go to Law school," she explained to the being, almost absently.
Amused agreement. "So we heard."
"What do you want of me?" Telzey inquired.
"You'll know soon enough."
"Why not tell me now?" Telzey urged. It seemed about to dismiss her again.
Quick impatience flared at her. "Kitten-pictures! Kitten-thoughts! Kitten-talk! Too slow, too slow! YOUR pictures--too much YOU! Wait till the...."
Circuits close ... channels open.... Obstructions clear? What had it said? There'd been only the blurred image of a finicky, delicate, but perfectly normal technical operation of some kind.
"... Minutes now!" the voice concluded. A pause, then another thought tossed carelessly at her. "This is more important to you, small-bite, than to us!" The voice impression ended as sharply as if a communicator had snapped off.
Not too friendly! Telzey walked on towards the house, a new fear growing inside her ... a fear like the awareness of a storm gathered nearby, still quiet--deadly quiet, but ready to break.
"Kitten-pictures!" a voice seemed to jeer distantly, a whispering in the park trees beyond the garden wall.
* * * * *
Halet's cheeks were lightly pinked; her blue eyes sparkled. She looked downright stunning, which meant to anyone who knew her that the worst side of Halet's nature was champing at the bit again. On uninformed males it had a dazzling effect, however; and Telzey wasn't surprised to find their visitor wearing a tranced expression when she came into the living room. He was a tall, outdoorsy man with a tanned, bony face, a neatly trained black mustache, and a scar down one cheek which would have seemed dashing if it hadn't been for the stupefied look. Beside his chair stood a large, clumsy instrument which might have been some kind of telecamera.
Halet performed introductions. Their visitor was Dr. Droon, a zoologist. He had been tuned in on Telzey's newscast interview on the liner the night before, and wondered whether Telzey would care to discuss Tick-Tock with him.
"Frankly, no," Telzey said.
Dr. Droon came awake and gave Telzey a surprised look. Halet smiled easily.
"My niece doesn't intend to be discourteous, doctor," she explained.
"Of course not," the zoologist agreed doubtfully.
"It's just," Halet went on, "that Telzey is a little, oh, sensitive where Tick-Tock is concerned. In her own way, she's attached to the animal. Aren't you, dear?"
"Yes," Telzey said blandly.
"Well, we hope this isn't going to disturbed you too much, dear." Halet glanced significantly at Dr. Droon. "Dr. Droon, you must understand, is simply doing ... well, there is something very important he must tell you now."
Telzey transferred her gaze back to the zoologist. Dr. Droon cleared his throat. "I, ah, understand, Miss Amberdon, that you're unaware of what kind of creature your, ah, Tick-Tock is?"
Telzey started to speak, then checked herself, frowning. She had been about to state that she knew exactly what kind of creature TT was ... but she didn't, of course!
Or did she? She....
She scowled absent-mindedly at Dr. Droon, biting her lip.
"Telzey!" Halet prompted gently.
"Huh?" Telzey said. "Oh ... please go on, doctor!"
Dr. Droon steepled his fingers. "Well," he said, "she ... your pet ... is, ah, a young crest cat. Nearly full grown now, apparently, and--"
"Why, yes!" Telzey cried.
The zoologist looked at her. "You knew that--"
"Well, not really," Telzey admitted. "Or sort of." She laughed, her cheeks flushed. "This is the most ... go ahead please! Sorry I interrupted." She stared at the wall beyond Dr. Droon with a rapt expression.
* * * * *
The zoologist and Halet exchanged glances. Then Dr. Droon resumed cautiously. The crest cats, he said, were a species native to Jontarou. Their existence had been known for only eight years. The species appeared to have had a somewhat limited range--the Baluit mountains on the opposite side of the huge continent on which Port Nichay had been built....
Telzey barely heard him. A very curious thing was happening. For every sentence Dr. Droon uttered, a dozen other sentences appeared in her awareness. More accurately, it was as if an instantaneous smooth flow of information relevant to whatever he said arose continuously from what might have been almost her own memory, but wasn't. Within a minute or two, she knew more about the crest cats of Jontarou than Dr. Droon could have told her in hours ... much more than he'd ever known.
She realized suddenly that he'd stopped talking, that he had asked her a question. "Miss Amberdon?" he repeated now, with a note of uncertainty.
"Yar-rrr-REE!" Telzey told him softly. "I'll drink your blood!"
"Eh?"
Telzey blinked, focused on Dr. Droon, wrenching her mind away from a splendid view of the misty-blue peaks of the Baluit range.
"Sorry," she said briskly. "Just a joke!" She smiled. "Now what were you saying?"
The zoologist looked at her in a rather odd manner for a moment. "I was inquiring," he said then, "whether you were familiar with the sporting rules established by the various hunting associations of the Hub in connection with the taking of game trophies?"
Telzey shook her head. "No, I never heard of them."
* * * * *
The rules, Dr. Droon explained, laid down the type of equipment ... weapons, spotting and tracking instruments, number of assistants, and so forth ... a sportsman could legitimately use in the pursuit of any specific type of game. "Before the end of the first year after their discovery," he went on, "the Baluit crest cats had been placed in the ultra-equipment class."
"What's ultra-equipment?" Telzey asked.
"Well," Dr. Droon said thoughtfully, "it doesn't quite involve the use of full battle armor ... not quite! And, of course, even with that classification the sporting principle of mutual accessibility must be observed."
"Mutual ... oh, I see!" Telzey paused as another wave of silent information rose into her awareness; went on, "So the game has to be able to get at the sportsman too, eh?"
"That's correct. Except in the pursuit of various classes of flying animals, a shikari would not, for example, be permitted the use of an aircar other than as means of simple transportation. Under these conditions, it was soon established that crest cats were being obtained by sportsmen who went after them at a rather consistent one-to-one ration."
Telzey's eyes widened. She'd gathered something similar from her other information source but hadn't quite believed it. "One hunter killed for each cat bagged?" she said. "That's pretty rough sport, isn't it?
"Extremely rough sport!" Dr. Droon agreed dryly. "In fact, when the statistics were published, the sporting interest in winning a Baluit cat trophy appears to have suffered a sudden and sharp decline. On the other hand, a more scientific interest in these remarkable animals was coincidingly created, and many permits for their acquisition by the agents of museums, universities, public and private collections were issued. Sporting rules, of course, do not apply to that activity."
Telzey nodded absently. "I see! They used aircars, didn't they? A sort of heavy knockout gun--"
"Aircars, long-range detectors and stunguns are standard equipment in such work," Dr. Droon acknowledged. "Gas and poison are employed, of course, as circumstances dictate. The collectors were relatively successful for a while."
"And then a curious thing happened. Less than two years after their existence became known, the crest cats of the Baluit range were extinct! The inroads made on their numbers by man cannot begin to account for this, so it must be assumed that a sudden plague wiped them out. At any rate, not another living member of the species has been seen on Jontarou until you landed here with your pet last night."
Telzey sat silent for some seconds. Not because of what he had said, but because the other knowledge was still flowing into her mind. On one very important point that was at variance with what the zoologist had stated; and from there a coldly logical pattern was building up. Telzey didn't grasp the pattern in complete detail yet, but what she saw of it stirred her with a half incredulous dread.
She asked, shaping the words carefully but with only a small part of her attention on what she was really saying. "Just what does all that have to do with Tick-Tock, Dr. Droon?"
Dr. Droon glanced at Halet, and returned his gaze to Telzey. Looking very uncomfortable but quite determined, he told her, "Miss Amberdon, there is a Federation law which states that when a species is threatened with extinction, any available survivors must be transferred to the Life Banks of the University League, to insure their indefinite preservation. Under the circumstances, this law applies to, ah, Tick-Tock!"
* * * * *
So that had been Halet's trick. She'd found out about the crest cats, might have put in as much as a few months arranging to make the discovery of TT's origin on Jontarou seem a regrettable mischance--something no one could have foreseen or prevented. In the Life Banks, from what Telzey had heard of them, TT would cease to exist as an individual awareness while scientists tinkered around with the possibilities of reconstructing her species.
Telzey studied her aunt's carefully sympathizing face for an instant, asked Dr. Droon, "What about the other crest cats--you said were collected before they became extinct here? Wouldn't they be enough for what the Life Banks need?"
He shook his head. "Two immature male specimens are know to exist, and they are at present in the Life Banks. The others that were taken alive at the time have been destroyed ... often under nearly disastrous circumstances. They are enormously cunning, enormously savage creatures, Miss Amberdon! The additional fact that they can conceal themselves to the point of being virtually indetectable except by the use of instruments makes them one of the most dangerous animals known. Since the young female which you raised as a pet has remained docile ... so far ... you may not really be able to appreciate that."
"Perhaps I can," Telzey said. She nodded at the heavy-looking instrument standing beside his chair. "And that's--?"
"It's a life detector combined with a stungun, Miss Amberdon. I have no intention of harming your pet, but we can't take chances with an animal of that type. The gun's charge will knock it unconscious for several minutes--just long enough to let me secure it with paralysis belts."
"You're a collector for the Life Banks, Dr. Droon?"
"That's correct."
"Dr. Droon," Halet remarked, "has obtained a permit from the Planetary Moderator, authorizing him to claim Tick-Tock for the University League and remove her from the planet, dear. So you see there is simply nothing we can do about the matter! Your mother wouldn't like us to attempt to obstruct the law, would she?" Halet paused. "The permit should have your signature, Telzey, but I can sign in your stead if necessary."
That was Halet's way of saying it would do no good to appeal to Jontarou's Planetary Moderator. She'd taken the precaution of getting his assent to the matter first.
"So now if you'll just call Tick-Tock, dear..." Halet went on.
Telzey barely heard the last words. She felt herself stiffening slowly, while the living room almost faded from her sight. Perhaps, in that instant, some additional new circuit had closed in her mind, or some additional new channel had opened, for TT's purpose in tricking her into contact with the reckless, mocking beings outside was suddenly and numbingly clear.
And what it meant immediately was that she'd have to get out of the house without being spotted at it, and go some place where she could be undisturbed for half an hour.
She realized that Halet and the zoologist were both staring at her.
* * * * *
"Are you ill, dear?"
"No." Telzey stood up. It would be worse than useless to try to tell these two anything! Her face must be pretty white at the moment--she could feel it--but they assumed, of course, that the shock of losing TT had just now sunk in on her.
"I'll have to check on that law you mentioned before I sign anything," she told Dr. Droon.
"Why, yes ..." He started to get out of his chair. "I'm sure that can be arranged, Miss Amberdon!"
"Don't bother to call the Moderator's office," Telzey said. "I brought my law library along. I'll look it up myself." She turned to leave the room.
"My niece," Halet explained to Dr. Droon who was beginning to look puzzled, "attends law school. She's always so absorbed in her studies ... Telzey?"
"Yes, Halet?" Telzey paused at the door.
"I'm very glad you've decided to be sensible about this, dear. But don't take too long, will you? We don't want to waste Dr. Droon's time."
"It shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes," Telzey told her agreeably. She closed the door behind her, and went directly to her bedroom on the second floor. One of her two valises was still unpacked. She locked the door behind her, opened the unpacked valise, took out a pocket edition law library and sat down at the table with it.
She clicked on the library's view-screen, tapped the clearing and index buttons. Behind the screen, one of the multiple rows of pinhead tapes shifted slightly as the index was flicked into reading position. Half a minute later, she was glancing over the legal section on which Dr. Droon had based his claim. The library confirmed what he had said.
Very neat of Halet, Telzey thought, very nasty ... and pretty idiotic! Even a second-year law student could think immediately of two or three ways in which a case like that could have been dragged out in the Federation's courts for a couple of decades before the question of handing Tick-Tock over to the Life Banks became too acute.
Well, Halet simply wasn't really intelligent. And the plot to shanghai TT was hardly even a side issue now.
Telzey snapped the tiny library shut, fastened it to the belt of her sunsuit and went over to the open window. A two-foot ledge passed beneath the window, leading to the roof of a patio on the right. Fifty yards beyond the patio, the garden ended in a natural-stone wall. Behind it lay one of the big wooded park areas which formed most of the ground level of Port Nichay.
Tick-Tock wasn't in sight. A sound of voices came from ground-floor windows on the left. Halet had brought her maid and chauffeur along; and a chef had showed up in time to make breakfast this morning, as part of the city's guest house service. Telzey took the empty valise to the window, set it on end against the left side of the frame, and let the window slide down until its lower edge rested on the valise. She went back to the house guard-screen panel beside the door, put her finger against the lock button, and pushed.
The sound of voices from the lower floor was cut off as outer doors and windows slid silently shut all about the house. Telzey glanced back at the window. The valise had creaked a little as the guard field drove the frame down on it, but it was supporting the thrust. She returned to the window, wriggled feet foremost through the opening, twisted around and got a footing on the ledge.
A minute later, she was scrambling quietly down a vine-covered patio trellis to the ground. Even after they discovered she was gone, the guard screen would keep everybody in the house for some little while. They'd either have to disengage the screen's main mechanisms and start poking around in them, or force open the door to her bedroom and get the lock unset. Either approach would involve confusion, upset tempers, and generally delay any organized pursuit.
Telzey edged around the patio and started towards the wall, keeping close to the side of the house so she couldn't be seen from the windows. The shrubbery made minor rustling noises as she threaded her way through it ... and then there was a different stirring which might have been no more than a slow, steady current of air moving among the bushes behind her. She shivered involuntarily but didn't look back.
She came to the wall, stood still, measuring its height, jumped and got an arm across it, swung up a knee and squirmed up and over. She came down on her feet with a small thump in the grass on the other side, glanced back once at the guest house, crossed a path and went on among the park trees.
* * * * *
Within a few hundred yards, it became apparent that she had an escort. She didn't look around for them, but spread out to right and left like a skirmish line, keeping abreast with her, occasional shadows slid silently through patches of open, sunlit ground, disappeared again under the trees. Otherwise, there was hardly anyone in sight. Port Nichay's human residents appeared to make almost no personal use of the vast parkland spread out beneath their tower apartments; and its traffic moved over the airways, visible from the ground only as rainbow-hued ribbons which bisected the sky between the upper tower levels. An occasional private aircar went by overhead.
Wisps of thought which were not her own thoughts flicked through Telzey's mind from moment to moment as the silent line of shadows moved deeper into the park with her. She realized she was being sized up, judged, evaluated again. No more information was coming through; they had given her as much information as she needed. In the main perhaps, they were simply curious now. This was the first human mind they'd been able to make heads or tails of, and that hadn't seemed deaf and silent to their form of communication. They were taking time out to study it. They'd been assured she would have something of genuine importance to tell them; and there was some derision about that. But they were willing to wait a little, and find out. They were curious and they liked games. At the moment, Telzey and what she might try to do to change their plans was the game on which their attention was fixed.
Twelve minutes passed before the talker on Telzey's wrist began to buzz. It continued to signal off and on for another few minutes, then stopped. Back in the guest house they couldn't be sure yet whether she wasn't simply locked inside her room and refusing to answer them. But Telzey quickened her pace.
The park's trees gradually became more massive, reached higher above her, stood spaced more widely apart. She passed through the morning shadow of the residential tower nearest the guest house, and emerged from it presently on the shore of a small lake. On the other side of the lake, a number of dappled grazing animals like long-necked, tall horses lifted their heads to watch her. For some seconds they seemed only mildly interested, but then a breeze moved across the lake, crinkling the surface of the water, and as it touched the opposite shore, abrupt panic exploded among the grazers. They wheeled, went flashing away in effortless twenty-foot strides, and were gone among the trees.
Telzey felt a crawling along her spine. It was the first objective indication she'd had of the nature of the company she had brought to the lake, and while it hardly came as a surprise, for a moment her urge was to follow the example of the grazers.
"Tick-Tock?" she whispered, suddenly a little short of breath.
A single up-and-down purring note replied from the bushes on her right. TT was still around, for whatever good that might do. Not too much, Telzey thought, if it came to serious trouble. But the knowledge was somewhat reassuring ... and this, meanwhile, appeared to be as far as she needed to get from the guest house. They'd be looking for her by aircar presently, but there was nothing to tell them in which direction to turn first.
She climbed the bank of the lake to a point where she was screened both by thick, green shrubbery and the top of a single immense tree from the sky, sat down on some dry, mossy growth, took the law library from her belt, opened it and placed it in her lap. Vague stirrings indicated that her escort was also settling down in an irregular circle about her; and apprehension shivered on Telzey's skin again. It wasn't that their attitude was hostile; they were simply overawing. And no one could predict what they might do next. Without looking up, she asked a question in her mind.
"Ready?"
* * * * *
Sense of multiple acknowledgment, variously tinged--sardonic; interestingly amused; attentive; doubtful. Impatience quivered through it too, only tentatively held in restraint, and Telzey's forehead was suddenly wet. Some of them seemed on the verge of expressing disapproval with what was being done here--
Her fingers quickly flicked in the index tape, and the stir of feeling about her subsided, their attention captured again for the moment. Her thoughts became to some degree detached, ready to dissect another problem in the familiar ways and present the answers to it. Not a very involved problem essentially, but this time it wasn't a school exercise. Her company waited, withdrawn, silent, aloof once more, while the index blurred, checked, blurred and checked. Within a minute and a half, she had noted a dozen reference symbols. She tapped in another of the pinhead tapes, glanced over a few paragraphs, licked salty sweat from her lip, and said in her thoughts, emphasizing the meaning of each detail of the sentence so that there would be no misunderstanding, "This is the Federation law that applies to the situation which existed originally on this planet...."
There were no interruptions, no commenting thoughts, no intrusions of any kind, as she went step by step through the section, turned to another one, and another. In perhaps twelve minutes she came to the end of the last one, and stopped. Instantly, argument exploded about her.
Telzey was not involved in the argument; in fact, she could grasp only scraps of it. Either they were excluding her deliberately, or the exchange was too swift, practiced and varied to allow her to keep up. But their vehemence was not encouraging. And was it reasonable to assume that the Federation's laws would have any meaning for minds like these? Telzey snapped the library shut with fingers that had begun to tremble, and placed it on the ground. Then she stiffened. In the sensations washing about her, a special excitement rose suddenly, a surge of almost gleeful wildness that choked away her breath. Awareness followed of a pair of malignant crimson eyes fastened on her, moving steadily closer. A kind of nightmare paralysis seized Telzey--they'd turned her over to that red-eyed horror! She sat still, feeling mouse-sized.
Something came out with a crash from a thicket behind her. Her muscles went tight. But it was TT who rubbed a hard head against her shoulder, took another three stiff-legged steps forward and stopped between Telzey and the bushes on their right, back rigid, neck fur erect, tail twisting.
Expectant silence closed in about them. The circle was waiting. In the greenery on the right something made a slow, heavy stir.
TT's lips peeled back from her teeth. Her head swung towards the motion, ears flattening, transformed to a split, snarling demon-mask. A long shriek ripped from her lungs, raw with fury, blood lust and challenge.
The sound died away. For some seconds the tension about them held; then came a sense of gradual relaxation mingled with a partly amused approval. Telzey was shaking violently. It had been, she was telling herself, a deliberate test ... not of herself, of course, but of TT. And Tick-Tock had passed with honors. That her nerves had been half ruined in the process would seem a matter of no consequence to this rugged crew....
She realized next that someone here was addressing her personally.
It took a few moments to steady her jittering thoughts enough to gain a more definite impression than that. This speaker, she discovered then, was a member of the circle of whom she hadn't been aware before. The thought-impressions came hard and cold as iron--a personage who was very evidently in the habit of making major decisions and seeing them carried out. The circle, its moment of sport over, was listening with more than a suggestion of deference. Tick-Tock, far from conciliated, green eyes still blazing, nevertheless was settling down to listen, too.
Telzey began to understand.
Her suggestions, Iron Thoughts informed her, might appear without value to a number of foolish minds here, but he intended to see they were given a fair trial. Did he perhaps hear, he inquired next of the circle, throwing in a casual but horridly vivid impression of snapping spines and slashed shaggy throats spouting blood, any objection to that?
Dead stillness all around. There was, definitely, no objection. Tick-Tock began to grin like a pleased kitten.
That point having been settled in an orderly manner now, Iron Thoughts went on coldly to Telzey, what specifically did she propose they should do?
* * * * *
Halet's long, pearl-gray sportscar showed up above the park trees twenty minutes later. Telzey, face turned down towards the open law library in her lap, watched the car from the corner of her eyes. She was in plain view, sitting beside the lake, apparently absorbed in legal research. Tick-Tock, camouflaged among the bushes thirty feet higher up the bank, had spotted the car an instant before she did and announced the fact with a three-second break in her purring. Neither of them made any other move.
The car was approaching the lake but still a good distance off. Its canopy was down, and Telzey could just make out the heads of three people inside. Delquos, Halet's chauffeur, would be flying the vehicle, while Halet and Dr. Droon looked around for her from the sides. Three hundred yards away, the aircar began a turn to the right. Delquos didn't like his employer much; at a guess, he had just spotted Telzey and was trying to warn her off.
Telzey closed the library and put it down, picked up a handful of pebbles and began flicking them idly, one at a time, into the water. The aircar vanished to her left.
Three minutes later, she watched its shadow glide across the surface of the lake towards her. Her heart began to thump almost audibly, but she didn't look up. Tick-Tock's purring continued, on its regular, unhurried note. The car came to a stop almost directly overhead. After a couple of seconds, there was a clicking noise. The purring ended abruptly.
Telzey climbed to her feet as Delquos brought the car down to the bank of the lake. The chauffeur grinned ruefully at her. A side door had been opened, and Halet and Dr. Droon stood behind it. Halet watched Telzey with a small smile while the naturalist put the heavy life-detector-and-stungun device carefully down on the floorboards.
"If you're looking for Tick-Tock," Telzey said, "she isn't here."
Halet just shook her head sorrowfully.
"There's no use lying to us, dear. Dr Droon just stunned her."
* * * * *
They found TT collapsed on her side among the shrubs, wearing her natural color. Her eyes were shut, her chest rose and fell in a slow breathing motion. Dr. Droon, looking rather apologetic, pointed out to Telzey that her pet was in no pain, that the stungun had simply put her comfortably to sleep. He also explained the use of the two sets of webbed paralysis belts which he fastened about TT's legs. The effect of the stun charge would wear off in a few minutes, and contact with the inner surfaces of the energized belts would then keep TT anesthetized and unable to move until the belts were removed. She would, he repeated, be suffering no pain throughout the process.
Telzey didn't comment. She watched Delquos raise TT's limp body above the level of the bushes with a gravity hoist belonging to Dr. Droon, and maneuver her back to the car, the others following. Delquos climbed into the car first, opened the big trunk compartment in the rear. TT was slid inside and the trunk compartment locked.
"Where are you taking her?" Telzey asked sullenly as Delquos lifted the car into the air.
"To the spaceport, dear," Halet said. "Dr. Droon and I both felt it would be better to spare your feelings by not prolonging the matter unnecessarily."
Telzey wrinkled her nose disdainfully, and walked up the aircar to stand behind Delquos' seat. She leaned against the back of the seat for an instant. Her legs felt shaky.
The chauffeur gave her a sober wink from the side.
"That's a dirty trick she's played on you, Miss Telzey!" he murmured. "I tried to warn you."
"I know." Telzey took a deep breath. "Look, Delquos, in just a minute something's going to happen! It'll look dangerous, but it won't be. Don't let it get you nervous ... right?"
"Huh?" Delquos appeared startled, but kept his voice low. "Just what's going to happen?"
"No time to tell you. Remember what I said."
* * * * *
Telzey moved back a few steps from the driver's seat, turned around, said unsteadily, "Halet ... Dr. Droon--"
Halet had been speaking quietly to Dr. Droon; they both looked up.
"If you don't move, and don't do anything stupid," Telzey said rapidly, "you won't get hurt. If you do ... well, I don't know! You see, there's another crest cat in the car...." In her mind she added, "Now!"
It was impossible to tell in just what section of the car Iron Thoughts had been lurking. The carpeting near the rear passenger seats seemed to blur for an instant. Then he was there, camouflage dropped, sitting on the floorboards five feet from the naturalist and Halet.
Halet's mouth opened wide; she tried to scream but fainted instead. Dr. Droon's right hand started out quickly towards the big stungun device beside his seat. Then he checked himself and sat still, ashen-faced.
Telzey didn't blame him for changing his mind. She felt he must be a remarkably brave man to have moved at all. Iron Thoughts, twice as broad across the back as Tick-Tock, twice as massively muscled, looked like a devil-beast even to her. His dark-green marbled hide was criss-crossed with old scar patterns; half his tossing crimson crest appeared to have been ripped away. He reached out now in a fluid, silent motion, hooked a paw under the stungun and flicked upwards. The big instrument rose in an incredibly swift, steep arc eighty feet into the air, various parts flying away from it, before it started curving down towards the treetops below the car. Iron Thoughts lazily swung his head around and looked at Telzey with yellow fire-eyes.
"Miss Telzey! Miss Telzey!" Delquos was muttering behind her. "You're sure it won't...."
Telzey swallowed. At the moment, she felt barely mouse-sized again. "Just relax!" she told Delquos in a shaky voice. "He's really quite t-t-t-tame."
Iron Thoughts produced a harsh but not unamiable chuckle in her mind.
* * * * *
The pearl-gray sportscar, covered now by its streamlining canopy, drifted down presently to a parking platform outside the suite of offices on Jontarou's Planetary Moderator, on the fourteenth floor of the Shikaris' Club Tower. An attendant waved it on into a vacant slot.
Inside the car, Delquos set the brakes, switched off the engine, asked, "Now what?"
"I think," Telzey said reflectively, "we'd better lock you in the trunk compartment with my aunt and Dr. Droon while I talk to the Moderator."
The chauffeur shrugged. He'd regained most of his aplomb during the unhurried trip across the parklands. Iron Thoughts had done nothing but sit in the center of the car, eyes half shut, looking like instant death enjoying a dignified nap and occasionally emitting a ripsawing noise which might have been either his style of purring or a snore. And Tick-Tock, when Delquos peeled the paralysis belts off her legs at Telzey's direction, had greeted him with her usual reserved affability. What the chauffeur was suffering from at the moment was intense curiosity, which Telzey had done nothing to relieve.
"Just as you say, Miss Telzey," he agreed. "I hate to miss whatever you're going to be doing here, but if you don't lock me up now, Miss Halet will figure I was helping you and fire me as soon as you let her out."
Telzey nodded, then cocked her head in the direction of the rear compartment. Faint sounds coming through the door indicated that Halet had regained consciousness and was having hysterics.
"You might tell her," Telzey suggested, "that there'll be a grown-up crest cat sitting outside the compartment door." This wasn't true, but neither Delquos nor Halet could know it. "If there's too much racket before I get back, it's likely to irritate him...."
A minute later, she set both car doors on lock and went outside, wishing she were less informally clothed. Sunbriefs and sandals tended to make her look juvenile.
* * * * *
The parking attendant appeared startled when she approached him with Tick-Tock striding alongside.
"They'll never let you into the offices with that thing, miss," he informed her. "Why, it doesn't even have a collar!"
"Don't worry about it." Telzey told him aloofly.
She dropped a two-credit piece she'd taken from Halet's purse into his hand, and continued on towards the building entrance. The attendant squinted after her, trying unsuccessfully to dispel an odd impression that the big catlike animal with the girl was throwing a double shadow.
The Moderator's chief receptionist also had some doubts about TT, and possibly about the sunbriefs, though she seemed impressed when Telzey's identification tag informed her she was speaking to the daughter of Federation Councilwoman Jessamine Amberdon.
"You feel you can discuss this ... emergency ... only with the Moderator himself, Miss Amberdon?" she repeated.
"Exactly," Telzey said firmly. A buzzer sounded as she spoke. The receptionist excused herself and picked up an earphone. She listened a moment, said blandly, "Yes.... Of course.... Yes, I understand," replaced the earphone and stood up, smiling at Telzey.
"Would you come with me, Miss Amberdon?" she said. "I think the Moderator will see you immediately...."
Telzey followed her, chewing thoughtfully at her lip. This was easier than she'd expected--in fact, too easy! Halet's work? Probably. A few comments to the effect of "A highly imaginative child ... overexcitable," while Halet was arranging to have the Moderator's office authorize Tick-Tock's transfer to the life Banks, along with the implication that Jessamine Amberdon would appreciate a discreet handling of any disturbance Telzey might create as a result.
It was the sort of notion that would appeal to Halet--
* * * * *
They passed through a series of elegantly equipped offices and hallways, Telzey grasping TT's neck-fur in lieu of a leash, their appearance creating a tactfully restrained wave of surprise among secretaries and clerks. And if somebody here and there was troubled by a fleeting, uncanny impression that not one large beast but two seemed to be trailing the Moderator's visitor down the aisles, no mention was made of what could have been only a momentary visual distortion. Finally, a pair of sliding doors opened ahead, and the receptionist ushered Telzey into a large, cool balcony garden on the shaded side of the great building. A tall, gray-haired man stood up from the desk at which he was working, and bowed to Telzey. The receptionist withdrew again.
"My pleasure, Miss Amberdon," Jontarou's Planetary Moderator said, "Be seated, please." He studied Tick-Tock with more than casual interest while Telzey was settling herself into a chair, added, "And what may I and my office do for you?"
Telzey hesitated. She'd observed his type on Orado in her mother's circle of acquaintances--a senior diplomat, a man not easy to impress. It was a safe bet that he'd had her brought out to his balcony office only to keep her occupied while Halet was quietly informed where the Amberdon problem child was and requested to come over and take charge.
What she had to tell him now would have sounded rather wild even if presented by a presumably responsible adult. She could provide proof, but until the Moderator was already nearly sold on her story, that would be a very unsafe thing to do. Old Iron Thoughts was backing her up, but if it didn't look as if her plans were likely to succeed, he would be willing to ride herd on his devil's pack just so long....
Better start the ball rolling without any preliminaries, Telzey decided. The Moderator's picture of her must be that of a spoiled, neurotic brat in a stew about the threatened loss of a pet animal. He expected her to start arguing with him immediately about Tick-Tock.
She said "Do you have a personal interest in keeping the Baluit crest cats from becoming extinct?"
Surprise flickered in his eyes for an instant. Then he smiled.
"I admit I do, Miss Amberdon," he said pleasantly. "I should like to see the species re-established. I count myself almost uniquely fortunate in having had the opportunity to bag two of the magnificent brutes before disease wiped them out on the planet."
The last seemed a less than fortunate statement just now. Telzey felt a sharp tingle of alarm, then sensed that in the minds which were drawing the meaning of the Moderator's speech from her mind there had been only a brief stir of interest.
She cleared her throat, said, "The point is that they weren't wiped out by disease."
He considered her quizzically, seemed to wonder what she was trying to lead up to. Telzey gathered her courage, plunged on, "Would you like to hear what did happen?"
"I should be very much interested, Miss Amberdon," the Moderator said without change of expression. "But first, if you'll excuse me a moment...."
There had been some signal from his desk which Telzey hadn't noticed, because he picked up a small communicator now and said "Yes?" After a few seconds, he resumed, "That's rather curious, isn't it?... Yes, I'd try that.... No, that shouldn't be necessary.... Yes, please do. Thank you." He replaced the communicator, his face very sober; then, his eyes flicking for an instant to TT, he drew one of the upper desk drawers open a few inches, and turned back to Telzey.
"Now, Miss Amberdon," he said affably, "you were about to say? About these crest cats...."
Telzey swallowed. She hadn't heard the other side of the conversation, but she could guess what it had been about. His office had called the guest house, had been told by Halet's maid that Halet, the chauffeur and Dr. Droon were out looking for Miss Telzey and her pet. The Moderator's office had then checked on the sportscar's communication number and attempted to call it. And, of course, there had been no response.
To the Moderator, considering what Halet would have told him, it must add up to the grim possibility that the young lunatic he was talking to had let her three-quarters-grown crest cat slaughter her aunt and the two men when they caught up with her! The office would be notifying the police now to conduct an immediate search for the missing aircar.
When it would occur to them to look for it on the Moderator's parking terrace was something Telzey couldn't know. But if Halet and Dr. Droon were released before the Moderator accepted her own version of what had occurred, and the two reported the presence of wild crest cats in Port Nichay, there would be almost no possibility of keeping the situation under control. Somebody was bound to make some idiotic move, and the fat would be in the fire....
* * * * *
Two things might be in her favor. The Moderator seemed to have the sort of steady nerve one would expect in a man who had bagged two Baluit crest cats. The partly opened desk drawer beside him must have a gun in it; apparently he considered that a sufficient precaution against an attack by TT. He wasn't likely to react in a panicky manner. And the mere fact that he suspected Telzey of homicidal tendencies would make him give the closest attention to what she said. Whether he believed her then was another matter, of course.
Slightly encouraged, Telzey began to talk. It did sound like a thoroughly wild story, but the Moderator listened with an appearance of intent interest. When she had told him as much as she felt he could be expected to swallow for a start, he said musingly, "So they weren't wiped out--they went into hiding! Do I understand you to say they did it to avoid being hunted?"
Telzey chewed her lip frowningly before replying. "There's something about that part I don't quite get," she admitted. "Of course I don't quite get either why you'd want to go hunting ... twice ... for something that's just as likely to bag you instead!"
"Well, those are, ah, merely the statistical odds," the Moderator explained. "If one has enough confidence, you see--"
"I don't really. But the crest cats seem to have felt the same way--at first. They were getting around one hunter for every cat that got shot. Humans were the most exciting game they'd ever run into.
"But then that ended, and the humans started knocking them out with stunguns from aircars where they couldn't be got at, and hauling them off while they were helpless. After it had gone on for a while, they decided to keep out of sight.
"But they're still around ... thousands and thousands of them! Another thing nobody's known about them is that they weren't only in the Baluit mountains. There were crest cats scattered all through the big forests along the other side of the continent."
"Very interesting," the Moderator commented. "Very interesting, indeed!" He glanced towards the communicator, then returned his gaze to Telzey, drumming his fingers lightly on the desk top.
She could tell nothing at all from his expression now, but she guessed he was thinking hard. There was supposed to be no native intelligent life in the legal sense on Jontarou, and she had been careful to say nothing so far to make the Baluit cats look like more than rather exceptionally intelligent animals. The next--rather large--question should be how she'd come by such information.
If the Moderator asked her that, Telzey thought, she could feel she'd made a beginning at getting him to buy the whole story.
"Well," he said abruptly, "if the crest cats are not extinct or threatened with extinction, the Life Banks obviously have no claim on your pet." He smiled confidingly at her. "And that's the reason you're here, isn't it?"
"Well, no," Telzey began, dismayed. "I--"
"Oh, it's quite all right, Miss Amberdon! I'll simply rescind the permit which was issued for the purpose. You need feel no further concern about that." He paused. "Now, just one question ... do you happen to know where your aunt is at present?"
* * * * *
Telzey had a dead, sinking feeling. So he hadn't believed a word she said. He'd been stalling her along until the aircar could be found.
She took a deep breath. "You'd better listen to the rest of it."
"Why, is there more?" the Moderator asked politely.
"Yes. The important part! The kind of creatures they are, they wouldn't go into hiding indefinitely just because someone was after them."
Was there a flicker of something beyond watchfulness in his expression. "What would they do, Miss Amberdon?" he asked quietly.
"If they couldn't get at the men in the aircars and couldn't communicate with them"--the flicker again!--"they'd start looking for the place the men came from, wouldn't they? It might take them some years to work their way across the continent and locate us here in Port Nichay. But supposing they did it finally and a few thousand of them are sitting around in the parks down there right now? They could come up the side of these towers as easily as they go up the side of a mountain. And supposing they'd decided that the only way to handle the problem was to clean out the human beings in Port Nichay?"
The Moderator stared at her in silence a few seconds. "You're saying," he observed then, "that they're rational beings--above the Critical I.Q. level."
"Well," Telzey said, "legally they're rational. I checked on that. About as rational as we are, I suppose."
"Would you mind telling me now how you happen to know this?"
"They told me," Telzey said.
He was silent again, studying her face. "You mentioned, Miss Amberdon, that they have been unable to communicate with other human beings. This suggests then that you are a xenotelepath...."
"I am?" Telzey hadn't heard the term before. "If it means that I can tell what the cats are thinking, and they can tell what I'm thinking, I guess that's the word for it." She considered him, decided she had him almost on the ropes, went on quickly.
"I looked up the laws, and told them they could conclude a treaty with the Federation which would establish them as an Affiliated Species ... and that would settle everything the way they would want it settled, without trouble. Some of them believed me. They decided to wait until I could talk to you. If it works out, fine! If it doesn't"--she felt her voice falter for an instant--"they're going to cut loose fast!"
The Moderator seemed undisturbed. "What am I supposed to do?"
"I told them you'd contact the Council of the Federation on Orado."
"Contact the Council?" he repeated coolly. "With no more proof for this story than your word Miss Amberdon?"
Telzey felt a quick, angry stirring begin about her, felt her face whiten.
"All right," she said "I'll give you proof! I'll have to now. But that'll be it. Once they've tipped their hand all the way, you'll have about thirty seconds left to make the right move. I hope you remember that!"
He cleared his throat. "I--"
"NOW!" Telzey said.
Along the walls of the balcony garden, beside the ornamental flower stands, against the edges of the rock pool, the crest cats appeared. Perhaps thirty of them. None quite as physically impressive as Iron Thoughts who stood closest to the Moderator; but none very far from it. Motionless as rocks, frightening as gargoyles, they waited, eyes glowing with hellish excitement.
"This is their council, you see," Telzey heard herself saying.
The Moderator's face had also paled. But he was, after all, an old shikari and a senior diplomat. He took an unhurried look around the circle, said quietly, "Accept my profound apologies for doubting you. Miss Amberdon!" and reached for the desk communicator.
Iron Thoughts swung his demon head in Telzey's direction. For an instant, she picked up the mental impression of a fierce yellow eye closing in an approving wink.
"... An open transmitter line to Orado," the Moderator was saying into the communicator. "The Council. And snap it up! Some very important visitors are waiting."
The offices of Jontarou's Planetary Moderator became an extremely busy and interesting area then. Quite two hours passed before it occurred to anyone to ask Telzey again whether she knew where her aunt was at present.
Telzey smote her forehead.
"Forgot all about that!" she admitted, fishing the sportscar's keys out of the pocket of her sunbriefs. "They're out on the parking platform...."
* * * * *
The preliminary treaty arrangements between the Federation of the Hub and the new Affiliated Species of the Planet of Jontarou were formally ratified two weeks later, the ceremony taking place on Jontarou, in the Champagne Hall of the Shikaris' Club.
Telzey was able to follow the event only by news viewer in her ship-cabin, she and Halet being on the return trip to Orado by then. She wasn't too interested in the treaty's details--they conformed almost exactly to what she had read out to Iron Thoughts and his co-chiefs and companions in the park. It was the smooth bridging of the wide language gap between the contracting parties by a row of interpreting machines and a handful of human xenotelepaths which held her attention.
As she switched off the viewer, Halet came wandering in from the adjoining cabin.
"I was watching it, too!" Halet observed. She smiled. "I was hoping to see dear Tick-Tock."
Telzey looked over at her. "Well, TT would hardly be likely to show up in Port Nichay," she said. "She's having too good a time now finding out what life in the Baluit range is like."
"I suppose so," Halet agreed doubtfully, sitting down on a hassock. "But I'm glad she promised to get in touch with us again in a few years. I'll miss her."
Telzey regarded her aunt with a reflective frown. Halet meant it quite sincerely, of course, she had undergone a profound change of heart during the past two weeks. But Telzey wasn't without some doubts about the actual value of a change of heart brought on by telepathic means. The learning process the crest cats had started in her mind appeared to have continued automatically several days longer than her rugged teachers had really intended; and Telzey had reason to believe that by the end of that time she'd developed associated latent abilities of which the crest cats had never heard. She'd barely begun to get it all sorted out yet, but ... as an example ... she'd found it remarkably easy to turn Halet's more obnoxious attitudes virtually upside down. It had taken her a couple of days to get the hang of her aunt's personal symbolism, but after that there had been no problem.
She was reasonably certain she'd broken no laws so far, though the sections in the law library covering the use and abuse of psionic abilities were veiled in such intricate and downright obscuring phrasing--deliberately, Telzey suspected--that it was really difficult to say what they did mean. But even aside from that, there were a number of arguments in favor of exercising great caution.
Jessamine, for one thing, was bound to start worrying about her sister-in-law's health if Halet turned up on Orado in her present state of mind, even though it would make for a far more agreeable atmosphere in the Amberdon household.
"Halet," Telzey inquired mentally, "do you remember what an all-out stinker you used to be?"
"Of course, dear," Halet said aloud. "I can hardly wait to tell dear Jessamine how much I regret the many times I...."
"Well," Telzey went on, still verbalizing it silently. "I think you'd really enjoy life more if you were, let's say, about halfway between your old nasty self and the sort of sickening-good kind you are now."
"Why, Telzey!" Halet cried out with dopey amiability. "What a delightful idea!"
"Let's try it," Telzey said.
There was silence in the cabin for some twenty minutes then while she went painstakingly about remolding a number of Halet's character traits for the second time. She still felt some misgivings about it; but if it became necessary, she probably could always restore the old Halet in toto.
These, she told herself, definitely were powers one should treat with respect! Better rattle through law school first; then, with that out of the way, she could start hunting around to see who in the Federation was qualified to instruct a genius-level novice in the proper handling of psionics.
ONENESS
by JAMES H. SCHMITZ
At that, you know the power to enforce the Golden Rule would make a terrible weapon!
Menesee felt excitement surge like a living tide about him as he came with the other directors into the vast Tribunal Hall. Sixty years ago, inexcusable carelessness had deprived Earth of its first chance to obtain a true interstellar drive. Now, within a few hours, Earth, or more specifically, the upper echelons of that great political organization called the Machine which had controlled the affairs of Earth for the past century and a half, should learn enough of the secrets of the drive to insure that it would soon be in their possession.
Menesee entered his box between those of Directors Cornelius and Ojeda, immediately to the right of the Spokesman's Platform and with an excellent view of the prisoner. When Administrator Bradshaw and Spokesman Dorn had taken their places on the platform, Menesee seated himself, drawing the transcript of the day's proceedings towards him. However, instead of glancing over it at once, he spent some seconds in a study of the prisoner.
The fellow appeared to be still young. He was a magnificent physical specimen, tall and strongly muscled, easily surpassing in this respect any of the hard-trained directors present. His face showed alert intelligence, giving no indication of the fact that for two of the three days since his capture he had been drugged and subject to constant hypnotic suggestion. He had given his name as Rainbolt, acknowledged freely that he was a member of the group of malcontent deserters known in the records of the Machine as the Mars Convicts, but described himself as being a "missionary of Oneness" whose purpose was to bring the benefits of some of the principles of "Oneness" to Earth. He had refused to state whether he had any understanding of the stardrive by the use of which the Mars Convicts had made their mass escape from the penal settlements of the Fourth Planet sixty years before, though the drive obviously had been employed in bringing him out of the depths of interstellar space to the Solar System and Earth. At the moment, while the significance of the bank of torture instruments on his right could hardly have escaped him, his expression was serious but not detectably concerned.
"Here is an interesting point!" Director Ojeda's voice said on Menesee's right.
Menesee glanced over at him. Ojeda was tapping the transcript with a finger.
"This Rainbolt," he said, "hasn't slept since he was captured! He states, furthermore, that he has never slept since he became an adult—"
Menesee frowned slightly, failing to see any great significance in the fact. That the fellow belonged to some curious cult which had developed among the Mars Convicts following their flight from the Solar System was already known. Earth's science had methods of inducing permanent sleeplessness but knew, too, that in most instances the condition eventually gave rise to very serious side effects which more than offset any advantages to be gained from it.
He picked up his transcript, indicating that he did not wish to be drawn into conversation. His eyes scanned quickly over the pages. Most of it was information he already had. Rainbolt's ship had been detected four days earlier, probing the outermost of the multiple globes of force screens which had enclosed Earth for fifty years as a defense both against faster-than-light missiles and Mars Convict spies. The ship was alone. A procedure had been planned for such an event, and it was now followed. The ship was permitted to penetrate the first two screens which were closed again behind it.
Rainbolt's ship, for all its incredible speed, was then a prisoner. Unhurriedly, it was worked closer to Earth until it came within range of giant scanners. For an instant, a large section of its interior was visible to the instruments of the watchers on Earth; then the picture blurred and vanished again. Presumably automatic anti-scanning devices had gone into action.
The photographed view was disappointing in that it revealed no details of the engines or their instruments. It did show, however, that the ship had been designed for the use of one man, and that it was neither armored or armed. Its hull was therefore bathed with paralytics, which in theory should have left the pilot helpless, and ships of the Machine were then sent up to tow the interstellar captive down to Earth.
At that point, the procedure collapsed. The ship was in atmosphere when an escape capsule was suddenly ejected from it, which later was found to contain Rainbolt, alert and obviously not affected by the paralysis beams. A moment later, the ship itself became a cloud of swiftly dissipating hot gas.
The partial failure of the capture might have been unavoidable in any case. But the manner in which it occurred still reflected very poorly, Menesee thought, on the thoroughness with which the plans had been prepared. The directors who had been in charge of the operation would not be dealt with lightly—
He became aware suddenly that the proceedings of the day had begun and hastily put down the transcript.
Spokesman Dorn, the Machine's executive officer, sitting beside Administrator Bradshaw at a transparent desk on the raised platform to Menesee's left, had enclosed the area about the prisoner with a sound block and was giving a brief verbal resume of the background of the situation. Few of the directors in the Tribunal Hall would have needed such information; but the matter was being carried on the Grand Assembly Circuit, and in hundreds of auditoriums on Earth the first and second echelons of the officials of the Machine had gathered to witness the interrogation of the Mars Convict spy.
The penal settlements on Mars had been established almost a century earlier, for the dual purpose of mining the mineral riches of the Fourth Planet and of utilizing the talents of political dissidents with a scientific background too valuable to be wasted in research and experimental work considered either too dangerous to be conducted on Earth or requiring more space than could easily be made available there. One of these projects had been precisely the development of more efficient spacedrives to do away with the costly and tedious manoeuverings required for travel even among the inner planets.
Work of such importance, of course, was supposed to be carried out only under close guard and under the direct supervision of reliable upper-echelon scientists of the Machine. Even allowing for criminal negligence, the fact that the Mars Convicts were able to develop and test their stardrive under such circumstances without being detected suggested that it could not be a complicated device. They did, at any rate, develop it, armed themselves and the miners of the other penal settlements and overwhelmed their guards in surprise attack. When the next ship arrived from Earth, two giant ore carriers and a number of smaller guard ships had been outfitted with the drive, and the Mars Convicts had disappeared in them. Their speed was such that only the faintest and briefest of disturbances had been registered on the tracking screens of space stations near Mars, the cause of which remained unsuspected until the news came out.
Anything which could have thrown any light on the nature of the drive naturally had been destroyed by the deserters before they left; and the few Machine scientists who had survived the fighting were unable to provide information though they were questioned intensively for several years before being executed. What it added up to was that some eighteen thousand sworn enemies of the Machine had disappeared into space, equipped with an instrument of unknown type which plainly could be turned into one of the deadliest of all known weapons.
The superb organization of the Machine swung into action instantly to meet the threat, though the situation became complicated by the fact that rumors of the manner in which the Mars Convicts had disappeared filtered out to the politically dissatisfied on Earth and set off an unprecedented series of local uprisings which took over a decade to quell. In spite of such difficulties, the planet's economy was geared over to the new task; and presently defenses were devised and being constructed which would stop missiles arriving at speeds greater than that of light. Simultaneously, the greatest research project in history had begun to investigate the possibilities of either duplicating the fantastic drive some scientific minds on Mars had come upon—chiefly, it was concluded, by an improbable stroke of good luck—or of matching its effects through a different approach. Since it had been demonstrated that it could be done, there was no question that in time the trained men of the Machine would achieve their goal. Then the armed might of the Machine would move into space to take control of any colony established by the Mars Convicts and their descendants.
That was the basic plan. The task of developing a stardrive remained a huge one because of the complete lack of information about the direction organized research should take. That difficulty would be overcome easily only by a second unpredictable twist of fortune—unless one of the Mars Convicts' FTL ships ventured close enough to Earth to be captured.
The last had now happened. The ship had been destroyed before it could be investigated, so that advantage was again lost. The ship's pilot, however, remained in their hands. The fact that he disclaimed having information pertinent to the drive meant nothing. So far as he knew, he might very well be speaking the truth. But he had piloted a ship that employed the stardrive, was familiar with instruments which controlled it, had been schooled in their use. A detailed investigation of his memories could not fail to provide literally hundreds of meaningful clues. And the Machine's scientists, in their superficially still fruitless search for the nature of the drive, had, in fact, covered basic possibilities with such comprehensive thoroughness that a few indisputably valid clues would show them now what it must be.
The prisoner, still demonstrating an extraordinary degree of obliviousness to what lay in store for him, appeared to welcome the opportunity to be heard by the directors of the Machine. Menesee, leaning back in his chair, studied the man thoughtfully, giving only partial attention to what was said. This was the standard opening stage of a Tribunal interrogation, an underplayed exchange of questions and answers. Innocuous as it seemed, it was part of a procedure which had become refined almost to an unvarying ritual—a ritual of beautiful and terrible precision which never failed to achieve its goals. Every man watching and listening in the Machine's auditoriums across the world was familiar with the swift processes by which a normal human being was transformed into a babbling puppet, his every significant thought becoming available for the upper echelons to regard and evaluate.
They would, of course, use torture. It was part of the interlocking mechanisms of interrogation, no more to be omitted than the preliminary conditioning by drug and hypnosis. Menesee was not unduly squeamish, but he felt some relief that it would not be the crude instruments ranked beside the prisoner which would be used. They were reserved as a rule for offending members of the organization, providing a salutary warning for any others who might be tempted to act against the interests of the Machine or fail culpably in their duties. This prisoner, as an individual, meant nothing to the Machine. He was simply a source of valuable information. Therefore, only direct nerve stimulation would be employed, in the manipulation of which Spokesman Dorn was a master.
So far the Spokesman had restricted himself to asking the prisoner questions, his voice and manner gravely courteous. To Menesee's surprised interest, he had just inquired whether two men of the last Earth ship to visit Mars, who had disappeared there, might not have been captured by Mars Convicts operating secretly within the Solar System.
"Yes, sir," Rainbolt replied readily, "they were. I'm happy to say that they're still alive and well."
Menesee recalled the incident now. After the mass escape of the Mars Convicts, the penal settlements had been closed down and the mining operations abandoned. To guard the desert planet against FTL raiders as Earth was guarded was technically infeasible. But twice each decade a patrol ship went there to look for signs that the Mars Convicts had returned. The last of these patrols had been conducted two years before. The missing men were believed to have been inspecting a deserted settlement in a ground vehicle when they vanished, but no trace of them or the vehicle could be discovered.
Administrator Bradshaw, seated to the spokesman's left, leaned forward as if to speak, but then sat back again. Menesee thought that Rainbolt's blunt admission had angered him. Bradshaw, white-haired and huge in build, had been for many years the nominal head of the Machine; but in practice the powers of the administrator were less than those of the spokesman, and it would have been a breach of protocol for Bradshaw to intervene in the interrogation.
Dorn appeared to have noticed nothing. He went on. "What was the reason for capturing these men?" "It was necessary," Rainbolt explained, "to find out what the conditions on Earth were like at present. At the time we didn't want to risk discovery by coming too close to Earth itself. And your two men were able to tell us all we needed to know."
"What was that?" the spokesman said.
Rainbolt was silent a moment, then said, "You see, sir, most of the past sixty years have been spent in finding new worlds on which human beings can live without encountering too many difficulties. But then—"
Dorn interrupted quietly, "You found such worlds?"
"Yes, sir, we did," Rainbolt said. "We're established, in about equal numbers, on planets of three star systems. Of course, I'm not allowed to give you more precise information on that at present."
"Quite understandable," the spokesman agreed dryly.
Menesee was conscious of a stir of intense interest among the listening directors in the hall. This was news, indeed! Mingled with the interest was surprised amusement at the prisoner's artless assumption that he had any choice about what he would or would not tell.
"But now that we're established," Rainbolt went on, apparently unaware of the sensation he had created, "our next immediate concern is to resume contact with Earth. Naturally, we can't do that freely while your Machine remains in political control of the planet. We found out from the two captured men that it still is in control. We'd hoped that after sixty years government in such a form would have become obselete here."
Menesee heard an astonished murmuring from the director boxes on his right, and felt himself that the fellow's impudent last remark might well have been answered by a pulse of nerve stimulation. Spokesman Dorn, however, replied calmly that the Machine happened to be indispensable to Earth. A planetary economy, and one on the verge of becoming an interplanetary and even interstellar economy, was simply too intricate and precariously balanced a structure to maintain without the assistance of a very tightly organized governing class.
"If the Machine were to vanish today," he explained, "Earth would approach a state of complete chaos before the month was out. In a year, a billion human beings would be starving to death. There would be fighting ... wars—" He shrugged, "You name it. No, my friend, the Machine is here to stay. And the Mars Convicts may as well resign themselves to the fact."
Rainbolt replied earnestly that he was not too well informed in economics, that not being his field. However, he had been told and believed that while the situation described by the spokesman would be true today, it should not take many years to train the populations of Earth to run their affairs quite as efficiently as the Machine had done, and without loss of personal and political liberties.
At any rate, the Mars Convicts and their descendants did not intend to give up the independence they had acquired. On the other hand, they had two vital reasons for wanting to come to an agreement with Earth. One was that they might waste centuries in attempting to accomplish by themselves what they could now do immediately if Earth's vast resources were made available to them. And the other, of course, was the obvious fact that Earth would not remain indefinitely without a stardrive of its own. If an unfriendly government was in control when it obtained one, the Mars Convicts would be forced either to abandon their newly settled planets and retreat farther into the galaxy or submit to Earth's superior strength.
Meanwhile, however, they had developed the principles of Oneness. Oneness was in essence a philosophy, but it had many practical applications; and it was in such practical applications that he, Rainbolt, was a trained specialist. He had, therefore, been dispatched to Earth to introduce the principles, which would in time bring about the orderly disintegration of the system of the Machine, to be followed by the establishment of an Earth government with which the Mars Convicts could deal without detriment to themselves.
Menesee had listened with a sense of growing angry incredulity. The fellow couldn't be as much of a fool as he seemed! Therefore, he had devised this hoax after he realised he would be captured, to cover up his real purpose which could only be that of a spy. Menesee saw that Administrator Bradshaw was saying something in a low voice to the spokesman, his face stony. Dorn glanced over at him, then looked back at the prisoner and said impassively, "So the goal of your missionary work here is the disintegration of the Machine?"
Rainbolt nodded, with an air almost of eagerness. "Yes, sir, it is! And if I will now be permitted to—"
"I am afraid you will be permitted to do nothing," Spokesman Dorn said dryly, "except, of course, to answer the number of questions we intend to ask you."
Rainbolt checked himself, looking startled. The spokesman's hand had moved very slightly on the desk before him and Rainbolt had just had his first experience with direct nerve stimulation. He stood kneading his right hand with his left, staring up at the spokesman, mouth half open.
Menesee smiled in grim amusement. It would have been a low-level pulse, of course; but even a low-level pulse, arriving unexpectedly, was a very unpleasant surprise. He had foreseen the spokesman's action, had, in fact, felt a sympathetic imaginary twinge in his own right hand as the pulse reached the prisoner.
Rainbolt swallowed, said in a changed voice, "Sir, we heard from the two captured men that the Machine has retained its practice of torture during interrogations. It isn't necessary to convince me that you are serious about this. Do the questions you referred to have to do with the stardrive?"
The spokesman nodded. "Of course."
Rainbolt said stubbornly, "Then, sir, it can do you no good at all to torture me. I simply don't have such information. We do plan to make the stardrive freely available to Earth. But not while Earth is ruled by the organization of the Machine."
This time, Menesee did not observe the motion of the spokesman's hand. Instead he saw Rainbolt jerk violently to the right. At the same moment, a blast of intense, fiery, almost unbearable pain shot up his own arm. As he grasped his arm, sweat spurting out on his face, he heard screams from the box on his left and realized it was Director Cornelius who screamed.
There were answering screams from around the hall.
Then the pain suddenly subsided.
Menesee started about, breathing raggedly. The pain-reaction had been severe enough to affect his vision; the great hall looked momentarily darker than it should have been. And although the actual pain had ended, the muscles of his arm and shoulder were still trying to cramp into knots.
There was no more screaming. From the right came Director Ojeda's gasping voice. "What happened? Did something go wrong with the stimulating devices? We might all have been killed—!"
Menesee didn't reply. Wherever he looked, he saw faces whitened with shock. Apparently everyone in the Tribunal Hall, from the administrator and Spokesman Dorn on down to the directors' attendants and the two guards flanking the prisoner's area, had felt the same thing. Here and there, men who had collapsed were struggling awkwardly back to their feet. He heard a hoarse whisper behind him. "Sir, Director Cornelius appears to have fainted!"
Menesee glanced around, saw Cornelius' attendant behind the box, then Cornelius himself, slumped forward, face down and motionless, sprawling half across his table. "Let him lie there and keep quiet, fool!" Menesee ordered the man sharply. He returned his attention to the center of the hall as Spokesman Dorn announced in a voice which held more of an edge than was normal but had lost none of its strength and steadiness, "Before any moves are suggested, I shall tell you what has been done.
"The Tribunal Hall has been sealed and further events in it will be monitored from without. No one will be able to leave until the matter with which we are now concerned here has been settled to the satisfaction of the Machine.
"Next, any of you who believe that an instrument failure was involved in the experience we shared can disabuse themselves. The same effect was reported immediately from two other auditoriums on the Great Circuit, and it is quite possible that it was repeated in all of them."
Rainbolt, grimacing and massaging his right arm vigorously, nodded. "It was repeated in all of them, sir!"
The spokesman ignored him, went on. "The Tribunal Hall has, therefore, been cut out of the Grand Assembly Circuit. How circuit energies could have been employed to transmit such physical sensations is not clear. But they will not be used in that manner again."
Menesee felt a flash of admiration. His own thoughts had been turning in the same direction, but he couldn't have approached Spokesman Dorn's decisive speed of action.
Dorn turned his attention now to Rainbolt. "What happened," he said, "apparently was caused by yourself."
Rainbolt nodded. "Yes, sir. It was. It was an application of Oneness. At present, I'm acting as a focal point of Oneness. Until that condition is changed, whatever I experience here will be simultaneously experienced by yourselves."
Menesee thought that the effects of the Machine's discipline became splendidly apparent at that point. No one stirred in the great hall though it must have been obvious to every man present that Rainbolt's words might have doomed them along with himself.
Rainbolt went on, addressing Spokesman Dorn.
"There is only one mistake in your reasoning, sir. The demonstrated effect of Oneness is not carried by the energies of the Grand Assembly Circuit, though I made use of those energies in establishing an initial connection with the other auditoriums and the people in them.
"You see, sir, we learned from the two men captured on Mars about your practice of having the two highest echelons of your organization attend significant hearings in the Tribunal Hall through the Assembly Circuit. Our plan was based on that. We knew that if anything was to be accomplished with the Oneness principles on Earth, it would have to be through a situation in which they could be applied simultaneously to the entire leadership of the Machine. That has now been done, and the fact that you had the Tribunal Hall taken out of the Assembly Circuit did not change the Oneness contact. It remains in full effect."
Spokesman Dorn stared at him for an instant, said, "We can test the truth of that statement immediately, of course; and we shall!" His hand moved on the desk.
Menesee felt pain surge through his left arm. It was not nearly as acute a sensation as the previous pulse had been, but it lasted longer—a good ten seconds. Menesee let his breath out carefully as it again ebbed away.
He heard the spokesman saying, "Rainbolt's claim appears to be verified. I've received a report that the pulse was being experienced in one of the auditoriums ... and, yes ... now in several."
Rainbolt nodded. "It was a valid claim, believe me, sir!" he said earnestly. "The applications of our principles have been very thoroughly explored, and the effects are invariable. Naturally, our strategem would have been useless if I'd been able to maintain contact only long enough to provide you with a demonstration of Oneness. Such a contact can be broken again, of course. But until I act deliberately to break it, it maintains itself automatically.
"To make that clear, I should explain that distance, direction and intervening shielding materials do not change the strength of the contact. Distance at least does not until it is extended to approximately fifty thousand miles."
"And what happens then?" the spokesman asked, watching him.
"At that point," Rainbolt acknowledged, "Oneness contacts do become tenuous and begin to dissolve." He added, almost apologetically, "However, that offers you no practical solution to your problem."
"Why not?" Dorn asked. He smiled faintly. "Why shouldn't we simply lock you into a spaceship and direct the ship through the defense fields and out into the solar system on automatic control?"
"I sincerely hope you don't try it, sir! Experiments in dissolving contacts in that manner have been invariably fatal to all connected individuals."
The spokesman hesitated. "You and every member of the Machine with whom you are now in contact would die together if that were done?"
"Yes, sir. That is certain what the results of those experiments show."
Administrator Bradshaw, who had been staring coldly at Rainbolt, asked in a hard, flat voice, "If you do nothing to break the contact, how long will this situation continue?"
Rainbolt looked at him. "Indefinitely, sir," he said. "There is nothing I need to do about it. It is a static condition."
"In that case," Bradshaw said icily, "this should serve to break the contact through you!"
As his hand came up, leveling a gun, Menesee was half out of his chair, hands raised in alarmed protest. "Stop him!" Menesee shouted.
But Administrator Bradshaw already was sagging sideways over the armrest of this chair, head lolling backwards. The gun slid from his hand, dropped to the platform.
"Director Menesee," Dorn said coolly from beside Bradshaw, "I thank you for your intended warning! Since the administrator and the spokesman are the only persons permitted to bear arms in the Tribunal Hall, I was naturally prepared to paralyze Administrator Bradshaw if he showed intentions of resorting to thoughtless action." He looked down at Rainbolt. "Are Director Menesee and I correct in assuming that if you died violently the persons with whom you are in contact would again suffer the same experience?"
"Yes, sir," Rainbolt said. "That is implicit in the principles of Oneness." He shrugged. "Under most circumstances, it is a very undesirable effect. But here we have made use of it—"
"The situation," Spokesman Dorn told the directors in the Tribunal Hall some minutes later, "is then this. There has been nothing haphazard about the Mars Convicts' plan to coerce us into accepting their terms. Considering the probable quality of the type of minds which developed both the stardrive and the extraordinary 'philosophy' we have encountered today, that could be taken for granted from the start. We cannot kill their emissary here, or subject him to serious pain or injury, since we would pay a completely disproportionate penalty in doing it.
"However, that doesn't mean that we should surrender to the Mars Convicts. In fact, for all their cleverness, they appear to be acting out of something very close to desperation. They have gained no essential advantage through their trick, and we must assume they made the mistake of underestimating us. This gentleman they sent to Earth has been given thorough physical examinations. They show him to be in excellent health. He is also younger by many years than most of us.
"So he will be confined to quarters where he will be comfortable and provided with whatever he wishes ... but where he will not be provided with any way of doing harm to himself. And then, I believe, we can simply forget about him. He will receive the best of attention, including medical care. Under such circumstances, we can expect his natural life span to exceed our own.
"Meanwhile, we shall continue our program of developing our own spacedrive. As the Mars Convicts themselves foresee, we'll gain it eventually and will then be more than a match for them. Until then the defense fields around Earth will remain closed. No ship will leave Earth and no ship will be admitted to it. And in the long run we will win."
The spokesman paused, added, "If there are no other suggestions, this man will now be conducted to the hospital of the Machine where he is to be detained for the remainder of his days."
Across the hall from Menesee, a figure arose deliberately in one of the boxes. A heavy voice said, "Spokesman Dorn, I very definitely do have a suggestion."
Dorn looked over, nodded warily. "Go ahead, Director Squires!"
Menesee grimaced in distaste. He had no liking for Squires, a harsh, arrogant man, notorious for his relentless persecution of any director or officer who, in Squires' opinion, had become slack in his duties to the Machine. But he had a large following in the upper echelons, and his words carried weight.
Squires folded his arms, said unhurriedly as if savoring each word, "As you pointed out, Spokesman Dorn, we cannot hurt the person of this prisoner. His immediate accomplices also remain beyond our reach at present. However, our hands are not—as you seem to imply—so completely tied that we cannot strike back at these rascals at once. There are camps on Earth filled with people of the same political stripe—potential supporters of the Mars Convicts who would be in fullest sympathy with their goals if they learned of them.
"I suggest that these people serve now as an object lesson to show the Mars Convicts the full measure of our determination to submit to no threats of force! Let this prisoner and the other convicts who doubtless are lurking in nearby space beyond Earth's defense fields know that for every day their obscene threat against the high officers of the Machine continues hundreds of malcontents who would welcome them on Earth will be painfully executed! Let them—"
Pain doubled Menesee abruptly over the table before him. A savage, compressing pain, very different from the fiery touch of the nerve stimulators, which held him immobile, unable to cry out or draw breath.
It relaxed almost as instantaneously as it had come on. Menesee slumped back in his chair, shaken and choking, fighting down bitter nausea. His eyes refocused painfully on Rainbolt, gray-faced but on his feet, in the prisoner's area.
"You will find," Rainbolt was saying, "that Director Squires is dead. And so, I'm very much afraid, is every other member of the upper echelons whose heart was in no better condition than his. This was a demonstration I had not intended to give you. But since it has been given, it should serve as a reminder that while it is true we could not force you directly to do as we wish, there are things we are resolved not to tolerate."
Ojeda was whispering shakily near Menesee, "He controls his body to the extent that he was able to bring on a heart attack in himself and project it to all of us! He counted on his own superb physical condition to pull him through it unharmed. That is why he didn't seem frightened when the administrator threatened him with a gun. Even if the spokesman hadn't acted, that gun never would have been fired.
"Menesee, no precautions we could take will stop that monster from killing us all whenever he finally chooses—simply by committing suicide through an act of will!"
Spokesman Dorn's voice seemed to answer Ojeda.
"Director Squires," Dorn's voice said, still thinned by pain but oddly triumphant, "became a victim of his own pointless vindictiveness. It was a mistake which, I am certain, no member of the Machine will care to repeat.
"Otherwise, this incident has merely served to confirm that the Mars Convicts operate under definite limitations. They could kill us but can't afford to do it. If they are to thrive in space, they need Earth, and Earth's resources. They are aware that if the Machine's leadership dies, Earth will lapse into utter anarchy and turn its tremendous weapons upon itself.
"The Mars Convicts could gain nothing from a ruined and depopulated planet. Therefore, the situation as it stands remains a draw. We shall devote every effort to turn it into a victory for us. The agreement we come to eventually with the Mars Convicts will be on our terms—and there is essentially nothing they or this man, with all his powers, can do to prevent it."
The Missionary of Oneness swung his bronzed, well-muscled legs over the side of the hammock and sat up. With an expression of great interest, he watched Spokesman Dorn coming across the sun room towards him from the entrance corridor of his hospital suite. It was the first visit he'd had from any member of the organization of the Machine in the two years he had been confined here.
For Spokesman Dorn it had been, to judge by his appearance, a strenuous two years. He had lost weight and there were dark smudges of fatigue under his eyes. At the moment, however, his face appeared relaxed. It might have been the relaxation a man feels who has been emptied out by a hard stint of work, but knows he has accomplished everything that could possibly have been done.
Dorn came to a stop a dozen feet from the hammock. For some seconds, the two men regarded each other without speaking.
"On my way here," Dorn remarked then, "I was wondering whether you mightn't already know what I've come to tell you."
Rainbolt shook his head.
"No," he said. "I think I could guess what it is—I pick up generalized impressions from outside—but I don't really know."
Spokesman Dorn considered that a moment, chewing his lower lip reflectively. Then he shrugged.
"So actual mind-reading doesn't happen to be one of your talents," he said. "I was rather sure of that, though others had a different opinion. Of course, considering what you are able to do, it wouldn't really make much difference.
"Well ... this morning we sent out a general call by space radio to any Mars Convict ships which might be in the Solar System to come in. The call was answered. Earth's defense fields have been shut down, and the first FTL ships will land within an hour."
"For what purpose?" Rainbolt said curiously.
"There's a strong popular feeling," Spokesman Dorn said, "that your colleagues should take part in deciding what pattern Earth's permanent form of government will take. In recent months we've handled things in a rather provisional and haphazard manner, but the situation is straightened out well enough now to permit giving attention to such legalistic details. Incidentally, you will naturally be free to leave when I do. Transportation is available for you if you wish to welcome your friends at the spaceport."
"Thank you," said Rainbolt. "I believe I will."
Spokesman Dorn shrugged. "What could we do?" he said, almost disinterestedly. "You never slept. In the beginning you were drugged a number of times, as you probably know, but we soon discovered that drugging you seemed to make no difference at all."
"It doesn't," Rainbolt agreed.
"Day after day," Dorn went on, "we'd find thoughts and inclinations coming into our minds we'd never wanted there. It was an eerie experience—though personally I found it even more disconcerting to awaken in the morning and discover that my attitudes had changed in some particular or other, and as a rule changed irrevocably."
Rainbolt said, "In a sense, those weren't really your attitudes, you know. They were results of the conditioning of the Machine. It was the conditioning I was undermining."
"Perhaps it was that," Dorn said. "It seems to make very little difference now." He paused, frowned. "When the first talk of initiating change began in the councils, there were numerous executions. I know now that we were badly frightened men. Then those of us who had ordered the executions found themselves wanting similar changes. Presently we had a majority, and the changes began to be brought about. Reforms, you would call them—and reforms I suppose they actually were. There was considerable general disturbance, of course, but we retained the organization to keep that within reasonable bounds."
"We expected that you would," Rainbolt said.
"It hasn't really been too bad," Spokesman Dorn said reflectively. "It was simply an extraordinary amount of work to change the structure of things that had been imposed on Earth by the Machine for the past century and a half. And the curious part of it is, you know, that now it's done we don't even feel resentment! We actually wouldn't want to go back to what we had before. You've obtained an incredible hold on our minds—and frankly I expect that when at last you do relinquish your control, we'll commit suicide or go mad."
Rainbolt shook his head. "There's been just one mistake in what you've said," he remarked.
Spokesman Dorn looked at him with tired eyes. "What's that?" he asked.
"I said I was undermining the conditioning of the Machine. I did—and after that I did nothing. You people simply have been doing what most of you always would have preferred to do, Spokesman. I relinquished control of the last of you over six months ago."
THE DOPE ON MARS
By JACK SHARKEY
Somebody had to get the human angle on this trip ... but what was humane about sending me?
My agent was the one who got me the job of going along to write up the first trip to Mars. He was always getting me things like that--appearances on TV shows, or mentions in writers' magazines. If he didn't sell much of my stuff, at least he sold me.
"It'll be the biggest break a writer ever got," he told me, two days before blastoff. "Oh, sure there'll be scientific reports on the trip, but the public doesn't want them; they want the human slant on things."
"But, Louie," I said weakly, "I'll probably be locked up for the whole trip. If there are fights or accidents, they won't tell me about them."
"Nonsense," said Louie, sipping carefully at a paper cup of scalding coffee. "It'll be just like the public going along vicariously. They'll identify with you."
"But, Louie," I said, wiping the dampness from my palms on the knees of my trousers as I sat there, "how'll I go about it? A story? An article? A you-are-there type of report? What?"
Louie shrugged. "So keep a diary. It'll be more intimate, like."
"But what if nothing happens?" I insisted hopelessly.
Louie smiled. "So you fake it."
I got up from the chair in his office and stepped to the door. "That's dishonest," I pointed out.
"Creative is the word," Louie said.
So I went on the first trip to Mars. And I kept a diary. This is it. And it is honest. Honest it is.
* * * * *
October 1, 1960
They picked the launching date from the March, 1959, New York Times, which stated that this was the most likely time for launching. Trip time is supposed to take 260 days (that's one way), so we're aimed toward where Mars will be (had better be, or else).
There are five of us on board. A pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist. And, of course, me. I've met all but the pilot (he's very busy today), and they seem friendly enough.
Dwight Kroger, the biochemist, is rather old to take the "rigors of the journey," as he puts it, but the government had a choice between sending a green scientist who could stand the trip or an accomplished man who would probably not survive, so they picked Kroger. We've blasted off, though, and he's still with us. He looks a damn sight better than I feel. He's kind of balding, and very iron-gray-haired and skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's, and right now he's telling jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.
Jones (that's the co-pilot; I didn't quite catch his first name) is scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and gives the general appearance of belonging under the spreading chestnut tree, not in a metal bullet flinging itself out into airless space. Come to think of it, who does belong where we are?
The navigator's name is Lloyd Streeter, but I haven't seen his face yet. He has a little cubicle behind the pilot's compartment, with all kinds of maps and rulers and things. He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall (they call it the bulkhead, for some reason or other) table, scratching away with a ballpoint pen on the maps, and now and then calling numbers over a microphone to the pilot. His hair is red and curly, and he looks as though he'd be tall if he ever gets to stand up. There are freckles on the backs of his hands, so I think he's probably got them on his face, too. So far, all he's said is, "Scram, I'm busy."
Kroger tells me that the pilot's name is Patrick Desmond, but that I can call him Pat when I get to know him better. So far, he's still Captain Desmond to me. I haven't the vaguest idea what he looks like. He was already on board when I got here, with my typewriter and ream of paper, so we didn't meet.
My compartment is small but clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't during blastoff. The inertial gravities didn't bother me so much as the gyroscopic spin they put on the ship so we have a sort of artificial gravity to hold us against the curved floor. It's that constant whirly feeling that gets me. I get sick on merry-go-rounds, too.
They're having pork for dinner today. Not me.
* * * * *
October 2, 1960
Feeling much better today. Kroger gave me a box of Dramamine pills. He says they'll help my stomach. So far, so good.
Lloyd came by, also. "You play chess?" he asked.
"A little," I admitted.
"How about a game sometime?"
"Sure," I said. "Do you have a board?"
He didn't.
Lloyd went away then, but the interview wasn't wasted. I learned that he is tall and does have a freckled face. Maybe we can build a chessboard. With my paper and his ballpoint pen and ruler, it should be easy. Don't know what we'll use for pieces, though.
Jones (I still haven't learned his first name) has been up with the pilot all day. He passed my room on the way to the galley (the kitchen) for a cup of dark brown coffee (they like it thick) and told me that we were almost past the Moon. I asked to look, but he said not yet; the instrument panel is Top Secret. They'd have to cover it so I could look out the viewing screen, and they still need it for steering or something.
I still haven't met the pilot.
* * * * *
October 3, 1960
Well, I've met the pilot. He is kind of squat, with a vulturish neck and close-set jet-black eyes that make him look rather mean, but he was pleasant enough, and said I could call him Pat. I still don't know Jones' first name, though Pat spoke to him, and it sounded like Flants. That can't be right.
Also, I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon, with a bluish blurred crescent beyond it that Pat said was the Earth. The back of the Moon isn't much different from the front. As to the space in front of the ship, well, it's all black with white dots in it, and none of the dots move, except in a circle that Pat says is a "torque" result from the gyroscopic spin we're in. Actually, he explained to me, the screen is supposed to keep the image of space locked into place no matter how much we spin. But there's some kind of a "drag." I told him I hoped it didn't mean we'd land on Mars upside down. He just stared at me.
I can't say I was too impressed with that 16 x 19 view of outer space. It's been done much better in the movies. There's just no awesomeness to it, no sense of depth or immensity. It's as impressive as a piece of velvet with salt sprinkled on it.
Lloyd and I made a chessboard out of a carton. Right now we're using buttons for men. He's one of these fast players who don't stop and think out their moves. And so far I haven't won a game.
It looks like a long trip.
* * * * *
October 4, 1960
I won a game. Lloyd mistook my queen-button for my bishop-button and left his king in jeopardy, and I checkmated him next move. He said chess was a waste of time and he had important work to do and he went away.
I went to the galley for coffee and had a talk about moss with Kroger. He said there was a good chance of lichen on Mars, and I misunderstood and said, "A good chance of liking what on Mars?" and Kroger finished his coffee and went up front.
When I got back to my compartment, Lloyd had taken away the chessboard and all his buttons. He told me later he needed it to back up a star map.
Pat slept mostly all day in his compartment, and Jones sat and watched the screen revolve. There wasn't much to do, so I wrote a poem, sort of.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With Martian rime, Venusian slime, And a radioactive hoe.
I showed it to Kroger. He says it may prove to be environmentally accurate, but that I should stick to prose.
* * * * *
October 5, 1960
Learned Jones' first name. He wrote something in the ship's log, and I saw his signature. His name is Fleance, like in "Macbeth." He prefers to be called Jones. Pat uses his first name as a gag. Some fun.
And only 255 days to go.
* * * * *
April 1, 1961
I've skipped over the last 177 days or so, because there's nothing much new. I brought some books with me on the trip, books that I'd always meant to read and never had the time. So now I know all about Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and Babbitt.
They didn't take as long as I thought they would, except for Vanity Fair. It must have been a riot when it first came out. I mean, all those sly digs at the aristocracy, with copious interpolations by Mr. Thackeray in case you didn't get it when he'd pulled a particularly good gag. Some fun.
And only 78 days to go.
* * * * *
June 1, 1961
Only 17 days to go. I saw Mars on the screen today. It seems to be descending from overhead, but Pat says that that's the "torque" doing it. Actually, it's we who are coming in sideways.
We've all grown beards, too. Pat said it was against regulations, but what the hell. We have a contest. Longest whiskers on landing gets a prize.
I asked Pat what the prize was and he told me to go to hell.
* * * * *
June 18, 1961
Mars has the whole screen filled. Looks like Death Valley. No sign of canals, but Pat says that's because of the dust storm down below. It's nice to have a "down below" again. We're going to land, so I have to go to my bunk. It's all foam rubber, nylon braid supports and magnesium tubing. Might as well be cement for all the good it did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully far away.
* * * * *
June 19, 1961
Well, we're down. We have to wear gas masks with oxygen hook-ups. Kroger says the air is breathable, but thin, and it has too much dust in it to be any fun to inhale. He's all for going out and looking for lichen, but Pat says he's got to set up camp, then get instructions from Earth. So we just have to wait. The air is very cold, but the Sun is hot as hell when it hits you. The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger says it's the dust. The sand underfoot is kind of rose-colored, and not really gritty. The particles are round and smooth.
No lichen so far. Kroger says maybe in the canals, if there are any canals. Lloyd wants to play chess again.
Jones won the beard contest. Pat gave him a cigar he'd smuggled on board (no smoking was allowed on the ship), and Jones threw it away. He doesn't smoke.
* * * * *
June 20, 1961
Got lost today. Pat told me not to go too far from camp, so, when I took a stroll, I made sure every so often that I could still see the rocket behind me. Walked for maybe an hour; then the oxygen gauge got past the halfway mark, so I started back toward the rocket. After maybe ten steps, the rocket disappeared. One minute it was standing there, tall and silvery, the next instant it was gone.
Turned on my radio pack and got hold of Pat. Told him what happened, and he told Kroger. Kroger said I had been following a mirage, to step back a bit. I did, and I could see the ship again. Kroger said to try and walk toward where the ship seemed to be, even when it wasn't in view, and meantime they'd come out after me in the jeep, following my footprints.
Started walking back, and the ship vanished again. It reappeared, disappeared, but I kept going. Finally saw the real ship, and Lloyd and Jones waving their arms at me. They were shouting through their masks, but I couldn't hear them. The air is too thin to carry sound well.
All at once, something gleamed in their hands, and they started shooting at me with their rifles. That's when I heard the noise behind me. I was too scared to turn around, but finally Jones and Lloyd came running over, and I got up enough nerve to look. There was nothing there, but on the sand, paralleling mine, were footprints. At least I think they were footprints. Twice as long as mine, and three times as wide, but kind of featureless because the sand's loose and dry. They doubled back on themselves, spaced considerably farther apart.
"What was it?" I asked Lloyd when he got to me.
"Damned if I know," he said. "It was red and scaly, and I think it had a tail. It was two heads taller than you." He shuddered. "Ran off when we fired."
"Where," said Jones, "are Pat and Kroger?"
I didn't know. I hadn't seen them, nor the jeep, on my trip back. So we followed the wheel tracks for a while, and they veered off from my trail and followed another, very much like the one that had been paralleling mine when Jones and Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly thing.
"We'd better get them on the radio," said Jones, turning back toward the ship.
There wasn't anything on the radio but static.
Pat and Kroger haven't come back yet, either.
* * * * *
June 21, 1961
We're not alone here. More of the scaly things have come toward the camp, but a few rifle shots send them away. They hop like kangaroos when they're startled. Their attitudes aren't menacing, but their appearance is. And Jones says, "Who knows what's 'menacing' in an alien?"
We're going to look for Kroger and Pat today. Jones says we'd better before another windstorm blows away the jeep tracks. Fortunately, the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we always have the smears to follow, unless they get covered up, too. We're taking extra oxygen, shells, and rifles. Food, too, of course. And we're locking up the ship.
* * * * *
It's later, now. We found the jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of those big tracks nearby. We're taking the jeep to follow the aliens' tracks. There's some moss around here, on reddish brown rocks that stick up through the sand, just on the shady side, though. Kroger must be happy to have found his lichen.
The trail ended at the brink of a deep crevice in the ground. Seems to be an earthquake-type split in solid rock, with the sand sifting over this and the far edge like pink silk cataracts. The bottom is in the shade and can't be seen. The crack seems to extend to our left and right as far as we can look.
There looks like a trail down the inside of the crevice, but the Sun's setting, so we're waiting till tomorrow to go down.
Going down was Jones' idea, not mine.
* * * * *
June 22, 1961
Well, we're at the bottom, and there's water here, a shallow stream about thirty feet wide that runs along the center of the canal (we've decided we're in a canal). No sign of Pat or Kroger yet, but the sand here is hard-packed and damp, and there are normal-size footprints mingled with the alien ones, sharp and clear. The aliens seem to have six or seven toes. It varies from print to print. And they're barefoot, too, or else they have the damnedest-looking shoes in creation.
The constant shower of sand near the cliff walls is annoying, but it's sandless (shower-wise) near the stream, so we're following the footprints along the bank. Also, the air's better down here. Still thin, but not so bad as on the surface. We're going without masks to save oxygen for the return trip (Jones assures me there'll be a return trip), and the air's only a little bit sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose and mouth solve this.
We look like desperadoes, what with the rifles and covered faces. I said as much to Lloyd and he told me to shut up. Moss all over the cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.
* * * * *
We've found Kroger and Pat, with the help of the aliens. Or maybe I should call them the Martians. Either way, it's better than what Jones calls them.
They took away our rifles and brought us right to Kroger and Pat, without our even asking. Jones is mad at the way they got the rifles so easily. When we came upon them (a group of maybe ten, huddling behind a boulder in ambush), he fired, but the shots either bounced off their scales or stuck in their thick hides. Anyway, they took the rifles away and threw them into the stream, and picked us all up and took us into a hole in the cliff wall. The hole went on practically forever, but it didn't get dark. Kroger tells me that there are phosphorescent bacteria living in the mold on the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave smell, but it's richer in oxygen than even at the stream.
We're in a small cave that is just off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels come together. I can't remember which one we came in through, and neither can anyone else. Jones asked me what the hell I kept writing in the diary for, did I want to make it a gift to Martian archeologists? But I said where there's life there's hope, and now he won't talk to me. I congratulated Kroger on the lichen I'd seen, but he just said a short and unscientific word and went to sleep.
There's a Martian guarding the entrance to our cave. I don't know what they intend to do with us. Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just left us here, and we're out of rations.
Kroger tried talking to the guard once, but he (or it) made a whistling kind of sound and flashed a mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the teeth are in multiple rows, like a tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't told me.
* * * * *
June 23, 1961, I think
We're either in a docket or a zoo. I can't tell which. There's a rather square platform surrounded on all four sides by running water, maybe twenty feet across, and we're on it. Martians keep coming to the far edge of the water and looking at us and whistling at each other. A little Martian came near the edge of the water and a larger Martian whistled like crazy and dragged it away.
"Water must be dangerous to them," said Kroger.
"We shoulda brought water pistols," Jones muttered.
Pat said maybe we can swim to safety. Kroger told Pat he was crazy, that the little island we're on here underground is bordered by a fast river that goes into the planet. We'd end up drowned in some grotto in the heart of the planet, says Kroger.
"What the hell," says Pat, "it's better than starving."
It is not.
* * * * *
June 24, 1961, probably
I'm hungry. So is everybody else. Right now I could eat a dinner raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it down. A Martian threw a stone at Jones today, and Jones threw one back at him and broke off a couple of scales. The Martian whistled furiously and went away. When the crowd thinned out, same as it did yesterday (must be some sort of sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked Lloyd into swimming across the river and getting the red scales. Lloyd started at the upstream part of the current, and was about a hundred yards below this underground island before he made the far side. Sure is a swift current.
But he got the scales, walked very far upstream of us, and swam back with them. The stream sides are steep, like in a fjord, and we had to lift him out of the swirling cold water, with the scales gripped in his fist. Or what was left of the scales. They had melted down in the water and left his hand all sticky.
Kroger took the gummy things, studied them in the uncertain light, then tasted them and grinned.
The Martians are made of sugar.
* * * * *
Later, same day. Kroger said that the Martian metabolism must be like Terran (Earth-type) metabolism, only with no pancreas to make insulin. They store their energy on the outside of their bodies, in the form of scales. He's watched them more closely and seen that they have long rubbery tubes for tongues, and that they now and then suck up water from the stream while they're watching us, being careful not to get their lips (all sugar, of course) wet. He guesses that their "blood" must be almost pure water, and that it washes away (from the inside, of course) the sugar they need for energy.
I asked him where the sugar came from, and he said probably their bodies isolated carbon from something (he thought it might be the moss) and combined it with the hydrogen and oxygen in the water (even I knew the formula for water) to make sugar, a common carbohydrate.
Like plants, on Earth, he said. Except, instead of using special cells on leaves to form carbohydrates with the help of sunpower, as Earth plants do in photosynthesis (Kroger spelled that word for me), they used the shape of the scales like prisms, to isolate the spectra (another Kroger word) necessary to form the sugar.
"I don't get it," I said politely, when he'd finished his spiel.
"Simple," he said, as though he were addressing me by name. "They have a twofold reason to fear water. One: by complete solvency in that medium, they lose all energy and die. Two: even partial sprinkling alters the shape of the scales, and they are unable to use sunpower to form more sugar, and still die, if a bit slower."
"Oh," I said, taking it down verbatim. "So now what do we do?"
"We remove our boots," said Kroger, sitting on the ground and doing so, "and then we cross this stream, fill the boots with water, and spray our way to freedom."
"Which tunnel do we take?" asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the thought of escape.
Kroger shrugged. "We'll have to chance taking any that seem to slope upward. In any event, we can always follow it back and start again."
"I dunno," said Jones. "Remember those teeth of theirs. They must be for biting something more substantial than moss, Kroger."
"We'll risk it," said Pat. "It's better to go down fighting than to die of starvation."
The hell it is.
* * * * *
June 24, 1961, for sure
The Martians have coal mines. That's what they use those teeth for. We passed through one and surprised a lot of them chewing gritty hunks of anthracite out of the walls. They came running at us, whistling with those tubelike tongues, and drooling dry coal dust, but Pat swung one of his boots in an arc that splashed all over the ground in front of them, and they turned tail (literally) and clattered off down another tunnel, sounding like a locomotive whistle gone berserk.
We made the surface in another hour, back in the canal, and were lucky enough to find our own trail to follow toward the place above which the jeep still waited.
Jones got the rifles out of the stream (the Martians had probably thought they were beyond recovery there) and we found the jeep. It was nearly buried in sand, but we got it cleaned off and running, and got back to the ship quickly. First thing we did on arriving was to break out the stores and have a celebration feast just outside the door of the ship.
It was pork again, and I got sick.
* * * * *
June 25, 1961
We're going back. Pat says that a week is all we were allowed to stay and that it's urgent to return and tell what we've learned about Mars (we know there are Martians, and they're made of sugar).
"Why," I said, "can't we just tell it on the radio?"
"Because," said Pat, "if we tell them now, by the time we get back we'll be yesterday's news. This way we may be lucky and get a parade."
"Maybe even money," said Kroger, whose mind wasn't always on science.
"But they'll ask why we didn't radio the info, sir," said Jones uneasily.
"The radio," said Pat, nodding to Lloyd, "was unfortunately broken shortly after landing."
Lloyd blinked, then nodded back and walked around the rocket. I heard a crunching sound and the shattering of glass, not unlike the noise made when one drives a rifle butt through a radio.
Well, it's time for takeoff.
* * * * *
This time it wasn't so bad. I thought I was getting my space-legs, but Pat says there's less gravity on Mars, so escape velocity didn't have to be so fast, hence a smoother (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing bunks.
Lloyd wants to play chess again. I'll be careful not to win this time. However, if I don't win, maybe this time I'll be the one to quit.
Kroger is busy in his cramped lab space trying to classify the little moss he was able to gather, and Jones and Pat are up front watching the white specks revolve on that black velvet again.
Guess I'll take a nap.
* * * * *
June 26, 1961
Hell's bells. Kroger says there are two baby Martians loose on board ship. Pat told him he was nuts, but there are certain signs he's right. Like the missing charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming (AFAR) system. And the water gauges are going down. But the clincher is those two sugar crystals Lloyd had grabbed up when we were in that zoo. They're gone.
Pat has declared a state of emergency. Quick thinking, that's Pat. Lloyd, before he remembered and turned scarlet, suggested we radio Earth for instructions. We can't.
Here we are, somewhere in a void headed for Earth, with enough air and water left for maybe three days--if the Martians don't take any more.
Kroger is thrilled that he is learning something, maybe, about Martian reproductive processes. When he told Pat, Pat put it to a vote whether or not to jettison Kroger through the airlock. However, it was decided that responsibility was pretty well divided. Lloyd had gotten the crystals, Kroger had only studied them, and Jones had brought them aboard.
So Kroger stays, but meanwhile the air is getting worse. Pat suggested Kroger put us all into a state of suspended animation till landing time, eight months away. Kroger said, "How?"
* * * * *
June 27, 1961
Air is foul and I'm very thirsty. Kroger says that at least--when the Martians get bigger--they'll have to show themselves. Pat says what do we do then? We can't afford the water we need to melt them down. Besides, the melted crystals might all turn into little Martians.
Jones says he'll go down spitting.
Pat says why not dismantle interior of rocket to find out where they're holing up? Fine idea.
How do you dismantle riveted metal plates?
* * * * *
June 28, 1961
The AFAR system is no more and the water gauges are still dropping. Kroger suggests baking bread, then slicing it, then toasting it till it turns to carbon, and we can use the carbon in the AFAR system.
We'll have to try it, I guess.
* * * * *
The Martians ate the bread. Jones came forward to tell us the loaves were cooling, and when he got back they were gone. However, he did find a few of the red crystals on the galley deck (floor). They're good-sized crystals, too. Which means so are the Martians.
Kroger says the Martians must be intelligent, otherwise they couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates present in the bread after a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat says let's jettison Kroger.
This time the vote went against Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve by suggesting the crystals be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric acid. He says this'll produce carbon.
I certainly hope so.
So does Kroger.
* * * * *
Brief reprieve for us. The acid-sugar combination not only produces carbon but water vapor, and the gauge has gone up a notch. That means that we have a quart of water in the tanks for drinking. However, the air's a bit better, and we voted to let Kroger stay inside the rocket.
Meantime, we have to catch those Martians.
* * * * *
June 29, 1961
Worse and worse. Lloyd caught one of the Martians in the firing chamber. We had to flood the chamber with acid to subdue the creature, which carbonized nicely. So now we have plenty of air and water again, but besides having another Martian still on the loose, we now don't have enough acid left in the fuel tanks to make a landing.
Pat says at least our vector will carry us to Earth and we can die on our home planet, which is better than perishing in space.
The hell it is.
* * * * *
March 3, 1962
Earth in sight. The other Martian is still with us. He's where we can't get at him without blow-torches, but he can't get at the carbon in the AFAR system, either, which is a help. However, his tail is prehensile, and now and then it snakes out through an air duct and yanks food right off the table from under our noses.
Kroger says watch out. We are made of carbohydrates, too. I'd rather not have known.
* * * * *
March 4, 1962
Earth fills the screen in the control room. Pat says if we're lucky, he might be able to use the bit of fuel we have left to set us in a descending spiral into one of the oceans. The rocket is tighter than a submarine, he insists, and it will float till we're rescued, if the plates don't crack under the impact.
We all agreed to try it. Not that we thought it had a good chance of working, but none of us had a better idea.
* * * * *
I guess you know the rest of the story, about how that destroyer spotted us and got us and my diary aboard, and towed the rocket to San Francisco. News of the "captured Martian" leaked out, and we all became nine-day wonders until the dismantling of the rocket.
Kroger says he must have dissolved in the water, and wonders what that would do. There are about a thousand of those crystal-scales on a Martian.
So last week we found out, when those red-scaled things began clambering out of the sea on every coastal region on Earth. Kroger tried to explain to me about salinity osmosis and hydrostatic pressure and crystalline life, but in no time at all he lost me.
The point is, bullets won't stop these things, and wherever a crystal falls, a new Martian springs up in a few weeks. It looks like the five of us have abetted an invasion from Mars.
Needless to say, we're no longer heroes.
I haven't heard from Pat or Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked up attacking a candy factory yesterday, and Kroger and I were allowed to sign on for the flight to Venus scheduled within the next few days--because of our experience.
Kroger says there's only enough fuel for a one-way trip. I don't care. I've always wanted to travel with the President.
HELLHOUNDS OF THE COSMOS
By Clifford D. Simak
Weird are the conditions of the interdimensional struggle faced by Dr. White's ninety-nine men.
The paper had gone to press, graphically describing the latest of the many horrible events which had been enacted upon the Earth in the last six months. The headlines screamed that Six Corners, a little hamlet in Pennsylvania, had been wiped out by the Horror. Another front-page story told of a Terror in the Amazon Valley which had sent the natives down the river in babbling fear. Other stories told of deaths here and there, all attributable to the "Black Horror," as it was called.
The telephone rang.
"Hello," said the editor.
"London calling," came the voice of the operator.
"All right," replied the editor.
He recognized the voice of Terry Masters, special correspondent. His voice came clearly over the transatlantic telephone.
"The Horror is attacking London in force," he said. "There are thousands of them and they have completely surrounded the city. All roads are blocked. The government declared the city under martial rule a quarter of an hour ago and efforts are being made to prepare for resistance against the enemy."
"Just a second," the editor shouted into the transmitter.
He touched a button on his desk and in a moment an answering buzz told him he was in communication with the press-room.
"Stop the presses!" he yelled into the speaking tube. "Get ready for a new front make-up!"
"O.K.," came faintly through the tube, and the editor turned back to the phone.
"Now let's have it," he said, and the voice at the London end of the wire droned on, telling the story that in another half hour was read by a world which shuddered in cold fear even as it scanned the glaring headlines.
* * * * *
"Woods," said the editor of the Press to a reporter, "run over and talk to Dr. Silas White. He phoned me to send someone. Something about this Horror business."
Henry Woods rose from his chair without a word and walked from the office. As he passed the wire machine it was tapping out, with a maddeningly methodical slowness, the story of the fall of London. Only half an hour before it had rapped forth the flashes concerning the attack on Paris and Berlin.
He passed out of the building into a street that was swarming with terrified humanity. Six months of terror, of numerous mysterious deaths, of villages blotted out, had set the world on edge. Now with London in possession of the Horror and Paris and Berlin fighting hopelessly for their lives, the entire population of the world was half insane with fright.
Exhorters on street corners enlarged upon the end of the world, asking that the people prepare for eternity, attributing the Horror to the act of a Supreme Being enraged with the wickedness of the Earth.
Expecting every moment an attack by the Horror, people left their work and gathered in the streets. Traffic, in places, had been blocked for hours and law and order were practically paralyzed. Commerce and transportation were disrupted as fright-ridden people fled from the larger cities, seeking doubtful hiding places in rural districts from the death that stalked the land.
A loudspeaker in front of a music store blared forth the latest news flashes.
"It has been learned," came the measured tones of the announcer, "that all communication with Berlin ceased about ten minutes ago. At Paris all efforts to hold the Horror at bay have been futile. Explosives blow it apart, but have the same effect upon it as explosion has on gas. It flies apart and then reforms again, not always in the same shape as it was before. A new gas, one of the most deadly ever conceived by man, has failed to have any effect on the things. Electric guns and heat guns have absolutely no effect upon them.
"A news flash which has just come in from Rome says that a large number of the Horrors has been sighted north of that city by airmen. It seems they are attacking the capitals of the world first. Word comes from Washington that every known form of defense is being amassed at that city. New York is also preparing...."
Henry Woods fought his way through the crowd which milled in front of the loudspeaker. The hum of excitement was giving away to a silence, the silence of a stunned people, the fearful silence of a populace facing a presence it is unable to understand, an embattled world standing with useless weapons before an incomprehensible enemy.
In despair the reporter looked about for a taxi, but realized, with a groan of resignation, that no taxi could possibly operate in that crowded street. A street car, blocked by the stream of humanity which jostled and elbowed about it, stood still, a defeated thing.
Seemingly the only man with a definite purpose in that whirlpool of terror-stricken men and women, the newspaperman settled down to the serious business of battling his way through the swarming street.
* * * * *
"Before I go to the crux of the matter," said Dr. Silas White, about half an hour later, "let us first review what we know of this so-called Horror. Suppose you tell me exactly what you know of it."
Henry Woods shifted uneasily in his chair. Why didn't the old fool get down to business? The chief would raise hell if this story didn't make the regular edition. He stole a glance at his wrist-watch. There was still almost an hour left. Maybe he could manage it. If the old chap would only snap into it!
"I know no more," he said, "than is common knowledge."
The gimlet eyes of the old white-haired scientist regarded the newspaperman sharply.
"And that is?" he questioned.
There was no way out of it, thought Henry. He'd have to humor the old fellow.
"The Horror," he replied, "appeared on Earth, so far as the knowledge of man is concerned, about six months ago."
Dr. White nodded approvingly.
"You state the facts very aptly," he said.
"How so?"
"When you say 'so far as the knowledge of man is concerned.'"
"Why is that?"
"You will understand in due time. Please proceed."
Vaguely the newspaperman wondered whether he was interviewing the scientist or the scientist interviewing him.
* * * * *
"They were first reported," Woods said, "early this spring. At that time they wiped out a small village in the province of Quebec. All the inhabitants, except a few fugitives, were found dead, killed mysteriously and half eaten, as if by wild beasts. The fugitives were demented, babbling of black shapes that swept down out of the dark forest upon the little town in the small hours of the morning.
"The next that was heard of them was about a week later, when they struck in an isolated rural district in Poland, killing and feeding on the population of several farms. In the next week more villages were wiped out, in practically every country on the face of the Earth. From the hinterlands came tales of murder done at midnight, of men and women horribly mangled, of livestock slaughtered, of buildings crushed as if by some titanic force.
"At first they worked only at night and then, seeming to become bolder and more numerous, attacked in broad daylight."
The newspaperman paused.
"Is that what you want?" he asked.
"That's part of it," replied Dr. White, "but that's not all. What do these Horrors look like?"
"That's more difficult," said Henry. "They have been reported as every conceivable sort of monstrosity. Some are large and others are small. Some take the form of animals, others of birds and reptiles, and some are cast in appalling shapes such as might be snatched out of the horrid imagery of a thing which resided in a world entirely alien to our own."
* * * * *
Dr. White rose from his chair and strode across the room to confront the other.
"Young man," he asked, "do you think it possible the Horror might have come out of a world entirely alien to our own?"
"I don't know," replied Henry. "I know that some of the scientists believe they came from some other planet, perhaps even from some other solar system. I know they are like nothing ever known before on Earth. They are always inky black, something like black tar, you know, sort of sticky-looking, a disgusting sight. The weapons of mankind can't affect them. Explosives are useless and so are projectiles. They wade through poison gas and fiery chemicals and seem to enjoy them. Elaborate electrical barriers have failed. Heat doesn't make them turn a hair."
"And you think they came from some other planet, perhaps some other solar system?"
"I don't know what to think," said Henry. "If they came out of space they must have come in some conveyance, and that would certainly have been sighted, picked up long before it arrived, by our astronomers. If they came in small conveyances, there must have been many of them. If they came in a single conveyance, it would be too large to escape detection. That is, unless--"
"Unless what?" snapped the scientist.
"Unless it traveled at the speed of light. Then it would have been invisible."
"Not only invisible," snorted the old man, "but non-existent."
A question was on the tip of the newspaperman's tongue, but before it could be asked the old man was speaking again, asking a question:
"Can you imagine a fourth dimension?"
"No, I can't," said Henry.
"Can you imagine a thing of only two dimensions?"
"Vaguely, yes."
The scientist smote his palms together.
"Now we're coming to it!" he exclaimed.
Henry Woods regarded the other narrowly. The old man must be turned. What did fourth and second dimensions have to do with the Horror?
"Do you know anything about evolution?" questioned the old man.
"I have a slight understanding of it. It is the process of upward growth, the stairs by which simple organisms climb to become more complex organisms."
Dr. White grunted and asked still another question:
"Do you know anything about the theory of the exploding universe? Have you ever noted the tendency of the perfectly balanced to run amuck?"
The reporter rose slowly to his feet.
"Dr. White," he said, "you phoned my paper you had a story for us. I came here to get it, but all you have done is ask me questions. If you can't tell me what you want us to publish, I will say good-day."
The doctor put forth a hand that shook slightly.
"Sit down, young man," he said. "I don't blame you for being impatient, but I will now come to my point."
The newspaperman sat down again.
* * * * *
"I have developed a hypothesis," said Dr. White, "and have conducted several experiments which seem to bear it out. I am staking my reputation upon the supposition that it is correct. Not only that, but I am also staking the lives of several brave men who believe implicitly in me and my theory. After all, I suppose it makes little difference, for if I fail the world is doomed, if I succeed it is saved from complete destruction.
"Have you ever thought that our evolutionists might be wrong, that evolution might be downward instead of upward? The theory of the exploding universe, the belief that all of creation is running down, being thrown off balance by the loss of energy, spurred onward by cosmic accidents which tend to disturb its equilibrium, to a time when it will run wild and space will be filled with swirling dust of disintegrated worlds, would bear out this contention.
"This does not apply to the human race. There is no question that our evolution is upward, that we have arisen from one-celled creatures wallowing in the slime of primal seas. Our case is probably paralleled by thousands of other intelligences on far-flung planets and island universes. These instances, however, running at cross purposes to the general evolutional trend of the entire cosmos, are mere flashes in the eventual course of cosmic evolution, comparing no more to eternity than a split second does to a million years.
"Taking these instances, then, as inconsequential, let us say that the trend of cosmic evolution is downward rather than upward, from complex units to simpler units rather than from simple units to more complex ones.
"Let us say that life and intelligence have degenerated. How would you say such a degeneration would take place? In just what way would it be manifested? What sort of transition would life pass through in passing from one stage to a lower one? Just what would be the nature of these stages?"
The scientist's eyes glowed brightly as he bent forward in his chair. The newspaperman said simply: "I have no idea."
"Man," cried the old man, "can't you see that it would be a matter of dimensions? From the fourth dimension to the third, from the third to the second, from the second to the first, from the first to a questionable existence or plane which is beyond our understanding or perhaps to oblivion and the end of life. Might not the fourth have evolved from a fifth, the fifth from a sixth, the sixth from a seventh, and so on to no one knows what multidimension?"
* * * * *
Dr. White paused to allow the other man to grasp the importance of his statements. Woods failed lamentably to do so.
"But what has this to do with the Horror?" he asked.
"Have you absolutely no imagination?" shouted the old man.
"Why, I suppose I have, but I seem to fail to understand."
"We are facing an invasion of fourth-dimensional creatures," the old man whispered, almost as if fearful to speak the words aloud. "We are being attacked by life which is one dimension above us in evolution. We are fighting, I tell you, a tribe of hellhounds out of the cosmos. They are unthinkably above us in the matter of intelligence. There is a chasm of knowledge between us so wide and so deep that it staggers the imagination. They regard us as mere animals, perhaps not even that. So far as they are concerned we are just fodder, something to be eaten as we eat vegetables and cereals or the flesh of domesticated animals. Perhaps they have watched us for years, watching life on the world increase, lapping their monstrous jowls over the fattening of the Earth. They have awaited the proper setting of the banquet table and now they are dining.
"Their thoughts are not our thoughts, their ideals not our ideals. Perhaps they have nothing in common with us except the primal basis of all life, self-preservation, the necessity of feeding.
"Maybe they have come of their own will. I prefer to believe that they have. Perhaps they are merely following the natural course of events, obeying some immutable law legislated by some higher being who watches over the cosmos and dictates what shall be and what shall not be. If this is true it means that there has been a flaw in my reasoning, for I believed that the life of each plane degenerated in company with the degeneration of its plane of existence, which would obey the same evolutional laws which govern the life upon it. I am quite satisfied that this invasion is a well-planned campaign, that some fourth-dimensional race has found a means of breaking through the veil of force which separates its plane from ours."
"But," pointed out Henry Woods, "you say they are fourth-dimensional things. I can't see anything about them to suggest an additional dimension. They are plainly three-dimensional."
"Of course they are three-dimensional. They would have to be to live in this world of three dimensions. The only two-dimensional objects which we know of in this world are merely illusions, projections of the third dimension, like a shadow. It is impossible for more than one dimension to live on any single plane.
"To attack us they would have to lose one dimension. This they have evidently done. You can see how utterly ridiculous it would be for you to try to attack a two-dimensional thing. So far as you were concerned it would have no mass. The same is true of the other dimensions. Similarly a being of a lesser plane could not harm an inhabitant of a higher plane. It is apparent that while the Horror has lost one material dimension, it has retained certain fourth-dimensional properties which make it invulnerable to the forces at the command of our plane."
The newspaperman was now sitting on the edge of his chair.
"But," he asked breathlessly, "it all sounds so hopeless. What can be done about it?"
Dr. White hitched his chair closer and his fingers closed with a fierce grasp upon the other's knee. A militant boom came into his voice.
"My boy," he said, "we are to strike back. We are going to invade the fourth-dimensional plane of these hellhounds. We are going to make them feel our strength. We are going to strike back."
Henry Woods sprang to his feet.
"How?" he shouted. "Have you...?"
Dr. White nodded.
"I have found a way to send the third-dimensional into the fourth. Come and I will show you."
* * * * *
The machine was huge, but it had an appearance of simple construction. A large rectangular block of what appeared to be a strange black metal was set on end and flanked on each side by two smaller ones. On the top of the large block was set a half-globe of a strange substance, somewhat, Henry thought, like frosted glass. On one side of the large cube was set a lever, a long glass panel, two vertical tubes and three clock-face indicators. The control board, it appeared, was relatively simple.
Beside the mass of the five rectangles, on the floor, was a large plate of transparent substance, ground to a concave surface, through which one could see an intricate tangle of wire mesh.
Hanging from the ceiling, directly above the one on the floor, was another concave disk, but this one had a far more pronounced curvature.
Wires connected the two disks and each in turn was connected to the rectangular machine.
"It is a matter of the proper utilization of two forces, electrical and gravitational," proudly explained Dr. White. "Those two forces, properly used, warp the third-dimensional into the fourth. A reverse process is used to return the object to the third. The principle of the machine is--"
The old man was about to launch into a lengthy discussion, but Henry interrupted him. A glance at his watch had shown him press time was drawing perilously close.
"Just a second," he said. "You propose to warp a third-dimensional being into a fourth dimension. How can a third-dimensional thing exist there? You said a short time ago that only a specified dimension could exist on one single plane."
"You have missed my point," snapped Dr. White. "I am not sending a third-dimensional thing to a fourth dimension. I am changing the third-dimensional being into a fourth-dimensional being. I add a dimension, and automatically the being exists on a different plane. I am reversing evolution. This third dimension we now exist on evolved, millions of eons ago, from a fourth dimension. I am sending a lesser entity back over those millions of eons to a plane similar to one upon which his ancestors lived inconceivably long ago."
"But, man, how do you know you can do it?"
* * * * *
The doctor's eyes gleamed and his fingers reached out to press a bell.
A servant appeared almost at once.
"Bring me a dog," snapped the old man. The servant disappeared.
"Young man," said Dr. White, "I am going to show you how I know I can do it. I have done it before, now I am going to do it for you. I have sent dogs and cats back to the fourth dimension and returned them safely to this room. I can do the same with men."
The servant reappeared, carrying in his arms a small dog. The doctor stepped to the control board of his strange machine.
"All right, George," he said.
The servant had evidently worked with the old man enough to know what was expected of him. He stepped close to the floor disk and waited. The dog whined softly, sensing that all was not exactly right.
The old scientist slowly shoved the lever toward the right, and as he did so a faint hum filled the room, rising to a stupendous roar as he advanced the lever. From both floor disk and upper disk leaped strange cones of blue light, which met midway to form an hour-glass shape of brilliance.
The light did not waver or sparkle. It did not glow. It seemed hard and brittle, like straight bars of force. The newspaperman, gazing with awe upon it, felt that terrific force was there. What had the old man said? Warp a third-dimensional being into another dimension! That would take force!
As he watched, petrified by the spectacle, the servant stepped forward and, with a flip, tossed the little dog into the blue light. The animal could be discerned for a moment through the light and then it disappeared.
"Look in the globe!" shouted the old man; and Henry jerked his eyes from the column of light to the half-globe atop the machine.
He gasped. In the globe, deep within its milky center, glowed a picture that made his brain reel as he looked upon it. It was a scene such as no man could have imagined unaided. It was a horribly distorted projection of an eccentric landscape, a landscape hardly analogous to anything on Earth.
* * * * *
"That's the fourth dimension, sir," said the servant.
"That's not the fourth dimension," the old man corrected him. "That's a third-dimensional impression of the fourth dimension. It is no more the fourth dimension than a shadow is three-dimensional. It, like a shadow, is merely a projection. It gives us a glimpse of what the fourth plane is like. It is a shadow of that plane."
Slowly a dark blotch began to grow in the landscape. Slowly it assumed definite form. It puzzled the reporter. It looked familiar. He could have sworn he had seen it somewhere before. It was alive, for it had moved.
"That, sir, is the dog," George volunteered.
"That was the dog," Dr. White again corrected him. "God knows what it is now."
He turned to the newspaperman.
"Have you seen enough?" he demanded.
Henry nodded.
The other slowly began to return the lever to its original position. The roaring subsided, the light faded, the projection in the half-globe grew fainter.
"How are you going to use it?" asked the newspaperman.
"I have ninety-eight men who have agreed to be projected into the fourth dimension to seek out the entities that are attacking us and attack them in turn. I shall send them out in an hour."
"Where is there a phone?" asked the newspaperman.
"In the next room," replied Dr. White.
As the reporter dashed out of the door, the light faded entirely from between the two disks and on the lower one a little dog crouched, quivering, softly whimpering.
* * * * *
The old man stepped from the controls and approached the disk. He scooped the little animal from where it lay into his arms and patted the silky head.
"Good dog," he murmured; and the creature snuggled close to him, comforted, already forgetting that horrible place from which it had just returned.
"Is everything ready, George?" asked the old man.
"Yes, sir," replied the servant. "The men are all ready, even anxious to go. If you ask me, sir, they are a tough lot."
"They are as brave a group of men as ever graced the Earth," replied the scientist gently. "They are adventurers, every one of whom has faced danger and will not shrink from it. They are born fighters. My one regret is that I have not been able to secure more like them. A thousand men such as they should be able to conquer any opponent. It was impossible. The others were poor soft fools. They laughed in my face. They thought I was an old fool--I, the man who alone stands between them and utter destruction."
His voice had risen to almost a scream, but it again sank to a normal tone.
"I may be sending ninety-eight brave men to instant death. I hope not."
"You can always jerk them back, sir," suggested George.
"Maybe I can, maybe not," murmured the old man.
Henry Woods appeared in the doorway.
"When do we start?" he asked.
"We?" exclaimed the scientist.
"Certainly, you don't believe you're going to leave me out of this. Why, man, it's the greatest story of all time. I'm going as special war correspondent."
"They believed it? They are going to publish it?" cried the old man, clutching at the newspaperman's sleeve.
"Well, the editor was skeptical at first, but after I swore on all sorts of oaths it was true, he ate it up. Maybe you think that story didn't stop the presses!"
"I didn't expect them to. I just took a chance. I thought they, too, would laugh at me."
"But when do we start?" persisted Henry.
"You are really in earnest? You really want to go?" asked the old man, unbelievingly.
"I am going. Try to stop me."
Dr. White glanced at his watch.
"We will start in exactly thirty-four minutes," he said.
* * * * *
"Ten seconds to go." George, standing with watch in hand, spoke in a precise manner, the very crispness of his words betraying the excitement under which he labored.
The blue light, hissing, drove from disk to disk; the room thundered with the roar of the machine, before which stood Dr. White, his hand on the lever, his eyes glued on the instruments before him.
In a line stood the men who were to fling themselves into the light to be warped into another dimension, there to seek out and fight an unknown enemy. The line was headed by a tall man with hands like hams, with a weather-beaten face and a wild mop of hair. Behind him stood a belligerent little cockney. Henry Woods stood fifth in line. They were a motley lot, adventurers every one of them, and some were obviously afraid as they stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally dangerous, but less unusual, jobs.
"Five seconds," snapped George.
The lever was all the way over now. The half-globe showed, within its milky interior, a hideously distorted landscape. The light had taken on a hard, brittle appearance and its hiss had risen to a scream. The machine thundered steadily with a suggestion of horrible power.
"Time up!"
The tall man stepped forward. His foot reached the disk; another step and he was bathed in the light, a third and he glimmered momentarily, then vanished. Close on his heels followed the little cockney.
With his nerves at almost a snapping point, Henry moved on behind the fourth man. He was horribly afraid, he wanted to break from the line and run, it didn't matter where, any place to get away from that steady, steely light in front of him. He had seen three men step into it, glow for a second, and then disappear. A fourth man had placed his foot on the disk.
Cold sweat stood out on his brow. Like an automaton he placed one foot on the disk. The fourth man had already disappeared.
"Snap into it, pal," growled the man behind.
Henry lifted the other foot, caught his toe on the edge of the disk and stumbled headlong into the column of light.
He was conscious of intense heat which was instantly followed by equally intense cold. For a moment his body seemed to be under enormous pressure, then it seemed to be expanding, flying apart, bursting, exploding....
* * * * *
He felt solid ground under his feet, and his eyes, snapping open, saw an alien land. It was a land of somber color, with great gray moors, and beetling black cliffs. There was something queer about it, an intangible quality that baffled him.
He looked about him, expecting to see his companions. He saw no one. He was absolutely alone in that desolate brooding land. Something dreadful had happened! Was he the only one to be safely transported from the third dimension? Had some horrible accident occurred? Was he alone?
Sudden panic seized him. If something had happened, if the others were not here, might it not be possible that the machine would not be able to bring him back to his own dimension? Was he doomed to remain marooned forever in this terrible plane?
He looked down at his body and gasped in dismay. It was not his body!
It was a grotesque caricature of a body, a horrible profane mass of flesh, like a phantasmagoric beast snatched from the dreams of a lunatic.
It was real, however. He felt it with his hands, but they were not hands. They were something like hands; they served the same purpose that hands served in the third dimension. He was, he realized, a being of the fourth dimension, but in his fourth-dimensional brain still clung hard-fighting remnants of that faithful old third-dimensional brain. He could not, as yet, see with fourth-dimensional eyes, think purely fourth-dimensional thoughts. He had not oriented himself as yet to this new plane of existence. He was seeing the fourth dimension through the blurred lenses of millions of eons of third-dimensional existence. He was seeing it much more clearly than he had seen it in the half-globe atop the machine in Dr. White's laboratory, but he would not see it clearly until every vestige of the third dimension was wiped from him. That, he knew, would come in time.
He felt his weird body with those things that served as hands, and he found, beneath his groping, unearthly fingers, great rolling muscles, powerful tendons, and hard, well-conditioned flesh. A sense of well-being surged through him and he growled like an animal, like an animal of that horrible fourth plane.
But the terrible sounds that came from between his slobbering lips were not those of his own voice, they were the voices of many men.
* * * * *
Then he knew. He was not alone. Here, in this one body were the bodies, the brains, the power, the spirit, of those other ninety-eight men. In the fourth dimension, all the millions of third-dimensional things were one. Perhaps that particular portion of the third dimension called the Earth had sprung from, or degenerated from, one single unit of a dissolving, worn-out fourth dimension. The third dimension, warped back to a higher plane, was automatically obeying the mystic laws of evolution by reforming in the shape of that old ancestor, unimaginably removed in time from the race he had begot. He was no longer Henry Woods, newspaperman; he was an entity that had given birth, in the dim ages when the Earth was born, to a third dimension. Nor was he alone. This body of his was composed of other sons of that ancient entity.
He felt himself grow, felt his body grow vaster, assume greater proportions, felt new vitality flow through him. It was the other men, the men who were flinging themselves into the column of light in the laboratory to be warped back to this plane, to be incorporated in his body.
It was not his body, however. His brain was not his alone. The pronoun, he realized, represented the sum total of those other men, his fellow adventurers.
Suddenly a new feeling came, a feeling of completeness, a feeling of supreme fitness. He knew that the last of the ninety-eight men had stepped across the disk, that all were here in this giant body.
Now he could see more clearly. Things in the landscape, which had escaped him before, became recognizable. Awful thoughts ran through his brain, heavy, ponderous, black thoughts. He began to recognize the landscape as something familiar, something he had seen before, a thing with which he was intimate. Phenomena, which his third-dimensional intelligence would have gasped at, became commonplace. He was finally seeing through fourth-dimensional eyes, thinking fourth-dimensional thoughts.
Memory seeped into his brain and he had fleeting visions, visions of dark caverns lit by hellish flames, of huge seas that battered remorselessly with mile-high waves against towering headlands that reared titanic toward a glowering sky. He remembered a red desert scattered with scarlet boulders, he remembered silver cliffs of gleaming metallic stone. Through all his thoughts ran something else, a scarlet thread of hate, an all-consuming passion, a fierce lust after the life of some other entity.
He was no longer a composite thing built of third-dimensional beings. He was a creature of another plane, a creature with a consuming hate, and suddenly he knew against whom this hate was directed and why. He knew also that this creature was near and his great fists closed and then spread wide as he knew it. How did he know it? Perhaps through some sense which he, as a being of another plane, held, but which was alien to the Earth. Later, he asked himself this question. At the time, however, there was no questioning on his part. He only knew that somewhere near was a hated enemy and he did not question the source of his knowledge....
* * * * *
Mumbling in an idiom incomprehensible to a third-dimensional being, filled with rage that wove redly through his brain, he lumbered down the hill onto the moor, his great strides eating up the distance, his footsteps shaking the ground.
At the foot of the hill he halted and from his throat issued a challenging roar that made the very crags surrounding the moor tremble. The rocks flung back the roar as if in mockery.
Again he shouted and in the shout he framed a lurid insult to the enemy that lurked there in the cliffs.
Again the crags flung back the insult, but this time the echoes, booming over the moor, were drowned by another voice, the voice of the enemy.
At the far end of the moor appeared a gigantic form, a form that shambled on grotesque, misshapen feet, growling angrily as he came.
He came rapidly despite his clumsy gait, and as he came he mouthed terrific threats.
Close to the other he halted and only then did recognition dawn in his eyes.
"You, Mal Shaff?" he growled in his guttural tongue, and surprise and consternation were written large upon his ugly face.
"Yes, it is I, Mal Shaff," boomed the other. "Remember, Ouglat, the day you destroyed me and my plane. I have returned to wreak my vengeance. I have solved a mystery you have never guessed and I have come back. You did not imagine you were attacking me again when you sent your minions to that other plane to feed upon the beings there. It was I you were attacking, fool, and I am here to kill you."
Ouglat leaped and the thing that had been Henry Woods, newspaperman, and ninety-eight other men, but was now Mal Shaff of the fourth dimension, leaped to meet him.
Mal Shaff felt the force of Ouglat, felt the sharp pain of a hammering fist, and lashed out with those horrible arms of his to smash at the leering face of his antagonist. He felt his fists strike solid flesh, felt the bones creak and tremble beneath his blow.
His nostrils were filled with the terrible stench of the other's foul breath and his filthy body. He teetered on his gnarled legs and side-stepped a vicious kick and then stepped in to gouge with straightened thumb at the other's eye. The thumb went true and Ouglat howled in pain.
Mal Shaff leaped back as his opponent charged head down, and his knotted fist beat a thunderous tattoo as the misshapen beast closed in. He felt clawing fingers seeking his throat, felt ghastly nails ripping at his shoulders. In desperation he struck blindly, and Ouglat reeled away. With a quick stride he shortened the distance between them and struck Ouglat a hard blow squarely on his slavering mouth. Pressing hard upon the reeling figure, he swung his fists like sledge-hammers, and Ouglat stumbled, falling in a heap on the sand.
Mal Shaff leaped upon the fallen foe and kicked him with his taloned feet, ripping him wickedly. There was no thought of fair play, no faintest glimmer of mercy. This was a battle to the death: there could be no quarter.
* * * * *
The fallen monster howled, but his voice cut short as his foul mouth, with its razor-edged fangs, closed on the other's body. His talons, seeking a hold, clawed deep.
Mal Shaff, his brain a screaming maelstrom of weird emotions, aimed pile-driver blows at the enemy, clawed and ripped. Together the two rolled, locked tight in titanic battle, on the sandy plain and a great cloud of heavy dust marked where they struggled.
In desperation Ouglat put every ounce of his strength into a heave that broke the other's grip and flung him away.
The two monstrosities surged to their feet, their eyes red with hate, glaring through the dust cloud at one another.
Slowly Ouglat's hand stole to a black, wicked cylinder that hung on a belt at his waist. His fingers closed upon it and he drew the weapon. As he leveled it at Mal Shaff, his lips curled back and his features distorted into something that was not pleasant to see.
Mal Shaff, with doubled fists, saw the great thumb of his enemy slowly depressing a button on the cylinder, and a great fear held him rooted in his tracks. In the back of his brain something was vainly trying to explain to him the horror of this thing which the other held.
Then a multicolored spiral, like a corkscrew column of vapor, sprang from the cylinder and flashed toward him. It struck him full on the chest and even as it did so he caught the ugly fire of triumph in the red eyes of his enemy.
He felt a stinging sensation where the spiral struck, but that was all. He was astounded. He had feared this weapon, had been sure it portended some form of horrible death. But all it did was to produce a slight sting.
For a split second he stood stock-still, then he surged forward and advanced upon Ouglat, his hands outspread like claws. From his throat came those horrible sounds, the speech of the fourth dimension.
"Did I not tell you, foul son of Sargouthe, that I had solved a mystery you have never guessed at? Although you destroyed me long ago, I have returned. Throw away your puny weapon. I am of the lower dimension and am invulnerable to your engines of destruction. You bloated...." His words trailed off into a stream of vileness that could never have occurred to a third-dimensional mind.
Ouglat, with every line of his face distorted with fear, flung the weapon from him, and turning, fled clumsily down the moor, with Mal Shaff at his heels.
* * * * *
Steadily Mal Shaff gained and with only a few feet separating him from Ouglat, he dived with outspread arms at the other's legs.
The two came down together, but Mal Shaff's grip was broken by the fall and the two regained their feet at almost the same instant.
The wild moor resounded to their throaty roaring and the high cliffs flung back the echoes of the bellowing of the two gladiators below. It was sheer strength now and flesh and bone were bruised and broken under the life-shaking blows that they dealt. Great furrows were plowed in the sand by the sliding of heavy feet as the two fighters shifted to or away from attack. Blood, blood of fourth-dimensional creatures, covered the bodies of the two and stained the sand with its horrible hue. Perspiration streamed from them and their breath came in gulping gasps.
The lurid sun slid across the purple sky and still the two fought on. Ouglat, one of the ancients, and Mal Shaff, reincarnated. It was a battle of giants, a battle that must have beggared even the titanic tilting of forgotten gods and entities in the ages when the third-dimensional Earth was young.
Mal Shaff had no conception of time. He may have fought seconds or hours. It seemed an eternity. He had attempted to fight scientifically, but had failed to do so. While one part of him had cried out to elude his opponent, to wait for openings, to conserve his strength, another part had shouted at him to step in and smash, smash, smash at the hated monstrosity pitted against him.
It seemed Ouglat was growing in size, had become more agile, that his strength was greater. His punches hurt more; it was harder to hit him.
Still Mal Shaff drilled in determinedly, head down, fists working like pistons. As the other seemed to grow stronger and larger, he seemed to become smaller and weaker.
It was queer. Ouglat should be tired, too. His punches should be weaker. He should move more slowly, be heavier on his feet.
There was no doubt of it. Ouglat was growing larger, was drawing on some mysterious reserve of strength. From somewhere new force and life were flowing into his body. But from where was this strength coming?
A huge fist smashed against Mal Shaff's jaw. He felt himself lifted, and the next moment he skidded across the sand.
Lying there, gasping for breath, almost too fagged to rise, with the black bulk of the enemy looming through the dust cloud before him, he suddenly realized the source of the other's renewed strength.
Ouglat was recalling his minions from the third dimension! They were incorporating in his body, returning to their parent body!
They were coming back from the third dimension to the fourth dimension to fight a third-dimensional thing reincarnated in the fourth-dimensional form it had lost millions of eons ago!
This was the end, thought Mal Shaff. But he staggered to his feet to meet the charge of the ancient enemy and a grim song, a death chant immeasurably old, suddenly and dimly remembered from out of the mists of countless millenniums, was on his lips as he swung a pile-driver blow into the suddenly astonished face of the rushing Ouglat....
* * * * *
The milky globe atop the machine in Dr. White's laboratory glowed softly, and within that glow two figures seemed to struggle.
Before the machine, his hands still on the controls, stood Dr. Silas White. Behind him the room was crowded with newspapermen and photographers.
Hours had passed since the ninety-eight men--ninety-nine, counting Henry Woods--had stepped into the brittle column of light to be shunted back through unguessed time to a different plane of existence. The old scientist, during all those hours, had stood like a graven image before his machine, eyes staring fixedly at the globe.
Through the open windows he had heard the cry of the newsboy as the Press put the greatest scoop of all time on the street. The phone had rung like mad and George answered it. The doorbell buzzed repeatedly and George ushered in newspapermen who had asked innumerable questions, to which he had replied briefly, almost mechanically. The reporters had fought for the use of the one phone in the house and had finally drawn lots for it. A few had raced out to use other phones.
Photographers came and flashes popped and cameras clicked. The room was in an uproar. On the rare occasions when the reporters were not using the phone the instrument buzzed shrilly. Authoritative voices demanded Dr. Silas White. George, his eyes on the old man, stated that Dr. Silas White could not be disturbed, that he was busy.
From the street below came the heavy-throated hum of thousands of voices. The street was packed with a jostling crowd of awed humanity, every eye fastened on the house of Dr. Silas White. Lines of police held them back.
"What makes them move so slowly?" asked a reporter, staring at the globe. "They hardly seem to be moving. It looks like a slow motion picture."
"They are not moving slowly," replied Dr. White. "There must be a difference in time in the fourth dimension. Maybe what is hours to us is only seconds to them. Time must flow more slowly there. Perhaps it is a bigger place than this third plane. That may account for it. They aren't moving slowly, they are fighting savagely. It's a fight to the death! Watch!"
* * * * *
The grotesque arm of one of the figures in the milky globe was moving out slowly, loafing along, aimed at the head of the other. Slowly the other twisted his body aside, but too slowly. The fist finally touched the head, still moving slowly forward, the body following as slowly. The head of the creature twisted, bent backward, and the body toppled back in a leisurely manner.
"What does White say?... Can't you get a statement of some sort from him? Won't he talk at all? A hell of a fine reporter you are--can't even get a man to open his mouth. Ask him about Henry Woods. Get a human-interest slant on Woods walking into the light. Ask him how long this is going to last. Damn it all, man, do something, and don't bother me again until you have a real story--yes, I said a real story--are you hard of hearing? For God's sake, do something!"
The editor slammed the receiver on the hook.
"Brooks," he snapped, "get the War Department at Washington. Ask them if they're going to back up White. Go on, go on. Get busy.... How will you get them? I don't know. Just get them, that's all. Get them!"
Typewriters gibbered like chuckling morons through the roaring tumult of the editorial rooms. Copy boys rushed about, white sheets clutched in their grimy hands. Telephones jangled and strident voices blared through the haze that arose from the pipes and cigarettes of perspiring writers who feverishly transferred to paper the startling events that were rocking the world.
The editor, his necktie off, his shirt open, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, drummed his fingers on the desk. It had been a hectic twenty-four hours and he had stayed at the desk every minute of the time. He was dead tired. When the moment of relaxation came, when the tension snapped, he knew he would fall into an exhausted stupor of sleep, but the excitement was keeping him on his feet. There was work to do. There was news such as the world had never known before. Each new story meant a new front make-up, another extra. Even now the presses were thundering, even now papers with the ink hardly dry upon them were being snatched by the avid public from the hands of screaming newsboys.
* * * * *
A man raced toward the city desk, waving a sheet of paper in his hand. Sensing something unusual the others in the room crowded about as he laid the sheet before the editor.
"Just came in," the man gasped.
The paper was a wire dispatch. It read:
"Rome--The Black Horror is in full retreat. Although still apparently immune to the weapons being used against it, it is lifting the siege of this city. The cause is unknown."
The editor ran his eye down the sheet. There was another dateline:
"Madrid--The Black Horror, which has enclosed this city in a ring of dark terror for the last two days, is fleeing, rapidly disappearing...."
The editor pressed a button. There was an answering buzz.
"Composing room," he shouted, "get ready for a new front! Yes, another extra. This will knock their eyes out!"
A telephone jangled furiously. The editor seized it.
"Yes. What was that?... White says he must have help. I see. Woods and the others are weakening. Being badly beaten, eh?... More men needed to go out to the other plane. Wants reinforcements. Yes. I see. Well, tell him that he'll have them. If he can wait half an hour we'll have them walking by thousands into that light. I'll be damned if we won't! Just tell White to hang on! We'll have the whole nation coming to the rescue!"
He jabbed up the receiver.
"Richards," he said, "write a streamer, 'Help Needed,' 'Reinforcements Called'--something of that sort, you know. Make it scream. Tell the foreman to dig out the biggest type he has. A foot high. If we ever needed big type, we need it now!"
He turned to the telephone.
"Operator," he said, "get me the Secretary of War at Washington. The secretary in person, you understand. No one else will do."
He turned again to the reporters who stood about the desk.
"In two hours," he explained, banging the desk top for emphasis, "we'll have the United States Army marching into that light Woods walked into!"
* * * * *
The bloody sun was touching the edge of the weird world, seeming to hesitate before taking the final plunge behind the towering black crags that hung above the ink-pot shadows at their base. The purple sky had darkened until it was almost the color of soft, black velvet. Great stars were blazing out.
Ouglat loomed large in the gathering twilight, a horrible misshapen ogre of an outer world. He had grown taller, broader, greater. Mal Shaff's head now was on a level with the other's chest; his huge arms seemed toylike in comparison with those of Ouglat, his legs mere pipestems.
Time and time again he had barely escaped as the clutching hands of Ouglat reached out to grasp him. Once within those hands he would be torn apart.
The battle had become a game of hide and seek, a game of cat and mouse, with Mal Shaff the mouse.
Slowly the sun sank and the world became darker. His brain working feverishly, Mal Shaff waited for the darkness. Adroitly he worked the battle nearer and nearer to the Stygian darkness that lay at the foot of the mighty crags. In the darkness he might escape. He could no longer continue this unequal fight. Only escape was left.
The sun was gone now. Blackness was dropping swiftly over the land, like a great blanket, creating the illusion of the glowering sky descending to the ground. Only a few feet away lay the total blackness under the cliffs.
Like a flash Mal Shaff darted into the blackness, was completely swallowed in it. Roaring, Ouglat followed.
His shoulders almost touching the great rock wall that shot straight up hundreds of feet above him, Mal Shaff ran swiftly, fear lending speed to his shivering legs. Behind him he heard the bellowing of his enemy. Ouglat was searching for him, a hopeless search in that total darkness. He would never find him. Mal Shaff felt sure.
Fagged and out of breath, he dropped panting at the foot of the wall. Blood pounded through his head and his strength seemed to be gone. He lay still and stared out into the less dark moor that stretched before him.
For some time he lay there, resting. Aimlessly he looked out over the moor, and then he suddenly noted, some distance to his right, a hill rising from the moor. The hill was vaguely familiar. He remembered it dimly as being of great importance.
A sudden inexplicable restlessness filled him. Far behind him he heard the enraged bellowing of Ouglat, but that he scarcely noticed. So long as darkness lay upon the land he knew he was safe from his enemy.
The hill had made him restless. He must reach the top. He could think of no logical reason for doing so. Obviously he was safer here at the base of the cliff, but a voice seemed to be calling, a friendly voice from the hilltop.
* * * * *
He rose on aching legs and forged ahead. Every fiber of his being cried out in protest, but resolutely he placed one foot ahead of the other, walking mechanically.
Opposite the hill he disregarded the strange call that pulsed down upon him, long enough to rest his tortured body. He must build up his strength for the climb.
He realized that danger lay ahead. Once he quitted the blackness of the cliff's base, Ouglat, even in the darkness that lay over the land, might see him. That would be disastrous. Once over the top of the hill he would be safe.
Suddenly the landscape was bathed in light, a soft green radiance. One moment it had been pitch dark, the next it was light, as if a giant search-light had been snapped on.
In terror, Mal Shaff looked for the source of the light. Just above the horizon hung a great green orb, which moved up the ladder of the sky even as he watched.
A moon! A huge green satellite hurtling swiftly around this cursed world!
A great, overwhelming fear sat upon Mal Shaff and with a high, shrill scream of anger he raced forward, forgetful of aching body and outraged lungs.
His scream was answered from far off, and out of the shadows of the cliffs toward the far end of the moor a black figure hurled itself. Ouglat was on the trail!
Mal Shaff tore madly up the slope, topped the crest, and threw himself flat on the ground, almost exhausted.
* * * * *
A queer feeling stole over him, a queer feeling of well-being. New strength was flowing into him, the old thrill of battle was pounding through his blood once more.
Not only were queer things happening to his body, but also to his brain. The world about him looked queer, held a sort of an intangible mystery he could not understand. A half question formed in the back of his brain. Who and what was he? Queer thoughts to be thinking! He was Mal Shaff, but had he always been Mal Shaff?
He remembered a brittle column of light, creatures with bodies unlike his body, walking into it. He had been one of those creatures. There was something about dimensions, about different planes, a plan for one plane to attack another!
He scrambled to his bowed legs and beat his great chest with mighty, long-nailed hands. He flung back his head and from his throat broke a sound to curdle the blood of even the bravest.
On the moor below Ouglat heard the cry and answered it with one equally ferocious.
Mal Shaff took a step forward, then stopped stock-still. Through his brain went a sharp command to return to the spot where he had stood, to wait there until attacked. He stepped back, shifting his feet impatiently.
He was growing larger; every second fresh vitality was pouring into him. Before his eyes danced a red curtain of hate and his tongue roared forth a series of insulting challenges to the figure that was even now approaching the foot of the hill.
As Ouglat climbed the hill, the night became an insane bedlam. The challenging roars beat like surf against the black cliffs.
Ouglat's lips were flecked with foam, his red eyes were mere slits, his mouth worked convulsively.
They were only a few feet apart when Ouglat charged.
* * * * *
Mal Shaff was ready for him. There was no longer any difference in their size and they met like the two forward walls of contending football teams.
Mal Shaff felt the soft throat of the other under his fingers and his grip tightened. Maddened, Ouglat shot terrific blow after terrific blow into Mal Shaff's body.
Try as he might, however, he could not shake the other's grip.
It was silent now. The night seemed brooding, watching the struggle on the hilltop.
Larger and larger grew Mal Shaff, until he overtopped Ouglat like a giant.
Then he loosened his grip and, as Ouglat tried to scuttle away, reached down to grasp him by the nape of his neck.
High above his head he lifted his enemy and dashed him to the ground. With a leap he was on the prostrate figure, trampling it apart, smashing it into the ground. With wild cries he stamped the earth, treading out the last of Ouglat, the Black Horror.
When no trace of the thing that had been Ouglat remained, he moved away and viewed the trampled ground.
Then, for the first time he noticed that the crest of the hill was crowded with other monstrous figures. He glared at them, half in surprise, half in anger. He had not noticed their silent approach.
"It is Mal Shaff!" cried one.
"Yes, I am Mal Shaff. What do you want?"
"But, Mal Shaff, Ouglat destroyed you once long ago!"
"And I, just now," replied Mal Shaff, "have destroyed Ouglat."
The figures were silent, shifting uneasily. Then one stepped forward.
"Mal Shaff," it said, "we thought you were dead. Apparently it was not so. We welcome you to our land again. Ouglat, who once tried to kill you and apparently failed, you have killed, which is right and proper. Come and live with us again in peace. We welcome you."
Mal Shaff bowed.
Gone was all thought of the third dimension. Through Mal Shaff's mind raced strange, haunting memories of a red desert scattered with scarlet boulders, of silver cliffs of gleaming metallic stone, of huge seas battering against towering headlands. There were other things, too. Great palaces of shining jewels, and weird nights of inhuman joy where hellish flames lit deep, black caverns.
He bowed again.
"I thank you, Bathazar," he said.
Without a backward look he shambled down the hill with the others.
* * * * *
"Yes?" said the editor. "What's that you say? Doctor White is dead! A suicide! Yeah, I understand. Worry, hey! Here, Roberts, take this story."
He handed over the phone.
"When you write it," he said, "play up the fact he was worried about not being able to bring the men back to the third dimension. Give him plenty of praise for ending the Black Horror. It's a big story."
"Sure," said Roberts, then spoke into the phone: "All right, Bill, shoot the works."
DREAM TOWN
by HENRY SLESAR
The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests?
The woman in the doorway looked like Mom in the homier political cartoons. She was plump, apple-cheeked, white-haired. She wore a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and was busily clutching a worn house-robe around her expansive middle. She blinked at Sol Becker's rain-flattened hair and hang-dog expression, and said: "What is it? What do you want?"
"I'm sorry--" Sol's voice was pained. "The man in the diner said you might put me up. I had my car stolen: a hitchhiker; going to Salinas ..." He was puffing.
"Hitchhiker? I don't understand." She clucked at the sight of the pool of water he was creating in her foyer. "Well, come inside, for heaven's sake. You're soaking!"
"Thanks," Sol said gratefully.
With the door firmly shut behind him, the warm interior of the little house covered him like a blanket. He shivered, and let the warmth seep over him. "I'm terribly sorry. I know how late it is." He looked at his watch, but the face was too misty to make out the hour.
"Must be nearly three," the woman sniffed. "You couldn't have come at a worse time. I was just on my way to court--"
The words slid by him. "If I could just stay overnight. Until the morning. I could call some friends in San Fernando. I'm very susceptible to head colds," he added inanely.
"Well, take those shoes off, first," the woman grumbled. "You can undress in the parlor, if you'll keep off the rug. You won't mind using the sofa?"
"No, of course not. I'd be happy to pay--"
"Oh, tush, nobody's asking you to pay. This isn't a hotel. You mind if I go back upstairs? They're gonna miss me at the palace."
"No, of course not," Sol said. He followed her into the darkened parlor, and watched as she turned the screw on a hurricane-style lamp, shedding a yellow pool of light over half a flowery sofa and a doily-covered wing chair. "You go on up. I'll be perfectly fine."
"Guess you can use a towel, though. I'll get you one, then I'm going up. We wake pretty early in this house. Breakfast's at seven; you'll have to be up if you want any."
"I really can't thank you enough--"
"Tush," the woman said. She scurried out, and returned a moment later with a thick bath towel. "Sorry I can't give you any bedding. But you'll find it nice and warm in here." She squinted at the dim face of a ship's-wheel clock on the mantle, and made a noise with her tongue. "Three-thirty!" she exclaimed. "I'll miss the whole execution ..."
"The what?"
"Goodnight, young man," Mom said firmly.
She padded off, leaving Sol holding the towel. He patted his face, and then scrubbed the wet tangle of brown hair. Carefully, he stepped off the carpet and onto the stone floor in front of the fireplace. He removed his drenched coat and suit jacket, and squeezed water out over the ashes.
He stripped down to his underwear, wondering about next morning's possible embarrassment, and decided to use the damp bath towel as a blanket. The sofa was downy and comfortable. He curled up under the towel, shivered once, and closed his eyes.
* * * * *
He was tired and very sleepy, and his customary nightly review was limited to a few detached thoughts about the wedding he was supposed to attend in Salinas that weekend ... the hoodlum who had responded to his good-nature by dumping him out of his own car ... the slogging walk to the village ... the little round woman who was hurrying off, like the White Rabbit, to some mysterious appointment on the upper floor ...
Then he went to sleep.
A voice awoke him, shrill and questioning.
"Are you nakkid?"
His eyes flew open, and he pulled the towel protectively around his body and glared at the little girl with the rust-red pigtails.
"Huh, mister?" she said, pushing a finger against her freckled nose. "Are you?"
"No," he said angrily. "I'm not naked. Will you please go away?"
"Sally!" It was Mom, appearing in the doorway of the parlor. "You leave the gentleman alone." She went off again.
"Yes," Sol said. "Please let me get dressed. If you don't mind." The girl didn't move. "What time is it?"
"Dunno," Sally shrugged. "I like poached eggs. They're my favorite eggs in the whole world."
"That's good," Sol said desperately. "Now why don't you be a good girl and eat your poached eggs. In the kitchen."
"Ain't ready yet. You going to stay for breakfast?"
"I'm not going to do anything until you get out of here."
She put the end of a pigtail in her mouth and sat down on the chair opposite. "I went to the palace last night. They had an exelution."
"Please," Sol groaned. "Be a good girl, Sally. If you let me get dressed, I'll show you how to take your thumb off."
"Oh, that's an old trick. Did you ever see an exelution?"
"No. Did you ever see a little girl with her hide tanned?"
"Huh?"
"Sally!" Mom again, sterner. "You get out of there, or you-know-what ..."
"Okay," the girl said blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace again. If I brush my teeth. Aren't you ever gonna get up?" She skipped out of the room, and Sol hastily sat up and reached for his trousers.
When he had dressed, the clothes still damp and unpleasant against his skin, he went out of the parlor and found the kitchen. Mom was busy at the stove. He said: "Good morning."
"Breakfast in ten minutes," she said cheerfully. "You like poached eggs?"
"Sure. Do you have a telephone?"
"In the hallway. Party line, so you may have to wait."
He tried for fifteen minutes to get through, but there was a woman on the line who was terribly upset about a cotton dress she had ordered from Sears, and was telling the world about it.
Finally, he got his call through to Salinas, and a sleepy-voiced Fred, his old Army buddy, listened somewhat indifferently to his tale of woe. "I might miss the wedding," Sol said unhappily. "I'm awfully sorry." Fred didn't seem to be half as sorry as he was. When Sol hung up, he was feeling more despondent than ever.
A man, tall and rangy, with a bobbing Adam's apple and a lined face, came into the hallway. "Hullo?" he said inquiringly. "You the fella had the car stolen?"
"Yes."
The man scratched his ear. "Take you over to Sheriff Coogan after breakfast. He'll let the Stateys know about it. My name's Dawes."
Sol accepted a careful handshake.
"Don't get many people comin' into town," Dawes said, looking at him curiously. "Ain't seen a stranger in years. But you look like the rest of us." He chuckled.
Mom called out: "Breakfast!"
* * * * *
At the table, Dawes asked his destination.
"Wedding in Salinas," he explained. "Old Army friend of mine. I picked this hitchhiker up about two miles from here. He seemed okay."
"Never can tell," Dawes said placidly, munching egg. "Hey, Ma. That why you were so late comin' to court last night?"
"That's right, Pa." She poured the blackest coffee Sol had ever seen. "Didn't miss much, though."
"What court is that?" Sol asked politely, his mouth full.
"Umagum," Sally said, a piece of toast sticking out from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin'?"
"Armagon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister--" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?"
"Becker."
"Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically.
"Dream? You mean this--Armagon is a place you dream about?"
"Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime."
Mom said: "I get muddle-headed too, sometimes."
"You mean--" Sol put his napkin in his lap. "You mean you dream about the same place?"
"Sure," Sally piped. "We all go there at night. I'm goin' to the palace again, too."
"If you brush your teeth," Mom said primly.
"If I brush my teeth. Boy, you shoulda seen the exelution!"
"Execution," her father said.
"Oh, my goodness!" Mom got up hastily. "That reminds me. I gotta call poor Mrs. Brundage. It's the least I could do."
"Good idea," Dawes nodded. "And I'll have to round up some folks and get old Brundage out of there."
Sol was staring. He opened his mouth, but couldn't think of the right question to ask. Then he blurted out: "What execution?"
"None of your business," the man said coldly. "You eat up, young man. If you want me to get Sheriff Coogan lookin' for your car."
The rest of the meal went silently, except for Sally's insistence upon singing her school song between mouthfuls. When Dawes was through, he pushed back his plate and ordered Sol to get ready.
Sol grabbed his topcoat and followed the man out the door.
"Have to stop someplace first," Dawes said. "But we'll be pickin' up the Sheriff on the way. Okay with you?"
"Fine," Sol said uneasily.
The rain had stopped, but the heavy clouds seemed reluctant to leave the skies over the small town. There was a skittish breeze blowing, and Sol Becker tightened the collar of his coat around his neck as he tried to keep up with the fast-stepping Dawes.
* * * * *
They crossed the street diagonally, and entered a two-story wooden building. Dawes took the stairs at a brisk pace, and pushed open the door on the second floor. A fat man looked up from behind a desk.
"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd see if you wanted to help move Brundage."
The man batted his eyes. "Oh, Brundage!" he said. "You know, I clean forgot about him?" He laughed. "Imagine me forgetting that?"
"Yeah." Dawes wasn't amused. "And you Prince Regent."
"Aw, Willie--"
"Well, come on. Stir that fat carcass. Gotta pick up Sheriff Coogan, too. This here gentleman has to see him about somethin' else."
The man regarded Sol suspiciously. "Never seen you before. Night or day. Stranger?"
"Come on!" Dawes said.
The fat man grunted and hoisted himself out of the swivel chair. He followed lamely behind the two men as they went out into the street again.
A woman, with an empty market basket, nodded casually to them. "Mornin', folks. Enjoyed it last night. Thought you made a right nice speech, Mr. Dawes."
"Thanks," Dawes answered gruffly, but obviously flattered. "We were just goin' over to Brundage's to pick up the body. Ma's gonna pay a call on Mrs. Brundage around ten o'clock. You care to visit?"
"Why, I think that's very nice," the woman said. "I'll be sure and do that." She smiled at the fat man. "Mornin', Prince."
Sol's head was spinning. As they left the woman and continued their determined march down the quiet street, he tried to find answers.
"Look, Mr. Dawes." He was panting; the pace was fast. "Does she dream about this--Armagon, too? That woman back there?"
"Yep."
Charlie chuckled. "He's a stranger, all right."
"And you, Mr.--" Sol turned to the fat man. "You also know about this palace and everything?"
"I told you," Dawes said testily. "Charlie here's Prince Regent. But don't let the fancy title fool you. He got no more power than any Knight of the Realm. He's just too dern fat to do much more'n sit on a throne and eat grapes. That right, Charlie?"
The fat man giggled.
"Here's the Sheriff," Dawes said.
The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed citizen with a long, sad face, was rocking on a porch as they approached his house, trying to puff a half-lit pipe. He lifted one hand wearily when he saw them.
"Hi, Cookie," Dawes grinned. "Thought you, me, and Charlie would get Brundage's body outa the house. This here's Mr. Becker; he got another problem. Mr. Becker, meet Cookie Coogan."
The Sheriff joined the procession, pausing only once to inquire into Sol's predicament.
He described the hitchhiker incident, but Coogan listened stoically. He murmured something about the Troopers, and shuffled alongside the puffing fat man.
Sol soon realized that their destination was a barber shop.
Dawes cupped his hands over the plate glass and peered inside. Gold letters on the glass advertised: HAIRCUT SHAVE & MASSAGE PARLOR. He reported: "Nobody in the shop. Must be upstairs."
* * * * *
The fat man rang the bell. It was a while before an answer came.
It was a reedy woman in a housecoat, her hair in curlers, her eyes red and swollen.
"Now, now," Dawes said gently. "Don't you take on like that, Mrs. Brundage. You heard the charges. It hadda be this way."
"My poor Vincent," she sobbed.
"Better let us up," the Sheriff said kindly. "No use just lettin' him lay there, Mrs. Brundage."
"He didn't mean no harm," the woman snuffled. "He was just purely ornery, Vincent was. Just plain mean stubborn."
"The law's the law," the fat man sighed.
Sol couldn't hold himself in.
"What law? Who's dead? How did it happen?"
Dawes looked at him disgustedly. "Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?"
"I don't know," Sol said miserably.
"You better stay out of this," the Sheriff warned. "This is a local matter, young man. You better stay in the shop while we go up."
They filed past him and the crying Mrs. Brundage.
When they were out of sight, Sol pleaded with her.
"What happened? How did your husband die?"
"Please ..."
"You must tell me! Was it something to do with Armagon? Do you dream about the place, too?"
She was shocked at the question. "Of course!"
"And your husband? Did he have the same dream?"
Fresh tears resulted. "Can't you leave me alone?" She turned her back. "I got things to do. You can make yourself comfortable--" She indicated the barber chairs, and left through the back door.
Sol looked after her, and then ambled over to the first chair and slipped into the high seat. His reflection in the mirror, strangely gray in the dim light, made him groan. His clothes were a mess, and he needed a shave. If only Brundage had been alive ...
He leaped out of the chair as voices sounded behind the door. Dawes was kicking it open with his foot, his arms laden with two rather large feet, still encased in bedroom slippers. Charlie was at the other end of the burden, which appeared to be a middle-aged man in pajamas. The Sheriff followed the trio up with a sad, undertaker expression. Behind him came Mrs. Brundage, properly weeping.
"We'll take him to the funeral parlor," Dawes said, breathing hard. "Weighs a ton, don't he?"
"What killed him?" Sol said.
"Heart attack."
The fat man chuckled.
The tableau was grisly. Sol looked away, towards the comfortingly mundane atmosphere of the barber shop. But even the sight of the thick-padded chairs, the shaving mugs on the wall, the neat rows of cutting instruments, seemed grotesque and morbid.
"Listen," Sol said, as they went through the doorway. "About my car--"
The Sheriff turned and regarded him lugubriously. "Your car? Young man, ain't you got no respect?"
Sol swallowed hard and fell silent. He went outside with them, the woman slamming the barber-shop door behind him. He waited in front of the building while the men toted away the corpse to some new destination.
* * * * *
He took a walk.
The town was just coming to life. People were strolling out of their houses, commenting on the weather, chuckling amiably about local affairs. Kids on bicycles were beginning to appear, jangling the little bells and hooting to each other. A woman, hanging wash in the back yard, called out to him, thinking he was somebody else.
He found a little park, no more than twenty yards in circumference, centered around a weatherbeaten monument of some unrecognizable military figure. Three old men took their places on the bench that circled the General, and leaned on their canes.
Sol was a civil engineer. But he made like a reporter.
"Pardon me, sir." The old man, leathery-faced, with a fine yellow moustache, looked at him dumbly. "Have you ever heard of Armagon?"
"You a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Thought so."
Sol repeated the question.
"Course I did. Been goin' there ever since I was a kid. Night-times, that is."
"How--I mean, what kind of place is it?"
"Said you're a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Then 'tain't your business."
That was that.
He left the park, and wandered into a thriving luncheonette. He tried questioning the man behind the counter, who merely snickered and said: "You stayin' with the Dawes, ain't you? Better ask Willie, then. He knows the place better than anybody."
He asked about the execution, and the man stiffened.
"Don't think I can talk about that. Fella broke one of the Laws; that's about it. Don't see where you come into it."
At eleven o'clock, he returned to the Dawes residence, and found Mom in the kitchen, surrounded by the warm nostalgic odor of home-baked bread. She told him that her husband had left a message for the stranger, informing him that the State Police would be around to get his story.
He waited in the house, gloomily turning the pages of the local newspaper, searching for references to Armagon. He found nothing.
At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced State Trooper came to call, and Sol told his story. He was promised nothing, and told to stay in town until he was contacted again by the authorities.
Mom fixed him a light lunch, the greatest feature of which was some hot biscuits she plucked out of the oven. It made him feel almost normal.
He wandered around the town some more after lunch, trying to spark conversation with the residents.
He learned little.
* * * * *
At five-thirty, he returned to the Dawes house, and was promptly leaped upon by little Sally.
"Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said, clutching his right leg and almost toppling him over. "We had a party in school. I had chocolate cake. You goin' to stay with us?"
"Just another night," Sol told her, trying to shake the girl off. "If it's okay with your folks. They haven't found my car yet."
"Sally!" Mom was peering out of the screen door. "You let Mr. Becker alone and go wash. Your Pa will be home soon."
"Oh, pooh," the girl said, her pigtails swinging. "Do you got a girlfriend, mister?"
"No." Sol struggled towards the house with her dead weight on his leg. "Would you mind? I can't walk."
"Would you be my boyfriend?"
"Well, we'll talk about it. If you let go my leg."
Inside the house, she said: "We're having pot roast. You stayin'?"
"Of course Mr. Becker's stayin'," Mom said. "He's our guest."
"That's very kind of you," Sol said. "I really wish you'd let me pay something--"
"Don't want to hear another word about pay."
* * * * *
Mr. Dawes came home an hour later, looking tired. Mom pecked him lightly on the forehead. He glanced at the evening paper, and then spoke to Sol.
"Hear you been asking questions, Mr. Becker."
Sol nodded, embarrassed. "Guess I have. I'm awfully curious about this Armagon place. Never heard of anything like it before."
Dawes grunted. "You ain't a reporter?"
"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I was just satisfying my own curiosity."
"Uh-huh." Dawes looked reflective. "You wouldn't be thinkin' about writing us up or anything. I mean, this is a pretty private affair."
"Writing it up?" Sol blinked. "I hadn't thought of it. But you'll have to admit--it's sure interesting."
"Yeah," Dawes said narrowly. "I guess it would be."
"Supper!" Mom called.
After the meal, they spent a quiet evening at home. Sally went to bed, screaming her reluctance, at eight-thirty. Mom, dozing in the big chair near the fireplace, padded upstairs at nine. Then Dawes yawned widely, stood up, and said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.
He paused in the doorway before leaving.
"I'd think about that," he said. "Writing it up, I mean. A lot of folks would think you were just plum crazy."
Sol laughed feebly. "I guess they would at that."
"Goodnight," Dawes said.
"Goodnight."
He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about half an hour. Then he undressed, made himself comfortable on the sofa, snuggled under the soft blanket that Mom had provided, and shut his eyes.
He reviewed the events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ...
Then sleep came.
* * * * *
He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling.
The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies.
He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him.
It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white toga. She was shrieking, laughing as she skittered past him, clutching a gleaming gold helmet.
He called out to her, but she was too busy outdistancing her pursuer. It was Sheriff Coogan, puffing and huffing, the metal-and-gold cloth uniform ludicrous on his lanky frame.
"Consarn kid!" he wheezed. "Gimme my hat!"
Mom was following him, her stout body regal in scarlet robes. "Sally! You give Sir Coogan his helmet! You hear?"
"Mrs. Dawes!" Sol said.
"Why, Mr. Becker! How nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!"
Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else could explain the magnificence of his attire.
"Yes," Dawes said craftily. "So I see. Welcome to Armagon, Mr. Becker."
"Armagon?" Sol gaped. "Then this is the place you've been dreaming about?"
"Yep," the King said. "And now you're in it, too."
"Then I'm only dreaming!"
Charlie, the fat man, clumsy as ever in his robes of State, said: "So that's the snooper, eh?"
"Yep," Dawes chuckled. "Think you better round up the Knights."
Sol said: "The Knights?"
"Exelution! Exelution!" Sally shrieked.
"Now wait a minute--"
Charlie shouted.
Running feet, clanking of armor. Sol backed up against a pillar. "Now look here. You've gone far enough--"
"Not quite," said the King.
The Knights stepped forward.
"Wait!" Sol screamed.
Familiar faces, under shining helmets, moved towards him; the tips of sharp-pointed spears gleaming wickedly. And Sol Becker wondered--would he ever awake?
HEART
By HENRY SLESAR
Monk had three questions he lived by: Where can I find it? How much will it cost? When can you deliver? But now they said that what he needed wasn't for sale. "Want to bet?" He snorted.
Systole ... diastole ... the Cardiophone listened, hummed, and recorded; tracing a path of perilous peaks and precipices on the white paper.
"Relax!" Dr. Rostov pleaded. "Please relax, Mr. Monk!"
The eyes of Fletcher Monk replied. Rostov knew their language well enough to read the glaring messages they transmitted. Indignation ... "Don't use that commanding tone with me, Doctor!" Protest ... "I am relaxed; completely relaxed!" Warning.... "Get me out of this electric chair, Rostov!"
The physician sighed and clicked the apparatus off. Swiftly, but with knowing fingers, he disengaged his patient from the wire and rubber encumbrances of the reclining seat. Fletcher Monk sat up and rubbed his forearms, watching every movement the doctor made as he prepared to study the results of his examination.
"You're fussing, Rostov," he said coldly. "My shirt."
"In a moment."
"Now," said Monk impatiently.
The physician shook his head sadly. He handed Monk his shirt and waited until the big man had buttoned it half way down. Then he returned to the Cardiophone for a more critical study. A fine analysis was hardly necessary; the alarming story had been told with the first measurements of the heart machine.
"Cut it out," said Monk brusquely. "You've got that death's-head look again, Rostov. If you want to say something, say it."
"You were tight as a drum," said the doctor. "That's going to influence my findings, you know. If you hadn't refused the narcotic--"
Fletcher Monk barked: "I won't be drugged!"
"It would have relaxed you--"
"I was as relaxed as I ever am," the other man said candidly, and Rostov recognized the truth of his analysis. Monk lived in a world of taut muscles and nerves stretched out just below the breaking point. Tenseness was his trademark; there was no more elasticity in Monk's body than there was in the hard cash he accumulated so readily.
"Well?" the patient jeered. "What's the verdict, you damned sawbones? Going to throw away my cigars? Going to send me on a long sea voyage?"
Rostov frowned.
"Don't look so smug!" Monk exploded. "I know you think there's something wrong with me. You can't wait to bury me!"
"You're sick, Mr. Monk," said the doctor. "You're very sick."
Monk glowered. "You're wrong," he said icily. "You've made a lousy diagnosis."
"What was that feeling you described?" asked Rostov. "Remember what you told me? Like a big, black bird, flapping its wings in your chest. Didn't that mean something to you, Mr. Monk?"
* * * * *
The industrialist paled. "All right. Get to the point," he said quietly. "What did that gadget tell you?"
"Bad news," said the doctor. "Your heart's been strained almost to bursting. It's working on will power, Mr. Monk; hardly anything else."
"Get to the point!" Monk shouted.
"That is the point," Rostov said stiffly. "You have a serious heart condition. A dangerous condition. You've ignored eight years of my advice, and now your heart is showing the effects."
"What can it do to me?"
"Kill you," said the doctor bluntly. "Frankly, I can't even promise that the usual precautions will do any good. But we have no other choice than to take them. The human body is a miraculous affair, and even the most desperate damages sometimes can't prevent it from going on living. But I won't mince words with you, Mr. Monk. You're a direct sort of person, so I'm telling you directly. Your chances are slim."
Monk sat down and put his black tie on distractedly. He sat deep in thought for a while, and then said:
"How much would it cost to fix it?"
"What?"
"Money!" the big man cried. "How much money would it take to get me repaired?"
"But it's not a matter of money--"
"Don't give me that!" Monk put his jacket on with a violent motion. "I've learned better than that in my fifty years, Dr. Rostov. Money fixes everything. Everything! I could curdle your milk by telling you some of the things I've fixed with money!"
The physician shrugged. "Money doesn't buy health."
"Doesn't it?" The patient gave an abrupt laugh. "Money buys people, Dr. Rostov. It buys loyalty and disloyalty. It buys friends and sells enemies. All these are commodities, Doctor. I found that out--the hard way."
"Mr. Monk, you don't know what I'm telling you. Your heart action is unreliable, and no amount of dollars can bring it back to normal--"
The industrialist stood up. "You think the heart is incorruptible, eh?" He snorted. "Well, I think different. Someplace on earth there's a man or a method that can fix me up. It'll take money to find the answer, that's for sure. But I'll find it!"
Rostov put out his hand helplessly. "You're being unreasonable, Mr. Monk. There is nothing on earth--"
"All right!" Fletcher Monk shouted. "So maybe there's nothing on Earth!" His body trembled with his emotion. "Then I'll go to the stars, if I have to!"
* * * * *
Rostov started. "If you mean this gravity business--"
"What's that?" Monk froze. "What's that you said?"
"This gravity thing," the doctor said. "This silly story about the Mars Colony they've been spreading--"
"What silly story?" asked Monk, narrowing his eyes. "I haven't heard it. What do you mean?"
Rostov regretted his words. But he knew it was too late to stop the industrialist from extracting the details from him. He made a despairing gesture and went over to his desk. From the top drawer, he withdrew a folded sheet torn from the pages of a daily newspaper that specialized in lurid articles and wild imaginings.
* * * * *
Monk snatched it from the doctor's hand. "Let me see that!" he said. He turned the paper over in his hand until he found the red-pencilled article the doctor had referred to.
"MARS BOON TO HEART CASES, SAYS SPACE DOCTOR." Monk read the headline aloud, and then looked at Rostov.
"It's a misquotation," the physician said. "Dr. Feasley never made such a bald statement. They've taken something out of context to make a sensational story--"
"Let me see for myself," snapped Monk.
He began to read. "... 'Space Medicine Association ... Dr. Samuel Feasley, renowned' ... here it is!... 'the effects of Earth's gravitational pull on the body versus the relatively light gravitation encountered by the members of the Martian Colony ... two-fifths the pull of Earth ... interesting speculation on the heart action...!'" He crushed the paper in his hands. "By God!" he cried. "Here's my answer, you gloomy old fool!"
"No, no!" said Rostov hurriedly. "You don't know what you're saying--"
Fletcher Monk laughed loudly. "I always know what I'm saying, Doctor Rostov. Here it is in black and white! Why should I die on Earth--when I can live on Mars?"
"But it's impossible! There are so many problems--"
"Money solves problems!"
"Not this one!" said the doctor heatedly. "Not the problem of acceleration! You'll never reach Mars alive!"
Monk paused. "What do you mean?" he blinked.
"The acceleration will kill you!" Rostov said in a shaking voice. "Three G's are enough to burst that sick heart of yours. And the acceleration reaches a gravity of nine at one point. You'd never make it!"
"I'll never make it here," said Monk, biting out the words. "You told me that yourself."
"At least there's a chance," the doctor argued. "A slim one, surely. But you're talking about almost certain death!"
"How do you know?" said Monk contemptuously. "You've never had anything to do with space medicine. You're what they call a groundworm, Doc. Just like me."
"You'll never even get aboard a spaceship. There's a rigid physical examination required. You couldn't pass it in a million years! It's suicide to think of it."
* * * * *
Monk paced the floor. "But if I did pass it--"
"Impossible!"
"But if I did," Monk insisted. "Would my chances for living be better on Mars?"
"I suppose so. Your heart wouldn't have to work nearly so hard. You'd weigh less than ninety pounds...."
"Then it's worth a try, isn't it?" He grasped the physician by the shoulders and shook him. "Isn't it?" he shouted.
"Mr. Monk, I can't let you even consider it!"
"You can't?" Monk looked at him threateningly. "Are you dictating my affairs now, Doctor? Are you forgetting who I am?"
"The Mars Colony is a working organization," the doctor said, desperately. "The life there is hard, rugged--"
"Hard?" Monk roared. "Hardness and Monk are synonymous words, Doctor Rostov. Don't you read the papers? Don't you know what they call me? The Iron Millionaire!" He laughed. "And there's something else you're not aware of. I own a lot of this country. But I also own a good piece of the Mars Colony. Just let 'em try and stop me!"
Rostov threw his hands in the air. "You're completely off balance, Mr. Monk. What you're thinking about is impossible in a dozen different ways. But I'm not going to worry about it. You'll never get near a space vessel--"
"That remains to be seen," said Monk.
"The best thing for you," the doctor continued, "is to start slowing down--right now, today. And the first project we have to work on is the loss of some thirty or forty pounds. You're much too heavy for that heart of yours."
Monk didn't appear to be listening. Thoughtfully, he reached inside his coat and brought out a long black cigar. He bit off the end and spat it out onto the polished floor of the examining room.
"You'll have to lose those, too," the doctor cautioned. "Cigars are out."
Fletcher Monk jammed the cigar between his teeth. He looked at the doctor and smiled grimly.
"O.K., Doc," he said. "I'm going to follow your advice. And the first thing I'm going to arrange is the loss of some weight." He lit the cigar and puffed heavily. "About a hundred and thirty pounds," he said.
Monk put his hat on his head and walked out. He felt better already.
* * * * *
Monk found his informant in the person of a Spacelane employee named Horner. Garcia, the converted hood that now "assisted" Monk in his personal affairs, brought the Spacelane man into the industrialist's office and gestured him into a chair.
"All right," said Monk. "Garcia's told you what I want. Now let's go." He picked up a paper from his desk, and began to read off the list of typewritten names.
"Houston," he said.
"No good," said Horner. "He's the dispatch officer. Crusty old guy. Spent eleven years in space, and he's plenty mean."
"I don't care about his disposition," said Monk testily. "Can he be bought?"
Horner shook his head. "I doubt it."
"All right, then." Monk rattled the paper. "How about Roth?"
"Uh-uh. He's the Chief Medical Officer. Very Army. He helped draft the original physical standards for space flight."
"Davis!" said Monk.
"Well ..." Horner looked pensive. "He doesn't mind a fast buck now and then. But he's only a Supplies Officer. He couldn't do anything about smuggling you aboard."
"Christy."
"Don't know much about Christy. He's a pilot, and pretty close-mouthed. Spends most of his time between trips in the bosom of his family, so to speak. Which is maybe understandable, because he's got a wife that is absolutely--"
"Skip that junk," said Garcia toughly. "The boss wants facts."
"Keep out of this, you," said Monk. He smiled humorlessly at Horner. "What about Christy's wife?"
"Well, she's--I mean, she's a looker, understand? A real beauty. Only from what I heard around the base, she's a groundworm's delight, if you know what I mean--"
"I don't know what you mean," said Monk patiently.
"Well, with her husband away six months out of every year, and a swell-lookin' doll like that ... Figure it out for yourself."
Monk grunted. "I'll keep it in mind," he said. "Now how about this fellow Forsch?"
"Maybe there's something there," said Horner. "He's a doctor, too. Handles most of the routine physicals. But I heard a rumor about some pretty unethical practices he was mixed up in before he took this job. There may be nothing to it, but if you could look into it--"
"I will," said Monk abruptly. He handed the paper over to the Spacelane employee. "Anybody else here you want to tell me about?"
Horner looked over the list.
"That's about it, I guess," he said. "Nobody here can do you any good. But you look into this guy Forsch. He may be your boy."
Monk smiled tightly.
"Pay him," he said to Garcia.
* * * * *
When the detectives handed Fletcher Monk the completed report on the activities of Diana Christy, he read it through thoroughly, savoring each juicy word between puffs of his cigar. The report was excellently constructed. It was painstaking in its detail. It named names, places, times, events, and even recorded certain revealing conversations. It gave the background of each of Mrs. Christy's lovers, even down to their income and place of birth.
It was a marvelous document, in Monk's estimation, and not the first of its kind he had had prepared. A powerful piece of persuasion.
With great satisfaction, he replaced the volume in an envelope and buzzed for Garcia. His instructions to the assistant were crisp and definite. The assignment was the kind that Garcia both understood and relished. He took the report from Monk's hands and went on his way to call on the lady in question.
Bill Christy, recently returned from a Mars flight, was both amazed and disturbed by the strange request his beautiful young wife made of him. It was awful--illegal--even criminal! To arrange for the certification of a man with a weak heart; to virtually counterfeit the medical records of the Spacelane Company!
But he was her uncle, Diana Christy pleaded. The only relative she had in the world; the only one she loved outside of Christy himself. He must help her; he must give her poor sick uncle a chance to make a new life for himself in the Mars Colony.
He wouldn't do it; he couldn't! But she cried, with great wet tears streaming down the smooth planes of her face. Didn't he love her? Wasn't this one little favor worth doing for the sake of her happiness? No one would be hurt by it. The motives were altruistic, after all.
But the risk--
There wasn't any risk, she assured him. Her uncle was wealthy; very wealthy. He could supply all the money Bill would need. If what people said about Dr. Forsch was true, he might be approached. That would make it simple, wouldn't it? It was such a small thing he could do--but how she would appreciate it! How she would love him for it!
And of course, finally, with her cool arms about his neck and her soft cheek pressed against his, he replied:
"I'll do it."
* * * * *
Monk handed his luggage to the official at the Spacelane Flight Desk. But he kept the brown leather bag in his hand, and no amount of argument could separate him from it. It was easy to understand his devotion to this particular piece of personal property; it contained some four million dollars in cash.
"I may not be the youngest man on Mars," he smiled to himself as he walked onto the loading platform. "But I'll be the richest!"
Aboard the ship, the pilot Bill Christy gave him a worried glance and assisted him into the contour chair. Christy showed concern.
"You feel okay, Mr. Wheeler?" he asked. Monk smiled back, but not in answer to the question. He enjoyed the pseudonym, because it was the name of an old competitor, long-since buried beneath Monk's superior talents in the business of making money.
"Try and relax as much as you can," said Christy. "We'll give you a mild sedative before blast-off. Remember, there are going to be distinct variations in the G forces as we accelerate, so try to remember the breathing instructions."
"I will," said Monk. "Once more, though--"
"There'll be a steady buildup of acceleration for about ninety seconds. We'll go rapidly from zero gravity to nine. Breathe deeply and regularly on the way up. Then, when you feel a normal amount of pressure, hold your breath. Don't let it out until you feel the G forces increase again."
"I understand," Monk nodded.
"We'll get up to a peak of 8 G's, and hold that for about two minutes. Do the same thing--hold your breath when we start accelerating once more. It'll be easy after that."
* * * * *
The pilot made a final check of Monk's G suit and straps. Then he clapped the industrialist on the shoulder and strode off.
Twenty minutes later, when they were ready for blast-off, a warning bell sounded throughout the ship.
With a deafening roar of its rocket motors, the great vessel lifted itself laboriously from the ground, squatting on flame, filling Fletcher Monk's mind with the first real sense of fear since he learned the grim facts of his ailment in Rostov's office.
Then the acceleration began, and in less than a minute, Monk knew a taste of Hell.
His vision blurred as the crushing force of naked speed pasted him against the contour seat. Consciousness began to leave him, but not soon enough. For there, in the tortured imaginings of his pain-constricted brain, came the ugly black bird again, shrieking horribly and perching itself on his chest. Its huge claws raked his ribs, and its dripping beak fastened itself on his throat. Now he recognized the species for what it was: a vulture, a bird of prey, unwilling to be robbed of its Earth victim; trying to pinion him to the planet with the strength of its anger. Its great wings flapped, flapped, flapped, beating against his body, flooding it with unrelieved anguish--
Then Monk gasped.
Gone! The bird was gone! A moment's peace, a moment's peace, a moment's freedom from torment--
No! The vulture returned, bent on its evil purpose. It wouldn't be denied; it raked its razor-sharp claws across Monk's shoulder; dug its beak into his chest; flapping, flapping--
Fletcher Monk screamed.
* * * * *
He opened his eyes, admitted a rush of clean air gratefully into his lungs.
"It's a miracle," said Bill Christy. "Nothing more. You were in a bad way, Mr. Wheeler, but you'll be okay now."
"Thank you, thank you!" panted Fletcher Monk.
"We're well on our way now. We'll reach the Big Bird in a matter of minutes--"
"The Big Bird?" said Monk in horror.
Christy smiled. "That's what we call the Space Station. We'll pick up some supplies and fuel there, and then we'll take off again. But you won't have to be concerned about the acceleration on the second blast-off. You can take that easily."
"Are you sure?" said Monk anxiously.
"Positive. There won't be any gravitational pull to overcome this time. You'll be fine."
"I appreciate this, Christy. I won't forget your help."
"That's okay, Mr. Wheeler. It makes my wife happy."
"Yes." Monk felt well enough now to give the pilot a sardonic smile. "She's a wonderful girl, Diana. A wonderful girl."
"You're telling me?" said Bill Christy.
* * * * *
The space suit that Fletcher Monk had been assigned before the descent on Mars was a little tight-fitting for his comfort. He wondered what life would be like in this eternal bulky costume. But he was comforted by the picture of the Mars Colony he had received back on Earth; a labyrinth of airtight interiors, burrowing their way over and into the planet, served by gigantic oxygen tanks. The network of buildings had been expanding every year, until now it covered some hundred miles of the planet's surface. He'd spend most of his time safely indoors, he promised himself, where he wouldn't need the cumbersome trappings of space clothing. His life had been an indoor affair anyway, back on Earth.
The passengers were led into the Quarantine Section, where they would spend their first three days on Mars.
It was a relief to Monk to shed the heavy space-suit in the air-filled room. And it was a revelation, for with helmet and boots removed, he found himself almost floating with each step he took, moving feather-light over the ground. He was surprised, and a little unnerved at first, but then he remembered that this feeble gravitation was the preserver of his health--and he laughed aloud.
"Something funny?" said the man at the front desk. He was a young man, about thirty, but there was an ageless competence in his features.
Monk smiled. "Just feeling good, that's all." He patted the brown leather bag in his hand.
"Name?"
"Well, it will be listed as Wheeler...."
The official scanned the list. "Here it is. Ben Wheeler." He looked up at Monk curiously. "How old are you, Mr. Wheeler?"
"Fifty," said Monk.
"Pretty old for the Colony, aren't you, Mr. Wheeler?"
Monk smirked. "The first thing we have to do is get rid of that Wheeler business, young man. My name is Monk. Fletcher Monk."
The official looked puzzled. "I don't get it. Why the phoney name?"
"I used an alias for reasons of my own. Now I'm telling you my real name. Monk."
The man shrugged and wrote something on the manifest.
"I don't expect you to cheer," said Monk sarcastically. "But you could show some reaction."
"What does that mean?"
Monk flushed. "Don't tell me you've never heard of me. I'm Fletcher Monk. I own half of this place."
"So?"
"What do you mean 'so?' My firm controls thirty percent of the mineral rights of the Colony. We ship you practically all of your Earth supplies. We can buy or sell this place at the drop of a quotation!"
"Listen, bud." The young man seemed annoyed. "If you're trying to impress me, forget it. And if you're threatening my job, you can take it!"
"Insolence!" Monk raged. "Who's your commanding officer? I want to see him right away!"
"My pleasure," the official grinned. "Hey, Gregorio!" he called to the man at the desk behind him. "Call Captain Moore. Gentleman here wants a word with him."
* * * * *
Monk took a seat while the other passengers went through the initial formalities. He sat there, fuming, until a tall man with an untrimmed beard entered the room. He took off his helmet and spoke briefly to the young man at the front desk, then looked over at Monk and came to his side.
"Mr. Monk?" he said. "I'm Captain Moore."
"Nice to meet you, Captain. I've just had a little conversation with your official greeter." He smiled, man-to-man. "Not a very friendly chap."
"We forget a lot about manners up here," said the captain, not smiling back. "We're kept pretty busy."
* * * * *
"I realize that, of course," said the industrialist. "But I would expect a little common courtesy--"
"You'll earn the right to courtesy out here, Mr. Monk," the captain snapped. "The Mars Colony lives on labor, and that's our first consideration. Courtesy comes about last on our list. We're in a battle here, twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes a day. We've got to fight to keep alive, and we've got to wrestle with a whole new planet if we want to unearth its secrets. Courtesy is a distinct privilege on Mars, Mr. Monk."
Monk bristled. "I don't quite get your meaning, Captain," he said indignantly. "But don't expect to pull rank or a holy attitude on me. In case you didn't realize it, I'm in a position to exert a great deal of influence over your little colony--and don't think I won't use it!"
The captain shrugged. "Use it," he said. "Go on. See if your influence really holds up here. Remember, Mr. Monk--you came to us of your own volition, and you can always turn around and go back."
"Impossible," said Monk, blanching. "I'm going to live here--for good."
"Then you'll have to adjust to our way," said the captain grimly. "You'll have to learn our way of doing things and cooperate a hundred percent. And the first thing you'll have to do is take a work assignment--"
"Work?" Monk gasped. "Why should I? You can't force me to work for you--"
"Remember Captain John Smith, Mr. Monk? He said the same thing to his colonists that I'm going to say to you now. If you don't work--you don't eat."
"But what could I do? I'm no scientist. I'm no--"
"There's plenty to do," the captain interrupted. "And most of it is dirty, physical labor. We have a thousand minerologists, chemists, geologists, botanists, physicists, meteorologists, and a lot more technical people at work on this planet. They can use all the help they can get. Don't worry about that!"
"But I'm Fletcher Monk!" the industrialist said. "I won't go grubbing around this filthy place! You can't enslave me like some chain-gang prisoner--"
"You'll do what you have to do," said the captain, "and you'll probably even like it. There's a wonderland outside this door," he said enthusiastically. "A crazy, wild, improbable wonderland, where we never see a rain-fall, where the plants grow scarlet, and clouds chase you down the street! We're uncovering marvelous things here. We have to fight and sometimes die to do it, but frankly, we enjoy the work."
He gave Monk his first smile. "Nobody's a prisoner on Mars, Mr. Monk. We're all volunteers."
He started to leave, but Monk stopped him.
"Wait," he said, licking his lips. "I have one more thing to say." He lowered his voice. "I can make a deal with you, Captain. A deal like you never had in your whole life." He patted the brown leather bag. "Name your price," he said. "And don't be shy about the figure."
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I'm talking about, Mr. Moore. Money. Real, hard, Earth dollars. Just name the amount it would take to buy a few small creature comforts around this place--and the right to live my own life."
"You can't buy your way out of working, mister--"
* * * * *
"Don't give me that! You'll sing a different tune when I tell you how much is in this bag. All you have to do is quote a figure--and it's yours!"
"Sorry, Mr. Monk," said the captain tersely.
"What do you mean by sorry?"
"I'm on a lifetime assignment here, and so are practically all the members of the Colony. It's a job that can barely be completed in a lifetime. And the economy we operate under doesn't call for money. Your dollars are so much excess baggage on Mars."
"What are you talking about?" Monk rasped. "I'm offering you a fortune. Money is money, you fool!"
"You can paper the walls of your quarters with it," said the officer sharply. "See if it helps keep out the Martian cold. That's about all the usefulness it has up here."
Wildly, Fletcher Monk unlocked the bag and dipped inside. His hand came out with a fistfull of green bills. "Look!" he cried. "I'm not joking about this! Look at it! Doesn't the sight of it mean anything to you?"
"It brings back some memories," said the captain smiling. "That's about all. Now you better go back to the desk and get your quarantine instructions."
He saluted the industrialist casually, and turned away.
"Okay, Mr. Moneybags," said the young official as the captain left. "Let's get acquainted."
* * * * *
A year later, Captain Harlan Moore presided at the dedication of the first fully-equipped hospital erected on the planet Mars. It was an impressive affair, despite the fact that it took place in a small, crowded chamber, and that the attending assemblage were still begrimed by their day's work.
When the ceremonies were completed, Captain Moore made an inspection of the new medical center, and one of his first stops was the bed-side of Fletcher Monk.
"We knew he wasn't a well man," said the young physician who stood by the bed, taking Monk's pulse. He watched as the captain picked up the chart hooked to the edge of the bed.
"Yes," said Moore. "He was a very sick man when he first came to the Colony. In more ways than one," he added.
The doctor looked perplexed. "But this illness still surprises me," he said. "I've examined him almost monthly for the past year, and frankly, I would have bet on his survival. He began to improve rapidly--physically, anyway. It might have been the lesser gravity, or the healthier life." He looked at the captain curiously. "Yet he wasn't assigned to any over-strenuous duties?"
"You know he wasn't," said the captain. "We don't want anybody to undertake work they can't handle. His labor was hardly physical. He worked in the geological and botanical groups, but not in the field. He did classifying and clerical work."
"Then that wouldn't account for the trouble--"
"Perhaps it does, in a way," The captain bent over the puffy, chalk-white face of the industrialist, listening to his shallow breathing. "He was never happy doing it. He had different ideas about himself than we did. He never understood what we were doing or why."
"It's the greatest mystery of them all," said the physician, shaking his head.
"What is?"
"The human body. It's incredible how much we've learned about the physical world, and even the physical features of our own construction. But there's still a mystery we haven't penetrated--"
The captain smiled. "That doesn't sound like you."
"I know," the young physician answered. "But when I see a case like this--a man breathing his life away for a reason I really can't understand--" The doctor rubbed the back of his head. "I know it's crazy, and old-fashioned, and doesn't make the least bit of sense in these scientific times, Captain. But if anyone were to ask me--off the record, and completely unofficially--I could only give them one honest diagnosis of this case. I think this man is dying of a broken heart."
THE END
HISTORY REPEATS
BY GEORGE O. SMITH
There are--and very probably will always be--some Terrestrials who can't, and for that matter don't want, to call their souls their own....
Xanabar lays across the Spiral Arm, a sprawling sphere of influence vast, mighty, solid at the core. Only the far-flung boundary shows the slight ebb and flow of contingent cultures that may win a system or two today and lose them back tomorrow or a hundred years from now. Xanabar is the trading post of the galaxy, for only Xanabar is strong enough to stand over the trading table when belligerents meet and offer to take them both at once if they do not sheathe their swords. For this service Xanabar assesses her percentage, therefore Xanabar is rich. Her riches buy her mercenaries to enforce her doctrines. Therefore Xanabar is rotten at the under-core, for mercenaries have no god but gold.
* * * * *
The clatter of a hundred tongues mingled with the clink of glasses and floated through strata of smoke from the burning weeds of a hundred planets. From one of the tables, voices rise in mild disagreement. There is a jeering laugh from one side and a roar of anger from the other. Two men rise and face one another ready to follow their insults with violence. Before the eruption can start, a mercenary steps forward on lithe feet and lightly catches the back-swung arm, a quick hand removes the poised glass before it can be thrown into the adversary's face.
"Sit!" says the mercenary in a cold voice, and they sit still glaring at one another.
"Now," says the mercenary, "settle your differences by talk. Or depart in opposite directions. This is Xanabar!"
"He lies! He brags!"
"I do not lie. They are barbarians. I do not brag. I can bring you one."
"You--"
"A wager," said the mercenary. "A wager. Xanabar can take no tax in blood." He faces one. "You claim you can do that which he says you can not." Then not waiting for a reply he faces the other, "And if he does, how much are you willing to pay?"
"How much is his life worth?"
"How much are you willing to pay?" demands the mercenary coldly.
"Five hundredweight in crystal-cut."
"An honorable sum. Do you agree?"
"Not enough--"
"For a task as easy as you claim it to be," said the mercenary, "Five hundredweight of crystal-cut seems honorable."
"But it means--"
"We in Xanabar are not interested in the details. Only in the tax. An honest wager-contract, outlanders. Otherwise I rule that your eruption here disturbed the peace."
The two outlanders look at one another; schoolboys caught fighting in the alley by a monitor who demands a bite of their apple in lieu of a visit to the principal. As if loath to touch one another they reach forward hesitantly and handshake in a quick light grip.
"Good!" glows the mercenary. He waves a hand and his fellows converge with contract-platen and etching stylus. "Now, gentlemen, please state the terms for Xanabar."
* * * * *
Peter Hawley strolled down a side street with a dog at his heel. It was a dog of many breeds, but not a mixture of careless parentage. Peter paused at a cross-street and looked uncertainly to left and right. "What do you make, Buregarde?"
"The noble dog says right," replied Buregarde.
"Right," said Peter turning up the street. "And stop this 'Noble dog' routine."
"Man is dog's best friend," said Buregarde. "If you'd called me something sensible, I wouldn't have looked it up. There is a statue to me in the Okeefenokee back on Earth. I am the noble dog. Pogo says so."
"I--"
"Easy Peter!" said the dog in a near-whisper.
"All right. Do we play down the chatter?"
Buregarde sat, lifted his nose and sniffed. His natural voice gave a faint whine of discontent. "I'm supposed to have a nose," he complained. "This is like trying to smell out a lone mouse in a zoological garden in midsummer."
"Why the warning?" asked Peter.
"All races smell the same when they are poised for violence," said the dog. "Trouble is that man-smell isn't pointed the way it's going, only where it's coming from."
Peter grunted. "Catch any woman-smell?"
"Just the usual whiff. Stale scent. She was here; she passed this way. But which way?"
"We can guess they made it away from the spaceport."
"Unless," said the dog taking another sniff of the air, "they're taking her back to some other spacecraft." Buregarde looked up at Peter. "Do you catch anything?"
"Just the usual mingled fright and danger, frantic despair."
"Directional?"
Peter shook his head. "No," he said. "The source is too close."
"Let's stroll up this street to the end and come back on the other side," said the dog. "Quietly."
In a saunter they went, alert and poised. A man and his dog from all appearances. But in Xanabar, the principal city of Xanabar the Empire they were huntsman and companion.
Like all cities of more than ten million souls, Xanabar had its glistening and lofty area and its slums--and what would have been a waterfront region in a seafaring city. The conditions were the same as they'd been everywhere for a few decades of thousands of years. Only the technology changes. Man's cave is stainless steel and synthetic plastic; the cave's man is swinging a better axe, and his hide is protected from the weather by stuff far more durable than his awn skin. But he's the same man with the same hackles; they just rise for a few more thousand reasons than the hackles of his ancestors.
"Got it!" said Buregarde coming to a brief point at a closed door.
"Let's go in!"
* * * * *
Buregarde's reply was half-snarl and half, "Look out!"
Peter whirled to catch a glimpse of a man upon him with pencil-ray coming to point. He faded down and toward the other, almost in a fall out of the path of the pencil-ray that flicked on and began a sweep upward and in. Peter caught his balance at the same time he clutched the wrist in his right hand. Then he went on down around and over, rising on his knees to flip the other man heels high in an arc that ended with a full-length, spine-thudding body smash on the pavement. Buregarde leaped in and slashed at the hand clutching the pencil-ray, snapped his head back and forth thrice and sent the weapon flying. Then with a savage growl he set a soft mouth against the other's throat and let the man feel the pressure of his fangs.
"Easy," said Peter.
Buregarde backed away a few inches. "Easy nothing," he snapped. "This man is the noble dog's worst enemy. He wanted your blood."
"Take it easy. I want his information."
The man looked up. "Barbarian Terrestrial!" he snarled.
Peter sneered. "And this is the capital city of the glorious civilization called Xanabar? Marble palaces with nobles of the blood, and stinking alleys with human rats. Where is she?"
The stranger spat.
"Buregarde, want some red meat?"
"He'd make me upchuck. Only rodents eat their own kind."
"Just a bite?"
"Do I have to swallow?"
"No. Just slash--"
"Wait, barbarian--"
"Barbarian Terrestrial, am I? You were maybe going to invite me for tea and cakes with that pencil-ray?"
"I--"
"Talk!" snapped Peter. "Where is she?"
"Who?"
"Buregarde--?"
"Yes, boss. The throat or the other hand?"
"All right--for the good it'll do you. She's in there. Go on in--and we'll have two of you!"
Buregarde growled, "Three of us. And we might be hard to handle."
Peter stood up and hauled the stranger to his feet. His right hand dripped blood from the dog's teeth. Peter looked for, and found the pencil-ray smashed against the stone front of the building. He cuffed the stranger across the face, turned him around, and pointed him toward the far corner.
"I count three," he said. "If you're not out of sight by three--"
"It'll be a pleasure, Peter," said Buregarde.
* * * * *
The stranger loped away on a crazy run. As he turned the corner he ran face on to one of the uniformed mercenaries of Xanabar. The mercenary collared the stranger and took a quick inventory of the slashed right hand, the ripped clothing, and adding those to the frightened gallop he came back with the stranger's left arm held in a backlock.
Haughtily he demanded, "What goes on in Xanabar?"
Peter eyed the mercenary sourly. "Kidnaping and attempted murder."
"Who says such lawlessness runs rife in Xanabar?"
"I say so. Peter Hawley of the Extraterrestrial Service. I say so."
"You are mistaken, barbarian."
"I say so," said Buregarde.
"You're an animal."
"I am--and so are you."
"I'll not be insulted by an animal! I am--"
"Take it easy, Buregarde."
"Take it easy nothing. This mercenary foot-soldier forgets one thing--or maybe he doesn't know about it."
"Don't call His Excellency's Peacekeepers 'mercenaries'!" snapped the mercenary.
"Peacekeeper," chuckled the dog. "Well listen and become wise. Dog and man, man and dog, have been together for about a half-million years. Once dog helped man in war and peace, and man gave dog food and shelter. Dog helped man rise above the level of the savage, and man has helped dog rise to the level of intelligence. But dog has one advantage. None of us has been intelligent long enough to really believe that dog has a soul, and those of us who do believe that also know that dog's soul is devoted to man. Do you know about dog, Xanabian--Peacekeeper?"
"No--"
"Then don't force me to show you what kind of adversary intelligent dog can be. Mere man is a pushover!"
"Bah!"
Buregarde loped in a mad circle around the mercenary. His Excellency's Peacekeeper turned to stay facing the dog but found himself turning his back on Peter. He stepped back and to one side and reached for his heavy-duty pencil--the dog gave a low growl of warning and crouched for a leap.
"He means it--Peacekeeper," said Peter Hawley quietly. "Draw that pencil and he'll have your hand in ribbons before you can level it."
The mercenary drew in his breath.
"Whistle for help and he'll have your throat."
"I shall not permit this high handed--"
"Then stop sounding off and listen to us!" snapped Peter. "I charge the Empire of Xanabar with the crime of being indifferent to the welfare of the stranger within her gate. I charge kidnaping and attempted murder, and I charge the latter against the specimen you hold in your hand."
"An outlander!"
"Does he bring his own law to Xanabar? If he does, then so do I!"
"I arrest you all for breaking the Peace of Xanabar."
"Me, too?" asked Buregarde.
The mercenary ignored the dog's eager sally. "You are armed, Terrestrial."
"So was he."
"So am I!" snarled Buregarde showing a fine set of white fangs in the most effective gesture.
"This must cease!" thundered the mercenary. "You cannot threaten His Excellency's Peacekeepers!"
Buregarde growled, "Slip the mercenary a crystal-cut, boss. We've got a girl to find!"
"A girl? A Terrestrial girl?" asked the mercenary with his eyes opening.
"The daughter of our envoy to Lonaphite. Miss Vanessa Lewis. Last reported in her stateroom aboard the Terrestrial Spacecraft Polaris during landing pattern at Xanabar Citadel Spaceport."
The mercenary said, "The work of outlanders--riffraff such as this!"
"Well," snapped Peter Hawley, "do His Excellency's Peacemakers condone such goings-on?"
"We keep the Peace of Xanabar. Your charge is your word, Terrestrial."
"Terrestrial Barbarian, isn't it?"
"I arrest you--"
"Oh, stop it. For fiveweight of crystal-cut can you be bribed to haul that specimen off to jail and let me go about making my own Peace with Xanabar?"
"You accuse me of accepting bribes?"
"You re a mercenary, aren't you? Sevenweight of crystal-cut."
"Ten."
"Seven," said Peter.
"Ten," said the mercenary, "and you have one more caper coming."
"Ten," agreed Peter Hawley, "and you look the other way when I take the lid off."
* * * * *
"Still got it," said Buregarde, sniffing at the closed door but keeping one eye on the disappearing mercenary and his prisoner.
"I've got it, too. Still fright and concern: fear of harm, concern over what happens next."
"Strong?"
"Definitely," said Peter closing his eyes and holding his breath.
"Nothing measurable?" asked the dog after a full minute.
"No. Too bad I was never introduced to her. I have no idea of her strength of mind--wait!" Another minute went by in personal silence; Peter Hawley's concentration far too deep to be disturbed by the sounds of the city's spaceport slum by night. The dog backed away from the door and took an alert position to guard Peter while the man was immersed in his own mind. Finally Peter alerted and shook his head sadly. "I thought for a moment that she'd caught me. A fleeting thought of rescue or escape, concept of freedom, flight, safety. But wish-thinking. Not communication. Let's go in."
"Barge, or slink?" asked the dog.
"Slink."
"Have it your way," said Buregarde.
Outside, the place looked closed. The door was solid, a plastic in imitation of bronze through which neither light nor sound passed. The windows were dark. But once the door was cracked, the wave of sound came pouring out along the slit of light and filled the street with echo and re-echo.
"Slink, now," said the dog.
"So everybody makes mistakes."
Inside, a woman leaned over a low counter. "Check your weap ... say! You can't bring that animal in here!"
Buregarde said, "He isn't bringing me. I'm here because I like it."
The woman's eyes bugged. "What ... kind--?"
"I am man's best friend--the noble dog of Barbarian Terra."
"Yes ... but--"
"Oh," said Peter airily, "we're looking for a friend."
"Friend? Who is he?"
"It's a she and her name is Vanessa Lewis."
"She ain't here."
"The dame's a liar-ess, Peter. I scent her strong."
"We'll just take a look around," said Peter to the check girl.
"You'll have to check your weapons."
"I'd rather go in naked. Sorry. Not today. Weapons happen to be my business today. Come on, Buregarde."
* * * * *
Man and dog started along the hallway warily. Buregarde said, "Any touch?"
"Got a faint impression of alarm, danger, call out the guards."
"I scent violence," said the dog. "And--"
The door at the end of the hallway opened and a big man stepped out. "What's going on here?" he demanded flatly.
The check girl said, "He wouldn't check ..."
The big man reached for his hip pocket.
Peter said, "Take him high!" and they plunged.
Peter dove for the man's knees, Buregarde went in a three-stride lope like an accordion folding and unfolding and then arched in a long leap with his snarling fangs aimed at the man's throat. Man and dog hit him low and high before he could open his mouth, before he could free the snub pencil-ray. There was a short scrabble that ended when Buregarde lifted the man's head and whammed it down hard against the floor.
Weakly, the check girl finished her statement, "...His weapons!" and keeled over in a dead faint.
Buregarde shook himself violently and worked his jaws, licking blood from his chops. Peter looked in through the open wall-door opposite the check counter; the racket had not been noticed by the roomful of spacemen and riffraff. The babble of a hundred tongues still went on amid the clink of glasses and the disturbing strains of Xanabian music. Smoke from a hundred semi-noxious weeds lay in strata across the room, and at a table in the far corner two men faced one another, their expressions a mixed pair. One held heavily begrudged admiration as he paid off five hundredweight of crystal-cut in the legal tender of Xanabar to the other, whose expression was greedy self-confidence. One of His Excellency's Peacekeepers presided over the exchange. Coldly he extracted a fiftyweight from the pile and folded it into the signed and completed wager-contract. For his own coffer he extracted a fiveweight and slipped it into his boot top.
Peter Hawley and Buregarde passed on, went through the far door dragging their late adversary ignominiously by the heels. Amid the lessened publicity of the distant hall, Peter checked the man and shrugged. "He may live," he said coldly, "if he doesn't bleed to death."
"You really ought to take 'em on the high side," said Buregarde, plaintively. "All I've got is my teeth to grab with. They don't bleed so bad from the ankle."
"They don't stay stopped that way either," said Peter harshly.
"You'd not be getting any praise from the Chief for that sort of brutality."
"If Xanabar weren't rotten to the core, we wouldn't be plowing through it in the first place. Now, let's get going."
"Shouldn't you call for the rest of the crew?"
"Not until I'm certain the girl's here. I'd hate to cut the city-wide search for cold evidence."
"She's here. I scent her."
"Maybe it's past tense, Buregarde. Or maybe it's another woman."
"Could be. But one thing: It is definitely Terrestrial woman." The dog sniffed again. "You get anything?"
"No more than before. It's close and they're the same set of impressions Yet, any woman would be frantic with fear and concern."
"I ... shhh!" Buregarde's sharp ears lifted instinctively at a distant sound not heard by the man. With a toss of his head, the dog folded one ear back, uncovering the inner shell. Like a sonic direction finder, Buregarde turned his head and listened.
"Man," he said finally with a low growling voice. "Peter, there'll be hell to pay around here directly. He's stumbled over our recent conquest."
"Let's get cutting!"
* * * * *
Peter started trying doors and peering in; the dog raced on ahead of the man, sniffing deep at the bottom of each. It was the dog that found the room. He called, "Here!" and Peter raced forward just as the fellow on the stairs yelled something in his native tongue.
Peter hit the door with the heel of his foot and slammed it open by splintering the doorframe. The dog crouched low and poised; Peter slipped in and around feeling for a light-switch. From inside there was a voiceless whimper of fright and from outside and below there came the pounding of several sets of heavy feet. Peter found the switch and flooded the room with light. The girl--whether she was Miss Vanessa Lewis or someone else, and kidnap-wise it was still a Terrestrial girl--lay trussed on the bed, a patch of surgical tape over her mouth.
"Sorry," said Peter in a voice that he hoped was soothing. He reached, freed a corner of the tape and ripped it off in a single swipe. The girl howled. Peter slapped her lightly. "Stop it!" he commanded sharply. "Vanessa Lewis?"
"Yes, but--"
"Call out the marines, Peter," snarled the dog.
"No! Bo! Back!"
Reluctantly the dog backed into the room. He crouched low, poised to spring, with his nose just beyond the doorframe.
"Four of 'em," he whimpered pleadingly. "I can get two--"
"Well, I can't get the other two unless I'm lucky," snapped Peter. "Don't be so eager to die for nothing, Buregarde."
"All this calculation," grumbled the dog sourly. "I don't call it a loss if I get two for one."
"I call it a loss if I don't get four for nothing--or the whole damned Empire of Xanabar for nothing, for that matter. We've a job to do and it ain't dying--until Miss Lewis is out of this glorious citadel."
The girl looked from one to the other. They did not need any identification; they were their own bona fides. Only man--Terrestrial Man--had intelligent dogs to work beside him. Period, question closed. Buregarde snarled at the door warningly while Peter stripped surgical tape from wrists and ankles.
Outside, someone called, "Come out or we blast!"
Buregarde snarled, "Come in and we'll cut you to bits!"
The quick flash of a pencil-ray flicked in a lance above the dog's nose: Buregarde snapped back as the lancet of light cut downward, then snapped forward for a quick look outside as the little pencil of danger flickered dark.
"Careful, Bo!"
"You call the boys," snapped the dog. "I'll--"
* * * * *
Something came twisting forward to hit the doorframe, it dropped just inside the doorjamb. Buregarde leaped, snapped at the thing and caught it in midair, snapped his head in a vicious shake and sent it whirling back outside again before it could be identified. The dog sunfished and landed on all four. Then the thing went off with a dull pouf! outside. There was a gentle flash of quick light that was smothered by a billow of smoke. Buregarde leaped into the cloud and disappeared. There was a hoarse shriek and the mad scrabble of dog-claws on the hard floor, the sound of a heavy thud, and the angry snarl of a dog with its teeth fastened into something soft. Then there was the fast patter of dog-feet and Buregarde came around the door on a dead run, sliding side-wise to carom off the opened door into safety just as a pencil-ray flicked to follow him.
"Got him," said the dog in a satisfied tone. "That's one!"
He took his post by the doorframe again, the tip of his nose just outside. There was a consultation out there in the hallway, at which Buregarde called, "Make a wild rush for us!"
Miss Lewis said, "What are we going to do?"
"Fight it out," said Peter. "They can't win so long as we're alive now. I've got my crew on its way in a dead run, and if we make enough noise, some of His Excellency's Peacemakers will step in and demand their cut of the finances." He grinned. "How much are you worth, Miss Lewis?"
She shuddered. "I don't know how much father would pay--"
"Hit 'em low, Peter!" came Buregarde's snarl.
Three of them came in a-slant, bounced shoulders against the opened door, caught their bearings and hell was out for noon. Buregarde caught the first with a slash at the throat; they went down in a mad whirl of dog and thug, paws, tail, arms, legs and a spurt of blood. The second flicked his pencil-ray at Peter, its capsule charge faded to a mere sting before it cut into him. The third aimed a kick at the struggling dog. Vanessa Lewis snatched a box from the bureau and hurled it at the second. Peter thumbed his pencil-ray and winged the third man in the biceps. Buregarde leaped for the second man's gun hand and closed on it as the hurled box opened and scatter-shotted his face with bric-a-brac. The man with the bloody throat flailed out and caught Peter by the ankle. Peter stomped his face with his other heel. Miss Lewis picked up the table lamp and with a single motion turned off the light and finished felling the one with the ray-burned shoulder.
Buregarde dropped from the second man's wrist and crouched to spring. The man cowered back, his good arm covering his throat and his other arm hanging limp. He mouthed fright-noises in some tongue native to some star a thousand light-years across the galaxy.
Coldly, Peter stepped forward and belted him in the plexus.
"Now," he said calmly, "we shall vacate the premises!"
They went side by side, facing slightly outward, Buregarde between them and slightly ahead. "We're coming out!" called the dog. "Three Barbarians from Terra!"
* * * * *
Down on the dark street, they met their mercenary again. He eyed them sourly. "I see you were, in a sense, successful."
Peter Hawley faced the mercenary. "We were successful and would you like to make something of it?"
"I'm going to have to arrest you, you know."
"You'll lose an arm trying!" snapped the dog.
"There's murder been committed tonight," said His Excellency's Peacemaker. "The Peace of Xanabar has been disturbed."
"Why you chiseling crook, there's been kidnaping tonight, and--"
"I'm afraid that I shall have to ask that the young lady produce her passport," said the mercenary. "Otherwise she's in Xanabar Citadel illegally."
Buregarde said, "Hit him low, Peter. Here come the boys."
"No!"
"Just once--for fun?"
"No. I want our money-grubbing Peacekeeper to carry a message to His Excellency. I want His Excellency to read some Terrestrial History. Once upon a time there was a place called the Byzantine Empire that laid across the trade routes. The upper crust of people used to serve the Presence of God in a golden throne whilst their underlings dealt in human slaves and procured comely concubines for the emperor; their policemen took bribes and human life was cheap. And when Byzantium fell, all the world was forced to seek a new trade route. So tell His Excellency that he'd better clean up his own foul mess, or some barbarians will clean it up for him."
"And that," said Buregarde, "goes for your dad-ratted cat!"
PYGMALION'S SPECTACLES
By Stanley G. Weinbaum
"But what is reality?" asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. "All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine."
Dan Burke, struggling for clarity of thought through the fumes of liquor, stared without comprehension at the tiny figure of his companion. He began to regret the impulse that had driven him to leave the party to seek fresh air in the park, and to fall by chance into the company of this diminutive old madman. But he had needed escape; this was one party too many, and not even the presence of Claire with her trim ankles could hold him there. He felt an angry desire to go home--not to his hotel, but home to Chicago and to the comparative peace of the Board of Trade. But he was leaving tomorrow anyway.
"You drink," said the elfin, bearded face, "to make real a dream. Is it not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream that what you hate is conquered. You drink to escape reality, and the irony is that even reality is a dream."
"Cracked!" thought Dan again.
"Or so," concluded the other, "says the philosopher Berkeley."
"Berkeley?" echoed Dan. His head was clearing; memories of a Sophomore course in Elementary Philosophy drifted back. "Bishop Berkeley, eh?"
"You know him, then? The philosopher of Idealism--no?--the one who argues that we do not see, feel, hear, taste the object, but that we have only the sensation of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting."
"I--sort of recall it."
"Hah! But sensations are mental phenomena. They exist in our minds. How, then, do we know that the objects themselves do not exist only in our minds?" He waved again at the light-flecked buildings. "You do not see that wall of masonry; you perceive only a sensation, a feeling of sight. The rest you interpret."
"You see the same thing," retorted Dan.
"How do you know I do? Even if you knew that what I call red would not be green could you see through my eyes--even if you knew that, how do you know that I too am not a dream of yours?"
Dan laughed. "Of course nobody knows anything. You just get what information you can through the windows of your five senses, and then make your guesses. When they're wrong, you pay the penalty." His mind was clear now save for a mild headache. "Listen," he said suddenly. "You can argue a reality away to an illusion; that's easy. But if your friend Berkeley is right, why can't you take a dream and make it real? If it works one way, it must work the other."
The beard waggled; elf-bright eyes glittered queerly at him. "All artists do that," said the old man softly. Dan felt that something more quivered on the verge of utterance.
"That's an evasion," he grunted. "Anybody can tell the difference between a picture and the real thing, or between a movie and life."
"But," whispered the other, "the realer the better, no? And if one could make a--a movie--very real indeed, what would you say then?"
"Nobody can, though."
The eyes glittered strangely again. "I can!" he whispered. "I did!"
"Did what?"
"Made real a dream." The voice turned angry. "Fools! I bring it here to sell to Westman, the camera people, and what do they say? 'It isn't clear. Only one person can use it at a time. It's too expensive.' Fools! Fools!"
"Huh?"
"Listen! I'm Albert Ludwig--Professor Ludwig." As Dan was silent, he continued, "It means nothing to you, eh? But listen--a movie that gives one sight and sound. Suppose now I add taste, smell, even touch, if your interest is taken by the story. Suppose I make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it. Would that be to make real a dream?"
"How the devil could you do that?"
"How? How? But simply! First my liquid positive, then my magic spectacles. I photograph the story in a liquid with light-sensitive chromates. I build up a complex solution--do you see? I add taste chemically and sound electrically. And when the story is recorded, then I put the solution in my spectacle--my movie projector. I electrolyze the solution, break it down; the older chromates go first, and out comes the story, sight, sound, smell, taste--all!"
"Touch?"
"If your interest is taken, your mind supplies that." Eagerness crept into his voice. "You will look at it, Mr.----?"
"Burke," said Dan. "A swindle!" he thought. Then a spark of recklessness glowed out of the vanishing fumes of alcohol. "Why not?" he grunted.
He rose; Ludwig, standing, came scarcely to his shoulder. A queer gnomelike old man, Dan thought as he followed him across the park and into one of the scores of apartment hotels in the vicinity.
In his room Ludwig fumbled in a bag, producing a device vaguely reminiscent of a gas mask. There were goggles and a rubber mouthpiece; Dan examined it curiously, while the little bearded professor brandished a bottle of watery liquid.
"Here it is!" he gloated. "My liquid positive, the story. Hard photography--infernally hard, therefore the simplest story. A Utopia--just two characters and you, the audience. Now, put the spectacles on. Put them on and tell me what fools the Westman people are!" He decanted some of the liquid into the mask, and trailed a twisted wire to a device on the table. "A rectifier," he explained. "For the electrolysis."
"Must you use all the liquid?" asked Dan. "If you use part, do you see only part of the story? And which part?"
"Every drop has all of it, but you must fill the eye-pieces." Then as Dan slipped the device gingerly on, "So! Now what do you see?"
"Not a damn' thing. Just the windows and the lights across the street."
"Of course. But now I start the electrolysis. Now!"
* * * * *
There was a moment of chaos. The liquid before Dan's eyes clouded suddenly white, and formless sounds buzzed. He moved to tear the device from his head, but emerging forms in the mistiness caught his interest. Giant things were writhing there.
The scene steadied; the whiteness was dissipating like mist in summer. Unbelieving, still gripping the arms of that unseen chair, he was staring at a forest. But what a forest! Incredible, unearthly, beautiful! Smooth boles ascended inconceivably toward a brightening sky, trees bizarre as the forests of the Carboniferous age. Infinitely overhead swayed misty fronds, and the verdure showed brown and green in the heights. And there were birds--at least, curiously lovely pipings and twitterings were all about him though he saw no creatures--thin elfin whistlings like fairy bugles sounded softly.
He sat frozen, entranced. A louder fragment of melody drifted down to him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding metal, now soft as remembered music. For a moment he forgot the chair whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about him, old Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the midst of that lovely glade. "Eden!" he muttered, and the swelling music of unseen voices answered.
Some measure of reason returned. "Illusion!" he told himself. Clever optical devices, not reality. He groped for the chair's arm, found it, and clung to it; he scraped his feet and found again an inconsistency. To his eyes the ground was mossy verdure; to his touch it was merely a thin hotel carpet.
The elfin buglings sounded gently. A faint, deliciously sweet perfume breathed against him; he glanced up to watch the opening of a great crimson blossom on the nearest tree, and a tiny reddish sun edged into the circle of sky above him. The fairy orchestra swelled louder in its light, and the notes sent a thrill of wistfulness through him. Illusion? If it were, it made reality almost unbearable; he wanted to believe that somewhere--somewhere this side of dreams, there actually existed this region of loveliness. An outpost of Paradise? Perhaps.
And then--far through the softening mists, he caught a movement that was not the swaying of verdure, a shimmer of silver more solid than mist. Something approached. He watched the figure as it moved, now visible, now hidden by trees; very soon he perceived that it was human, but it was almost upon him before he realized that it was a girl.
She wore a robe of silvery, half-translucent stuff, luminous as starbeams; a thin band of silver bound glowing black hair about her forehead, and other garment or ornament she had none. Her tiny white feet were bare to the mossy forest floor as she stood no more than a pace from him, staring dark-eyed. The thin music sounded again; she smiled.
Dan summoned stumbling thoughts. Was this being also--illusion? Had she no more reality than the loveliness of the forest? He opened his lips to speak, but a strained excited voice sounded in his ears. "Who are you?" Had he spoken? The voice had come as if from another, like the sound of one's words in fever.
The girl smiled again. "English!" she said in queer soft tones. "I can speak a little English." She spoke slowly, carefully. "I learned it from"--she hesitated--"my mother's father, whom they call the Grey Weaver."
Again came the voice in Dan's ears. "Who are you?"
"I am called Galatea," she said. "I came to find you."
"To find me?" echoed the voice that was Dan's.
"Leucon, who is called the Grey Weaver, told me," she explained smiling. "He said you will stay with us until the second noon from this." She cast a quick slanting glance at the pale sun now full above the clearing, then stepped closer. "What are you called?"
"Dan," he muttered. His voice sounded oddly different.
"What a strange name!" said the girl. She stretched out her bare arm. "Come," she smiled.
Dan touched her extended hand, feeling without any surprise the living warmth of her fingers. He had forgotten the paradoxes of illusion; this was no longer illusion to him, but reality itself. It seemed to him that he followed her, walking over the shadowed turf that gave with springy crunch beneath his tread, though Galatea left hardly an imprint. He glanced down, noting that he himself wore a silver garment, and that his feet were bare; with the glance he felt a feathery breeze on his body and a sense of mossy earth on his feet.
"Galatea," said his voice. "Galatea, what place is this? What language do you speak?"
She glanced back laughing. "Why, this is Paracosma, of course, and this is our language."
"Paracosma," muttered Dan. "Para--cosma!" A fragment of Greek that had survived somehow from a Sophomore course a decade in the past came strangely back to him. Paracosma! Land-beyond-the-world!
Galatea cast a smiling glance at him. "Does the real world seem strange," she queried, "after that shadow land of yours?"
"Shadow land?" echoed Dan, bewildered. "This is shadow, not my world."
The girl's smile turned quizzical. "Poof!" she retorted with an impudently lovely pout. "And I suppose, then, that I am the phantom instead of you!" She laughed. "Do I seem ghostlike?"
Dan made no reply; he was puzzling over unanswerable questions as he trod behind the lithe figure of his guide. The aisle between the unearthly trees widened, and the giants were fewer. It seemed a mile, perhaps, before a sound of tinkling water obscured that other strange music; they emerged on the bank of a little river, swift and crystalline, that rippled and gurgled its way from glowing pool to flashing rapids, sparkling under the pale sun. Galatea bent over the brink and cupped her hands, raising a few mouthfuls of water to her lips; Dan followed her example, finding the liquid stinging cold.
"How do we cross?" he asked.
"You can wade up there,"--the dryad who led him gestured to a sun-lit shallows above a tiny falls--"but I always cross here." She poised herself for a moment on the green bank, then dove like a silver arrow into the pool. Dan followed; the water stung his body like champagne, but a stroke or two carried him across to where Galatea had already emerged with a glistening of creamy bare limbs. Her garment clung tight as a metal sheath to her wet body; he felt a breath-taking thrill at the sight of her. And then, miraculously, the silver cloth was dry, the droplets rolled off as if from oiled silk, and they moved briskly on.
The incredible forest had ended with the river; they walked over a meadow studded with little, many-hued, star-shaped flowers, whose fronds underfoot were soft as a lawn. Yet still the sweet pipings followed them, now loud, now whisper-soft, in a tenuous web of melody.
"Galatea!" said Dan suddenly. "Where is the music coming from?"
She looked back amazed. "You silly one!" she laughed. "From the flowers, of course. See!" she plucked a purple star and held it to his ear; true enough, a faint and plaintive melody hummed out of the blossom. She tossed it in his startled face and skipped on.
A little copse appeared ahead, not of the gigantic forest trees, but of lesser growths, bearing flowers and fruits of iridescent colors, and a tiny brook bubbled through. And there stood the objective of their journey--a building of white, marble-like stone, single-storied and vine covered, with broad glassless windows. They trod upon a path of bright pebbles to the arched entrance, and here, on an intricate stone bench, sat a grey-bearded patriarchal individual. Galatea addressed him in a liquid language that reminded Dan of the flower-pipings; then she turned. "This is Leucon," she said, as the ancient rose from his seat and spoke in English.
"We are happy, Galatea and I, to welcome you, since visitors are a rare pleasure here, and those from your shadowy country most rare."
Dan uttered puzzled words of thanks, and the old man nodded, reseating himself on the carven bench; Galatea skipped through the arched entrance, and Dan, after an irresolute moment, dropped to the remaining bench. Once more his thoughts were whirling in perplexed turbulence. Was all this indeed but illusion? Was he sitting, in actuality, in a prosaic hotel room, peering through magic spectacles that pictured this world about him, or was he, transported by some miracle, really sitting here in this land of loveliness? He touched the bench; stone, hard and unyielding, met his fingers.
"Leucon," said his voice, "how did you know I was coming?"
"I was told," said the other.
"By whom?"
"By no one."
"Why--someone must have told you!"
The Grey Weaver shook his solemn head. "I was just told."
Dan ceased his questioning, content for the moment to drink in the beauty about him and then Galatea returned bearing a crystal bowl of the strange fruits. They were piled in colorful disorder, red, purple, orange and yellow, pear-shaped, egg-shaped, and clustered spheroids--fantastic, unearthly. He selected a pale, transparent ovoid, bit into it, and was deluged by a flood of sweet liquid, to the amusement of the girl. She laughed and chose a similar morsel; biting a tiny puncture in the end, she squeezed the contents into her mouth. Dan took a different sort, purple and tart as Rhenish wine, and then another, filled with edible, almond-like seeds. Galatea laughed delightedly at his surprises, and even Leucon smiled a grey smile. Finally Dan tossed the last husk into the brook beside them, where it danced briskly toward the river.
"Galatea," he said, "do you ever go to a city? What cities are in Paracosma?"
"Cities? What are cities?"
"Places where many people live close together."
"Oh," said the girl frowning. "No. There are no cities here."
"Then where are the people of Paracosma? You must have neighbors."
The girl looked puzzled. "A man and a woman live off there," she said, gesturing toward a distant blue range of hills dim on the horizon. "Far away over there. I went there once, but Leucon and I prefer the valley."
"But Galatea!" protested Dan. "Are you and Leucon alone in this valley? Where--what happened to your parents--your father and mother?"
"They went away. That way--toward the sunrise. They'll return some day."
"And if they don't?"
"Why, foolish one! What could hinder them?"
"Wild beasts," said Dan. "Poisonous insects, disease, flood, storm, lawless people, death!"
"I never heard those words," said Galatea. "There are no such things here." She sniffed contemptuously. "Lawless people!"
"Not--death?"
"What is death?"
"It's--" Dan paused helplessly. "It's like falling asleep and never waking. It's what happens to everyone at the end of life."
"I never heard of such a thing as the end of life!" said the girl decidedly. "There isn't such a thing."
"What happens, then," queried Dan desperately, "when one grows old?"
"Nothing, silly! No one grows old unless he wants to, like Leucon. A person grows to the age he likes best and then stops. It's a law!"
Dan gathered his chaotic thoughts. He stared into Galatea's dark, lovely eyes. "Have you stopped yet?"
The dark eyes dropped; he was amazed to see a deep, embarrassed flush spread over her cheeks. She looked at Leucon nodding reflectively on his bench, then back to Dan, meeting his gaze.
"Not yet," he said.
"And when will you, Galatea?"
"When I have had the one child permitted me. You see"--she stared down at her dainty toes--"one cannot--bear children--afterwards."
"Permitted? Permitted by whom?"
"By a law."
"Laws! Is everything here governed by laws? What of chance and accidents?"
"What are those--chance and accidents?"
"Things unexpected--things unforeseen."
"Nothing is unforeseen," said Galatea, still soberly. She repeated slowly, "Nothing is unforeseen." He fancied her voice was wistful.
Leucon looked up. "Enough of this," he said abruptly. He turned to Dan, "I know these words of yours--chance, disease, death. They are not for Paracosma. Keep them in your unreal country."
"Where did you hear them, then?"
"From Galatea's mother," said the Grey Weaver, "who had them from your predecessor--a phantom who visited here before Galatea was born."
Dan had a vision of Ludwig's face. "What was he like?"
"Much like you."
"But his name?"
The old man's mouth was suddenly grim. "We do not speak of him," he said and rose, entering the dwelling in cold silence.
"He goes to weave," said Galatea after a moment. Her lovely, piquant face was still troubled.
"What does he weave?"
"This," She fingered the silver cloth of her gown. "He weaves it out of metal bars on a very clever machine. I do not know the method."
"Who made the machine?"
"It was here."
"But--Galatea! Who built the house? Who planted these fruit trees?"
"They were here. The house and trees were always here." She lifted her eyes. "I told you everything had been foreseen, from the beginning until eternity--everything. The house and trees and machine were ready for Leucon and my parents and me. There is a place for my child, who will be a girl, and a place for her child--and so on forever."
Dan thought a moment. "Were you born here?"
"I don't know." He noted in sudden concern that her eyes were glistening with tears.
"Galatea, dear! Why are you unhappy? What's wrong?"
"Why, nothing!" She shook her black curls, smiled suddenly at him. "What could be wrong? How can one be unhappy in Paracosma?" She sprang erect and seized his hand. "Come! Let's gather fruit for tomorrow."
She darted off in a whirl of flashing silver, and Dan followed her around the wing of the edifice. Graceful as a dancer she leaped for a branch above her head, caught it laughingly, and tossed a great golden globe to him. She loaded his arms with the bright prizes and sent him back to the bench, and when he returned, she piled it so full of fruit that a deluge of colorful spheres dropped around him. She laughed again, and sent them spinning into the brook with thrusts of her rosy toes, while Dan watched her with an aching wistfulness. Then suddenly she was facing him; for a long, tense instant they stood motionless, eyes upon eyes, and then she turned away and walked slowly around to the arched portal. He followed her with his burden of fruit; his mind was once more in a turmoil of doubt and perplexity.
The little sun was losing itself behind the trees of that colossal forest to the west, and a coolness stirred among long shadows. The brook was purple-hued in the dusk, but its cheery notes mingled still with the flower music. Then the sun was hidden; the shadow fingers darkened the meadow; of a sudden the flowers were still, and the brook gurgled alone in a world of silence. In silence too, Dan entered the doorway.
The chamber within was a spacious one, floored with large black and white squares; exquisite benches of carved marble were here and there. Old Leucon, in a far corner, bent over an intricate, glistening mechanism, and as Dan entered he drew a shining length of silver cloth from it, folded it, and placed it carefully aside. There was a curious, unearthly fact that Dan noted; despite windows open to the evening, no night insects circled the globes that glowed at intervals from niches in the walls.
Galatea stood in a doorway to his left, leaning half-wearily against the frame; he placed the bowl of fruit on a bench at the entrance and moved to her side.
"This is yours," she said, indicating the room beyond. He looked in upon a pleasant, smaller chamber; a window framed a starry square, and a thin, swift, nearly silent stream of water gushed from the mouth of a carved human head on the left wall, curving into a six-foot basin sunk in the floor. Another of the graceful benches covered with the silver cloth completed the furnishings; a single glowing sphere, pendant by a chain from the ceiling, illuminated the room. Dan turned to the girl, whose eyes were still unwontedly serious.
"This is ideal," he said, "but, Galatea, how am I to turn out the light?"
"Turn it out?" she said. "You must cap it--so!" A faint smile showed again on her lips as she dropped a metal covering over the shining sphere. They stood tense in the darkness; Dan sensed her nearness achingly, and then the light was on once more. She moved toward the door, and there paused, taking his hand.
"Dear shadow," she said softly, "I hope your dreams are music." She was gone.
Dan stood irresolute in his chamber; he glanced into the large room where Leucon still bent over his work, and the Grey Weaver raised a hand in a solemn salutation, but said nothing. He felt no urge for the old man's silent company and turned back into his room to prepare for slumber.
* * * * *
Almost instantly, it seemed, the dawn was upon him and bright elfin pipings were all about him, while the odd ruddy sun sent a broad slanting plane of light across the room. He rose as fully aware of his surroundings as if he had not slept at all; the pool tempted him and he bathed in stinging water. Thereafter he emerged into the central chamber, noting curiously that the globes still glowed in dim rivalry to the daylight. He touched one casually; it was cool as metal to his fingers, and lifted freely from its standard. For a moment he held the cold flaming thing in his hands, then replaced it and wandered into the dawn.
Galatea was dancing up the path, eating a strange fruit as rosy as her lips. She was merry again, once more the happy nymph who had greeted him, and she gave him a bright smile as he chose a sweet green ovoid for his breakfast.
"Come on!" she called. "To the river!"
She skipped away toward the unbelievable forest; Dan followed, marveling that her lithe speed was so easy a match for his stronger muscles. Then they were laughing in the pool, splashing about until Galatea drew herself to the bank, glowing and panting. He followed her as she lay relaxed; strangely, he was neither tired nor breathless, with no sense of exertion. A question recurred to him, as yet unasked.
"Galatea," said his voice, "Whom will you take as mate?"
Her eyes went serious. "I don't know," she said. "At the proper time he will come. That is a law."
"And will you be happy?"
"Of course." She seemed troubled. "Isn't everyone happy?"
"Not where I live, Galatea."
"Then that must be a strange place--that ghostly world of yours. A rather terrible place."
"It is, often enough," Dan agreed. "I wish--" He paused. What did he wish? Was he not talking to an illusion, a dream, an apparition? He looked at the girl, at her glistening black hair, her eyes, her soft white skin, and then, for a tragic moment, he tried to feel the arms of that drab hotel chair beneath his hands--and failed. He smiled; he reached out his fingers to touch her bare arm, and for an instant she looked back at him with startled, sober eyes, and sprang to her feet.
"Come on! I want to show you my country." She set off down the stream, and Dan rose reluctantly to follow.
What a day that was! They traced the little river from still pool to singing rapids, and ever about them were the strange twitterings and pipings that were the voices of the flowers. Every turn brought a new vista of beauty; every moment brought a new sense of delight. They talked or were silent; when they were thirsty, the cool river was at hand; when they were hungry, fruit offered itself. When they were tired, there was always a deep pool and a mossy bank; and when they were rested, a new beauty beckoned. The incredible trees towered in numberless forms of fantasy, but on their own side of the river was still the flower-starred meadow. Galatea twisted him a bright-blossomed garland for his head, and thereafter he moved always with a sweet singing about him. But little by little the red sun slanted toward the forest, and the hours dripped away. It was Dan who pointed it out, and reluctantly they turned homeward.
As they returned, Galatea sang a strange song, plaintive and sweet as the medley of river and flower music. And again her eyes were sad.
"What song is that?" he asked.
"It is a song sung by another Galatea," she answered, "who is my mother." She laid her hand on his arm. "I will make it into English for you." She sang:
"The River lies in flower and fern, In flower and fern it breathes a song. It breathes a song of your return, Of your return in years too long. In years too long its murmurs bring Its murmurs bring their vain replies, Their vain replies the flowers sing, The flowers sing, 'The River lies!'"
Her voice quavered on the final notes; there was silence save for the tinkle of water and the flower bugles. Dan said, "Galatea--" and paused. The girl was again somber-eyed, tearful. He said huskily, "That's a sad song, Galatea. Why was your mother sad? You said everyone was happy in Paracosma."
"She broke a law," replied the girl tonelessly. "It is the inevitable way to sorrow." She faced him. "She fell in love with a phantom!" Galatea said. "One of your shadowy race, who came and stayed and then had to go back. So when her appointed lover came, it was too late; do you understand? But she yielded finally to the law, and is forever unhappy, and goes wandering from place to place about the world." She paused. "I shall never break a law," she said defiantly.
Dan took her hand. "I would not have you unhappy, Galatea. I want you always happy."
She shook her head. "I am happy," she said, and smiled a tender, wistful smile.
They were silent a long time as they trudged the way homeward. The shadows of the forest giants reached out across the river as the sun slipped behind them. For a distance they walked hand in hand, but as they reached the path of pebbly brightness near the house, Galatea drew away and sped swiftly before him. Dan followed as quickly as he might; when he arrived, Leucon sat on his bench by the portal, and Galatea had paused on the threshold. She watched his approach with eyes in which he again fancied the glint of tears.
"I am very tired," she said, and slipped within.
Dan moved to follow, but the old man raised a staying hand.
"Friend from the shadows," he said, "will you hear me a moment?"
Dan paused, acquiesced, and dropped to the opposite bench. He felt a sense of foreboding; nothing pleasant awaited him.
"There is something to be said," Leucon continued, "and I say it without desire to pain you, if phantoms feel pain. It is this: Galatea loves you, though I think she has not yet realized it."
"I love her too," said Dan.
The Grey Weaver stared at him. "I do not understand. Substance, indeed, may love shadow, but how can shadow love substance?"
"I love her," insisted Dan.
"Then woe to both of you! For this is impossible in Paracosma; it is a confliction with the laws. Galatea's mate is appointed, perhaps even now approaching."
"Laws! Laws!" muttered Dan. "Whose laws are they? Not Galatea's nor mine!"
"But they are," said the Grey Weaver. "It is not for you nor for me to criticize them--though I yet wonder what power could annul them to permit your presence here!"
"I had no voice in your laws."
The old man peered at him in the dusk. "Has anyone, anywhere, a voice in the laws?" he queried.
"In my country we have," retorted Dan.
"Madness!" growled Leucon. "Man-made laws! Of what use are man-made laws with only man-made penalties, or none at all? If you shadows make a law that the wind shall blow only from the east, does the west wind obey it?"
"We do pass such laws," acknowledged Dan bitterly. "They may be stupid, but they're no more unjust than yours."
"Ours," said the Grey Weaver, "are the unalterable laws of the world, the laws of Nature. Violation is always unhappiness. I have seen it; I have known it in another, in Galatea's mother, though Galatea is stronger than she." He paused. "Now," he continued, "I ask only for mercy; your stay is short, and I ask that you do no more harm than is already done. Be merciful; give her no more to regret."
He rose and moved through the archway; when Dan followed a moment later, he was already removing a square of silver from his device in the corner. Dan turned silent and unhappy to his own chamber, where the jet of water tinkled faintly as a distant bell.
Again he rose at the glow of dawn, and again Galatea was before him, meeting him at the door with her bowl of fruit. She deposited her burden, giving him a wan little smile of greeting, and stood facing him as if waiting.
"Come with me, Galatea," he said.
"Where?"
"To the river bank. To talk."
They trudged in silence to the brink of Galatea's pool. Dan noted a subtle difference in the world about him; outlines were vague, the thin flower pipings less audible, and the very landscape was queerly unstable, shifting like smoke when he wasn't looking at it directly. And strangely, though he had brought the girl here to talk to her, he had now nothing to say, but sat in aching silence with his eyes on the loveliness of her face.
Galatea pointed at the red ascending sun. "So short a time," she said, "before you go back to your phantom world. I shall be sorry, very sorry." She touched his cheek with her fingers. "Dear shadow!"
"Suppose," said Dan huskily, "that I won't go. What if I won't leave here?" His voice grew fiercer. "I'll not go! I'm going to stay!"
The calm mournfulness of the girl's face checked him; he felt the irony of struggling against the inevitable progress of a dream. She spoke. "Had I the making of the laws, you should stay. But you can't, dear one. You can't!"
Forgotten now were the words of the Grey Weaver. "I love you, Galatea," he said.
"And I you," she whispered. "See, dearest shadow, how I break the same law my mother broke, and am glad to face the sorrow it will bring." She placed her hand tenderly over his. "Leucon is very wise and I am bound to obey him, but this is beyond his wisdom because he let himself grow old." She paused. "He let himself grow old," she repeated slowly. A strange light gleamed in her dark eyes as she turned suddenly to Dan.
"Dear one!" she said tensely. "That thing that happens to the old--that death of yours! What follows it?"
"What follows death?" he echoed. "Who knows?"
"But--" Her voice was quivering. "But one can't simply--vanish! There must be an awakening."
"Who knows?" said Dan again. "There are those who believe we wake to a happier world, but--" He shook his head hopelessly.
"It must be true! Oh, it must be!" Galatea cried. "There must be more for you than the mad world you speak of!" She leaned very close. "Suppose, dear," she said, "that when my appointed lover arrives, I send him away. Suppose I bear no child, but let myself grow old, older than Leucon, old until death. Would I join you in your happier world?"
"Galatea!" he cried distractedly. "Oh, my dearest--what a terrible thought!"
"More terrible than you know," she whispered, still very close to him. "It is more than violation of a law; it is rebellion! Everything is planned, everything was foreseen, except this; and if I bear no child, her place will be left unfilled, and the places of her children, and of their children, and so on until some day the whole great plan of Paracosma fails of whatever its destiny was to be." Her whisper grew very faint and fearful. "It is destruction, but I love you more than I fear--death!"
Dan's arms were about her. "No, Galatea! No! Promise me!"
She murmured, "I can promise and then break my promise." She drew his head down; their lips touched, and he felt a fragrance and a taste like honey in her kiss. "At least," she breathed. "I can give you a name by which to love you. Philometros! Measure of my love!"
"A name?" muttered Dan. A fantastic idea shot through his mind--a way of proving to himself that all this was reality, and not just a page that any one could read who wore old Ludwig's magic spectacles. If Galatea would speak his name! Perhaps, he thought daringly, perhaps then he could stay! He thrust her away.
"Galatea!" he cried. "Do you remember my name?"
She nodded silently, her unhappy eyes on his.
"Then say it! Say it, dear!"
She stared at him dumbly, miserably, but made no sound.
"Say it, Galatea!" he pleaded desperately. "My name, dear--just my name!" Her mouth moved; she grew pale with effort and Dan could have sworn that his name trembled on her quivering lips, though no sound came.
At last she spoke. "I can't, dearest one! Oh, I can't! A law forbids it!" She stood suddenly erect, pallid as an ivory carving. "Leucon calls!" she said, and darted away. Dan followed along the pebbled path, but her speed was beyond his powers; at the portal he found only the Grey Weaver standing cold and stern. He raised his hand as Dan appeared.
"Your time is short," he said. "Go, thinking of the havoc you have done."
"Where's Galatea?" gasped Dan.
"I have sent her away." The old man blocked the entrance; for a moment Dan would have struck him aside, but something withheld him. He stared wildly about the meadow--there! A flash of silver beyond the river, at the edge of the forest. He turned and raced toward it, while motionless and cold the Grey Weaver watched him go.
"Galatea!" he called. "Galatea!"
He was over the river now, on the forest bank, running through columned vistas that whirled about him like mist. The world had gone cloudy; fine flakes danced like snow before his eyes; Paracosma was dissolving around him. Through the chaos he fancied a glimpse of the girl, but closer approach left him still voicing his hopeless cry of "Galatea!"
After an endless time, he paused; something familiar about the spot struck him, and just as the red sun edged above him, he recognized the place--the very point at which he had entered Paracosma! A sense of futility overwhelmed him as for a moment he gazed at an unbelievable apparition--a dark window hung in midair before him through which glowed rows of electric lights. Ludwig's window!
It vanished. But the trees writhed and the sky darkened, and he swayed dizzily in turmoil. He realized suddenly that he was no longer standing, but sitting in the midst of the crazy glade, and his hands clutched something smooth and hard--the arms of that miserable hotel chair. Then at last he saw her, close before him--Galatea, with sorrow-stricken features, her tear-filled eyes on his. He made a terrific effort to rise, stood erect, and fell sprawling in a blaze of coruscating lights.
He struggled to his knees; walls--Ludwig's room--encompassed him; he must have slipped from the chair. The magic spectacles lay before him, one lens splintered and spilling a fluid no longer water-clear, but white as milk.
"God!" he muttered. He felt shaken, sick, exhausted, with a bitter sense of bereavement, and his head ached fiercely. The room was drab, disgusting; he wanted to get out of it. He glanced automatically at his watch: four o'clock--he must have sat here nearly five hours. For the first time he noticed Ludwig's absence; he was glad of it and walked dully out of the door to an automatic elevator. There was no response to his ring; someone was using the thing. He walked three flights to the street and back to his own room.
In love with a vision! Worse--in love with a girl who had never lived, in a fantastic Utopia that was literally nowhere! He threw himself on his bed with a groan that was half a sob.
He saw finally the implication of the name Galatea. Galatea--Pygmalion's statue, given life by Venus in the ancient Grecian myth. But his Galatea, warm and lovely and vital, must remain forever without the gift of life, since he was neither Pygmalion nor God.
* * * * *
He woke late in the morning, staring uncomprehendingly about for the fountain and pool of Paracosma. Slow comprehension dawned; how much--how much--of last night's experience had been real? How much was the product of alcohol? Or had old Ludwig been right, and was there no difference between reality and dream?
He changed his rumpled attire and wandered despondently to the street. He found Ludwig's hotel at last; inquiry revealed that the diminutive professor had checked out, leaving no forwarding address.
What of it? Even Ludwig couldn't give what he sought, a living Galatea. Dan was glad that he had disappeared; he hated the little professor. Professor? Hypnotists called themselves "professors." He dragged through a weary day and then a sleepless night back to Chicago.
It was mid-winter when he saw a suggestively tiny figure ahead of him in the Loop. Ludwig! Yet what use to hail him? His cry was automatic. "Professor Ludwig!"
The elfin figure turned, recognized him, smiled. They stepped into the shelter of a building.
"I'm sorry about your machine, Professor. I'd be glad to pay for the damage."
"Ach, that was nothing--a cracked glass. But you--have you been ill? You look much the worse."
"It's nothing," said Dan. "Your show was marvelous, Professor--marvelous! I'd have told you so, but you were gone when it ended."
Ludwig shrugged. "I went to the lobby for a cigar. Five hours with a wax dummy, you know!"
"It was marvelous!" repeated Dan.
"So real?" smiled the other. "Only because you co-operated, then. It takes self-hypnosis."
"It was real, all right," agreed Dan glumly. "I don't understand it--that strange beautiful country."
"The trees were club-mosses enlarged by a lens," said Ludwig. "All was trick photography, but stereoscopic, as I told you--three dimensional. The fruits were rubber; the house is a summer building on our campus--Northern University. And the voice was mine; you didn't speak at all, except your name at the first, and I left a blank for that. I played your part, you see; I went around with the photographic apparatus strapped on my head, to keep the viewpoint always that of the observer. See?" He grinned wryly. "Luckily I'm rather short, or you'd have seemed a giant."
"Wait a minute!" said Dan, his mind whirling. "You say you played my part. Then Galatea--is she real too?"
"Tea's real enough," said the Professor. "My niece, a senior at Northern, and likes dramatics. She helped me out with the thing. Why? Want to meet her?"
Dan answered vaguely, happily. An ache had vanished; a pain was eased. Paracosma was attainable at last!
THE TIME MACHINE
by H. G. Wells
I
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought roams gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way--marking the points with a lean forefinger--as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
'You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.'
'Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?' said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
'I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness _nil_, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.'
'That is all right,' said the Psychologist.
'Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.'
'There I object,' said Filby. 'Of course a solid body may exist. All real things--'
'So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an _instantaneous_ cube exist?'
'Don't follow you,' said Filby.
'Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?'
Filby became pensive. 'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in _four_ directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and--Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.'
'That,' said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; 'that ... very clear indeed.'
'Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,' continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. 'Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. _There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it_. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?'
'_I_ have not,' said the Provincial Mayor.
'It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why _three_ dimensions particularly--why not another direction at right angles to the other three?--and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four--if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?'
'I think so,' murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. 'Yes, I think I see it now,' he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
'Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.
'Scientific people,' proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.'
'But,' said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, 'if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?'
The Time Traveller smiled. 'Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.'
'Not exactly,' said the Medical Man. 'There are balloons.'
'But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.'
'Still they could move a little up and down,' said the Medical Man.
'Easier, far easier down than up.'
'And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.'
'My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel _down_ if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface.'
'But the great difficulty is this,' interrupted the Psychologist. 'You _can_ move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.'
'That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?'
'Oh, _this_,' began Filby, 'is all--'
'Why not?' said the Time Traveller.
'It's against reason,' said Filby.
'What reason?' said the Time Traveller.
'You can show black is white by argument,' said Filby, 'but you will never convince me.'
'Possibly not,' said the Time Traveller. 'But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine--'
'To travel through Time!' exclaimed the Very Young Man.
'That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver determines.'
Filby contented himself with laughter.
'But I have experimental verification,' said the Time Traveller.
'It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,' the Psychologist suggested. 'One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!'
'Don't you think you would attract attention?' said the Medical Man. 'Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.'
'One might get one's Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,' the Very Young Man thought.
'In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.'
'Then there is the future,' said the Very Young Man. 'Just think! One might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!'
'To discover a society,' said I, 'erected on a strictly communistic basis.'
'Of all the wild extravagant theories!' began the Psychologist.
'Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until--'
'Experimental verification!' cried I. 'You are going to verify _that_?'
'The experiment!' cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
'Let's see your experiment anyhow,' said the Psychologist, 'though it's all humbug, you know.'
The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.
The Psychologist looked at us. 'I wonder what he's got?'
'Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,' said the Medical Man, and Filby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem; but before he had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby's anecdote collapsed.
The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows--unless his explanation is to be accepted--is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the fire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low arm-chair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. 'Well?' said the Psychologist.
'This little affair,' said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, 'is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.' He pointed to the part with his finger. 'Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.'
The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. 'It's beautifully made,' he said.
'It took two years to make,' retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: 'Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future Time, and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don't want to waste this model, and then be told I'm a quack.'
There was a minute's pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his finger towards the lever. 'No,' he said suddenly. 'Lend me your hand.' And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual's hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone--vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.
Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.
The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. 'Well?' he said, with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went to the tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill his pipe.
We stared at each other. 'Look here,' said the Medical Man, 'are you in earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that that machine has travelled into time?'
'Certainly,' said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist's face. (The Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut.) 'What is more, I have a big machine nearly finished in there'--he indicated the laboratory--'and when that is put together I mean to have a journey on my own account.'
'You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?' said Filby.
'Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which.'
After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. 'It must have gone into the past if it has gone anywhere,' he said.
'Why?' said the Time Traveller.
'Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled into the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have travelled through this time.'
'But,' I said, 'If it travelled into the past it would have been visible when we came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here; and the Thursday before that; and so forth!'
'Serious objections,' remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
'Not a bit,' said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist: 'You think. You can explain that. It's presentation below the threshold, you know, diluted presentation.'
'Of course,' said the Psychologist, and reassured us. 'That's a simple point of psychology. I should have thought of it. It's plain enough, and helps the paradox delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air. If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That's plain enough.' He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. 'You see?' he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.
'It sounds plausible enough to-night,' said the Medical Man; 'but wait until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.'
'Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?' asked the Time Traveller. And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way down the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
'Look here,' said the Medical Man, 'are you perfectly serious? Or is this a trick--like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?'
'Upon that machine,' said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, 'I intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life.'
None of us quite knew how to take it.
I caught Filby's eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he winked at me solemnly.
II
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown _him_ far less scepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby. But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would have made the frame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily. The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china. So I don't think any of us said very much about time travelling in the interval between that Thursday and the next, though its odd potentialities ran, no doubt, in most of our minds: its plausibility, that is, its practical incredibleness, the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model. That I remember discussing with the Medical Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar thing at Tubingen, and laid considerable stress on the blowing out of the candle. But how the trick was done he could not explain.
The next Thursday I went again to Richmond--I suppose I was one of the Time Traveller's most constant guests--and, arriving late, found four or five men already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical Man was standing before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch in the other. I looked round for the Time Traveller, and--'It's half-past seven now,' said the Medical Man. 'I suppose we'd better have dinner?'
'Where's----?' said I, naming our host.
'You've just come? It's rather odd. He's unavoidably detained. He asks me in this note to lead off with dinner at seven if he's not back. Says he'll explain when he comes.'
'It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil,' said the Editor of a well-known daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.
The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who had attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another--a quiet, shy man with a beard--whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner-table about the Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a half-jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the 'ingenious paradox and trick' we had witnessed that day week. He was in the midst of his exposition when the door from the corridor opened slowly and without noise. I was facing the door, and saw it first. 'Hallo!' I said. 'At last!' And the door opened wider, and the Time Traveller stood before us. I gave a cry of surprise. 'Good heavens! man, what's the matter?' cried the Medical Man, who saw him next. And the whole tableful turned towards the door.
He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer--either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it--a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. 'What on earth have you been up to, man?' said the Doctor. The Time Traveller did not seem to hear. 'Don't let me disturb you,' he said, with a certain faltering articulation. 'I'm all right.' He stopped, held out his glass for more, and took it off at a draught. 'That's good,' he said. His eyes grew brighter, and a faint colour came into his cheeks. His glance flickered over our faces with a certain dull approval, and then went round the warm and comfortable room. Then he spoke again, still as it were feeling his way among his words. 'I'm going to wash and dress, and then I'll come down and explain things ... Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat.'
He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was all right. The Editor began a question. 'Tell you presently,' said the Time Traveller. 'I'm--funny! Be all right in a minute.'
He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing on them but a pair of tattered, blood-stained socks. Then the door closed upon him. I had half a mind to follow, till I remembered how he detested any fuss about himself. For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering. Then, 'Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist,' I heard the Editor say, thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this brought my attention back to the bright dinner-table.
'What's the game?' said the Journalist. 'Has he been doing the Amateur Cadger? I don't follow.' I met the eye of the Psychologist, and read my own interpretation in his face. I thought of the Time Traveller limping painfully upstairs. I don't think any one else had noticed his lameness.
The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man, who rang the bell--the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting at dinner--for a hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and fork with a grunt, and the Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was resumed. Conversation was exclamatory for a little while, with gaps of wonderment; and then the Editor got fervent in his curiosity. 'Does our friend eke out his modest income with a crossing? or has he his Nebuchadnezzar phases?' he inquired. 'I feel assured it's this business of the Time Machine,' I said, and took up the Psychologist's account of our previous meeting. The new guests were frankly incredulous. The Editor raised objections. 'What _was_ this time travelling? A man couldn't cover himself with dust by rolling in a paradox, could he?' And then, as the idea came home to him, he resorted to caricature. Hadn't they any clothes-brushes in the Future? The Journalist too, would not believe at any price, and joined the Editor in the easy work of heaping ridicule on the whole thing. They were both the new kind of journalist--very joyous, irreverent young men. 'Our Special Correspondent in the Day after To-morrow reports,' the Journalist was saying--or rather shouting--when the Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in ordinary evening clothes, and nothing save his haggard look remained of the change that had startled me.
'I say,' said the Editor hilariously, 'these chaps here say you have been travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rosebery, will you? What will you take for the lot?'
The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He smiled quietly, in his old way. 'Where's my mutton?' he said. 'What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!'
'Story!' cried the Editor.
'Story be damned!' said the Time Traveller. 'I want something to eat. I won't say a word until I get some peptone into my arteries. Thanks. And the salt.'
'One word,' said I. 'Have you been time travelling?'
'Yes,' said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.
'I'd give a shilling a line for a verbatim note,' said the Editor. The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us. 'I suppose I must apologize,' he said. 'I was simply starving. I've had a most amazing time.' He reached out his hand for a cigar, and cut the end. 'But come into the smoking-room. It's too long a story to tell over greasy plates.' And ringing the bell in passing, he led the way into the adjoining room.
'You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?' he said to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming the three new guests.
'But the thing's a mere paradox,' said the Editor.
'I can't argue to-night. I don't mind telling you the story, but I can't argue. I will,' he went on, 'tell you the story of what has happened to me, if you like, but you must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell it. Badly. Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It's true--every word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at four o'clock, and since then ... I've lived eight days ... such days as no human being ever lived before! I'm nearly worn out, but I shan't sleep till I've told this thing over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions! Is it agreed?'
'Agreed,' said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed 'Agreed.' And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated. In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink--and, above all, my own inadequacy--to express its quality. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time Traveller's face.
III
'I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it's sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so that the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!
'I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
'I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback--of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
'The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hill-side upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed--melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.
'The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked indeed a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind--a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread--until at last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer green flow up the hill-side, and remain there, without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping.
'The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion--would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions--into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk--one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air.
'There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hail-stones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to the skin. "Fine hospitality," said I, "to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you."
'Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.
'My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space--half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun.
'I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness--a foul creature to be incontinently slain.
'Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded hill-side dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude to mount again.
'But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
'Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with my machine. He was a slight creature--perhaps four feet high--clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins--I could not clearly distinguish which--were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
'He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive--that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
IV
'In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue.
'There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and deep for them. So I shook my head, and, pointing to my ears, shook it again. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence--a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease. And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine-pins. But I made a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the Time Machine. Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of communication.
'And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild; and--this may seem egotism on my part--I fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
'As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun. At once a quaintly pretty little figure in chequered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.
'For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children--asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.
'I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and bowed. Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received with melodious applause; and presently they were all running to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the like can scarcely imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone. As I went with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to my mind.
'The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of little people, and with the big open portals that yawned before me shadowy and mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among the variegated shrubs, but, as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The Time Machine was left deserted on the turf among the rhododendrons.
'The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that they were very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-colored robes and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.
'The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not plates nor slabs--blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along the more frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from the floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognized as a kind of hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were strange.
'Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the sides of the tables. I was not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry. As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.
'And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end were thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the marble table near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was extremely rich and picturesque. There were, perhaps, a couple of hundred people dining in the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as they could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes shining over the fruit they were eating. All were clad in the same soft and yet strong, silky material.
'Fruit, by the by, was all their diet. These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also. Indeed, I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction. But the fruits were very delightful; one, in particular, that seemed to be in season all the time I was there--a floury thing in a three-sided husk--was especially good, and I made it my staple. At first I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I saw, but later I began to perceive their import.
'However, I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now. So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a resolute attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly that was the next thing to do. The fruits seemed a convenient thing to begin upon, and holding one of these up I began a series of interrogative sounds and gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in conveying my meaning. At first my efforts met with a stare of surprise or inextinguishable laughter, but presently a fair-haired little creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name. They had to chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and my first attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language caused an immense amount of amusement. However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb "to eat." But it was slow work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give their lessons in little doses when they felt inclined. And very little doses I found they were before long, for I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued.
'A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.
'The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known--even the flowers. The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position. I resolved to mount to the summit of a crest, perhaps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this our planet in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D. For that, I should explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded.
'As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world--for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants--nettles possibly--but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure, to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined, at a later date, to have a very strange experience--the first intimation of a still stranger discovery--but of that I will speak in its proper place.
'Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.
'"Communism," said I to myself.
'And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged, then, that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.
'Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.
'While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of freedom and adventure I pushed on up to the crest.
'There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins' heads. I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.
'So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was something in this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a half-truth--or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)
'It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life--the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure--had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!
'After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.
'This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done indeed for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had leaped. The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes.
'Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population had ceased to increase.
'But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young. _Now_, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.
'I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.
'Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help--may even be hindrances--to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived--the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
'Even this artistic impetus would at last die away--had almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!
'As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world--mastered the whole secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary. That would account for the abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough--as most wrong theories are!
V
'As I stood there musing over this too perfect triumph of man, the full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver light in the north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the night. I determined to descend and find where I could sleep.
'I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as the light of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver birch against it. There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in the pale light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the lawn again. A queer doubt chilled my complacency. "No," said I stoutly to myself, "that was not the lawn."
'But it _was_ the lawn. For the white leprous face of the sphinx was towards it. Can you imagine what I felt as this conviction came home to me? But you cannot. The Time Machine was gone!
'At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope. Once I fell headlong and cut my face; I lost no time in stanching the blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself: "They have moved it a little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way." Nevertheless, I ran with all my might. All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hill crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly in leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit world.
'When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized. Not a trace of the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.
'I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my invention had vanished. Yet, for one thing I felt assured: unless some other age had produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have moved in time. The attachment of the levers--I will show you the method later--prevented any one from tampering with it in that way when they were removed. It had moved, and was hid, only in space. But then, where could it be?
'I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently in and out among the moonlit bushes all round the sphinx, and startling some white animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I remember, too, late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist until my knuckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs. Then, sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted. I slipped on the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables, almost breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty curtains, of which I have told you.
'There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which, perhaps, a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly out of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the splutter and flare of a match. For they had forgotten about matches. "Where is my Time Machine?" I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon them and shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them. Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them standing round me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a thing as it was possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying to revive the sensation of fear. For, reasoning from their daylight behaviour, I thought that fear must be forgotten.
'Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and, knocking one of the people over in my course, went blundering across the big dining-hall again, out under the moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet running and stumbling this way and that. I do not remember all I did as the moon crept up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind--a strange animal in an unknown world. I must have raved to and fro, screaming and crying upon God and Fate. I have a memory of horrible fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible place and that; of groping among moon-lit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach of my arm.
'I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had got there, and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair. Then things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight, I could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly of my frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself. "Suppose the worst?" I said. "Suppose the machine altogether lost--perhaps destroyed? It behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means of getting materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may make another." That would be my only hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious world.
'But probably, the machine had only been taken away. Still, I must be calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or cunning. And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me, wondering where I could bathe. I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled. The freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness. I had exhausted my emotion. Indeed, as I went about my business, I found myself wondering at my intense excitement overnight. I made a careful examination of the ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in futile questionings, conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the little people as came by. They all failed to understand my gestures; some were simply stolid, some thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty laughing faces. It was a foolish impulse, but the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed and still eager to take advantage of my perplexity. The turf gave better counsel. I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was hollow. Examining the panels with care I found them discontinuous with the frames. There were no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind. It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.
'I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling to them and beckoned them to me. They came, and then, pointing to the bronze pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman--it is how she would look. They went off as if they had received the last possible insult. I tried a sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result. Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself. But, as you know, I wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more. As he turned off, like the others, my temper got the better of me. In three strides I was after him, had him by the loose part of his robe round the neck, and began dragging him towards the sphinx. Then I saw the horror and repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.
'But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I thought I heard something stir inside--to be explicit, I thought I heard a sound like a chuckle--but I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil in the decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes. The delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it. I saw a crowd of them upon the slopes, looking furtively at me. At last, hot and tired, I sat down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours--that is another matter.
'I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes towards the hill again. "Patience," said I to myself. "If you want your machine again you must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take your machine away, it's little good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don't, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it. To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all." Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.
'Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure of the avoidance. I was careful, however, to show no concern and to abstain from any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two things got back to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively simple--almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions. I determined to put the thought of my Time Machine and the mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx as much as possible in a corner of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me back to them in a natural way. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, tethered me in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.
'So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant richness as the Thames valley. From every hill I climbed I saw the same abundance of splendid buildings, endlessly varied in material and style, the same clustering thickets of evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees and tree-ferns. Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond, the land rose into blue undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of the sky. A peculiar feature, which presently attracted my attention, was the presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to me, of a very great depth. One lay by the path up the hill, which I had followed during my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed with bronze, curiously wrought, and protected by a little cupola from the rain. Sitting by the side of these wells, and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted match. But in all of them I heard a certain sound: a thud--thud--thud, like the beating of some big engine; and I discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady current of air set down the shafts. Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat of one, and, instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked swiftly out of sight.
'After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing here and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a sun-scorched beach. Putting things together, I reached a strong suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation, whose true import it was difficult to imagine. I was at first inclined to associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people. It was an obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.
'And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in this real future. In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and social arrangements, and so forth. But while such details are easy enough to obtain when the whole world is contained in one's imagination, they are altogether inaccessible to a real traveller amid such realities as I found here. Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.
'In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that, possibly, there might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my explorings. This, again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point. The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this people there were none.
'I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.
'Then, again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. Why? For the life of me I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering pillars. I felt I lacked a clue. I felt--how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you? Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One presented itself to me!
'That day, too, I made a friend--of a sort. It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes. When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and, wading in at a point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her safe to land. A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her. I had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any gratitude from her. In that, however, I was wrong.
'This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little woman, as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers--evidently made for me and me alone. The thing took my imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At any rate I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were soon seated together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles. The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a child's might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her name was Weena, which, though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended--as I will tell you!
'She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation. Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort. I thought it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me. Until it was too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I left her. Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For, by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.
'It was from her, too, that I learned that fear had not yet left the world. She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest confidence in me; for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful. It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me thinking and observing. I discovered then, among other things, that these little people gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept in droves. To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a tumult of apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping alone within doors, after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I missed the lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena's distress I insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.
'It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story slips away from me as I speak of her. It must have been the night before her rescue that I was awakened about dawn. I had been restless, dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps. I woke with a start, and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of the chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal. I got up, and went down into the great hall, and so out upon the flagstones in front of the palace. I thought I would make a virtue of necessity, and see the sunrise.
'The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky black, the ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up the hill I thought I could see ghosts. There several times, as I scanned the slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white, ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body. They moved hastily. I did not see what became of them. It seemed that they vanished among the bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand. I was feeling that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known. I doubted my eyes.
'As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere creatures of the half light. "They must have been ghosts," I said; "I wonder whence they dated." For a queer notion of Grant Allen's came into my head, and amused me. If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head. I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was a pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far deadlier possession of my mind.
'I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know it.
'Well, one very hot morning--my fourth, I think--as I was seeking shelter from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house where I slept and fed, there happened this strange thing: Clambering among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and side windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone. By contrast with the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me. I entered it groping, for the change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness.
'The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to turn. Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity appeared to be living came to my mind. And then I remembered that strange terror of the dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I advanced a step and spoke. I will admit that my voice was harsh and ill-controlled. I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me. It blundered against a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry.
'My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back. But, as I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on all-fours, or only with its forearms held very low. After an instant's pause I followed it into the second heap of ruins. I could not find it at first; but, after a time in the profound obscurity, I came upon one of those round well-like openings of which I have told you, half closed by a fallen pillar. A sudden thought came to me. Could this Thing have vanished down the shaft? I lit a match, and, looking down, I saw a small, white, moving creature, with large bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human spider! It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first time a number of metal foot and hand rests forming a kind of ladder down the shaft. Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand, going out as it dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster had disappeared.
'I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had seen was human. But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.
'I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered, was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization? How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful Upper-worlders? And what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft? I sat upon the edge of the well telling myself that, at any rate, there was nothing to fear, and that there I must descend for the solution of my difficulties. And withal I was absolutely afraid to go! As I hesitated, two of the beautiful Upper-world people came running in their amorous sport across the daylight in the shadow. The male pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.
'They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned pillar, peering down the well. Apparently it was considered bad form to remark these apertures; for when I pointed to this one, and tried to frame a question about it in their tongue, they were still more visibly distressed and turned away. But they were interested by my matches, and I struck some to amuse them. I tried them again about the well, and again I failed. So presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena, and see what I could get from her. But my mind was already in revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts; to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the Time Machine! And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.
'Here was the new view. Plainly, this second species of Man was subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a long-continued underground habit. In the first place, there was the bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the dark--the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then, those large eyes, with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things--witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while in the light--all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of the retina.
'Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and these tunnellings were the habitat of the new race. The presence of ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes--everywhere, in fact, except along the river valley--showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this artificial Underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight race was done? The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it, and went on to assume the _how_ of this splitting of the human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory; though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.
'At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you--and wildly incredible!--and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end--! Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?
'Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor--is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf--which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.
'The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks--that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called--I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the "Eloi," the beautiful race that I already knew.
'Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why, too, if the Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this Under-world, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of the human inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a match.
VI
'It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum. And they were filthily cold to the touch. Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.
'The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason. I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the moonlight--that night Weena was among them--and feeling reassured by their presence. It occurred to me even then, that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I felt assured that the Time Machine was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating these underground mysteries. Yet I could not face the mystery. If only I had had a companion it would have been different. But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me. I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
'It was this restlessness, this insecurity, perhaps, that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the south-westward towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I observed far off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the facade had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well as the pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore. But the day was growing late, and I had come upon the sight of the place after a long and tiring circuit; so I resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day, and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena. But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.
'Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely disconcerted. "Good-bye, little Weena," I said, kissing her; and then putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks. Rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away! At first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well. I saw her agonized face over the parapet, and smiled to reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung.
'I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again. Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible. Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disk, in which a star was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round black projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive. Everything save that little disk above was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again Weena had disappeared.
'I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft again, and leave the Under-world alone. But even while I turned this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall. Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was not too soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.
'I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand touching my face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches and, hastily striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the light. Living, as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way. I have no doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light. But, so soon as I struck a match in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion.
'I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different from that of the Over-world people; so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind. But I said to myself, "You are in for it now," and, feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match.
'Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the air. Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with what seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous! Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again! Then the match burned down, and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.
'I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke--at times I missed tobacco frightfully--even without enough matches. If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and examined it at leisure. But, as it was, I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me with--hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still remained to me.
'I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishing the Upper-worlders, to whom fire was a novelty. Now, as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again. They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I shivered violently, and shouted again--rather discordantly. This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me. I will confess I was horribly frightened. I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare. I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they hurried after me.
'In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked--those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!--as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment. But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated again, and when my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost burned through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my last match ... and it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and, kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.
'That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling. At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi. Then, for a time, I was insensible.
VII
'Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks--a something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before, I had felt as a man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy would come upon him soon.
'The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the little Upper-world people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism. But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-world. It seemed odd how it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of my meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but I could not tell what it was at the time.
'Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realizing to what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to think how they must already have examined me.
'I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its walls came back to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a child upon my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon when distances are deceptively diminished. In addition, the heel of one of my shoes was loose, and a nail was working through the sole--they were comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors--so that I was lame. And it was already long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace, silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.
'Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me, occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. At least she utilized them for that purpose. And that reminds me! In changing my jacket I found...'
The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon the little table. Then he resumed his narrative.
'As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand that we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken my Time Machine?
'So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out. The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena's fears and her fatigue grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her. Then, as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and, closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the opposite side of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue--a Faun, or some such figure, _minus_ the head. Here too were acacias. So far I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night, and the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.
'From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either to the right or the left. Feeling tired--my feet, in particular, were very sore--I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction. I looked into the thickness of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under that dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even were there no other lurking danger--a danger I did not care to let my imagination loose upon--there would still be all the roots to stumble over and the tree-boles to strike against.
'I was very tired, too, after the excitements of the day; so I decided that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.
'Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The hill-side was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there came now and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for the night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend.
'Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.
'Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of the old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear, except for a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection of some colourless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and white. And close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn came, pale at first, and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed, I had seen none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel; so I sat down again, took off my shoes, and flung them away.
'I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as the night. And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I felt assured now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was--far less than any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men----! I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side!
'Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.
'I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue. My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was immediate. In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew, would be more efficient against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to arrange some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White Sphinx. I had in mind a battering ram. I had a persuasion that if I could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should discover the Time Machine and escape. I could not imagine the Morlocks were strong enough to move it far away. Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time. And turning such schemes over in my mind I pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen as our dwelling.
VIII
'I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been. I thought then--though I never followed up the thought--of what might have happened, or might be happening, to the living things in the sea.
'The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
'Within the big valves of the door--which were open and broken--we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time. But they must have been air-tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
'Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington! Here, apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or threaded in strings upon reeds. And the cases had in some instances been bodily removed--by the Morlocks as I judged. The place was very silent. The thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
'And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
'To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least in my present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of oldtime geology in decay. Exploring, I found another short gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder. But I could find no saltpeter; indeed, no nitrates of any kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered. Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition. A few shrivelled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals, desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown dust of departed plants: that was all! I was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been attained. Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered. At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling--many of them cracked and smashed--which suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.
'Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all. [Footnote: It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the museum was built into the side of a hill.--ED.] The end I had come in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit like the "area" of a London house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena's increasing apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me, I saw that the dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge, and no means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well.
'I took Weena's hand. Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal-box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength of the lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute's strain, and I rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient, I judged, for any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the brutes I heard.
'Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the _Philosophical Transactions_ and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.
'Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And at last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches. Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even damp. I turned to Weena. "Dance," I cried to her in her own tongue. For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance, whistling _The Land of the Leal_ as cheerfully as I could. In part it was a modest _cancan_, in part a step dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
'Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most fortunate thing. Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame--was, in fact, an excellent candle--and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
'I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound. But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into dust. One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the specimens. In another place was a vast array of idols--Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
'As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin-mine, and then by the merest accident I discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite cartridges! I shouted "Eureka!" and smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated. Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into non-existence.
'It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position. Night was creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still to be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defences against the Morlocks--I had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning there was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had never impressed me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of iron not altogether inadequate for the work.
IX
'We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above the horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next morning, and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had stopped me on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible that night, and then, building a fire, to sleep in the protection of its glare. Accordingly, as we went along I gathered any sticks or dried grass I saw, and presently had my arms full of such litter. Thus loaded, our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena was tired. And I began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was full night before we reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge Weena would have stopped, fearing the darkness before us; but a singular sense of impending calamity, that should indeed have served me as a warning, drove me onward. I had been without sleep for a night and two days, and I was feverish and irritable. I felt sleep coming upon me, and the Morlocks with it.
'While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the bare hill-side, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer resting-place; I thought that with my matches and my camphor I could contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should have to abandon my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering our retreat.
'I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
'She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up, and in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I could see, through the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was creeping up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that, and turned again to the dark trees before me. It was very black, and Weena clung to me convulsively, but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems. Overhead it was simply black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us here and there. I struck none of my matches because I had no hand free. Upon my left arm I carried my little one, in my right hand I had my iron bar.
'For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering about me. I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Under-world. There were evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in upon me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then something at my arm. And Weena shivered violently, and became quite still.
'It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I did so, and, as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness about my knees, perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar cooing sounds from the Morlocks. Soft little hands, too, were creeping over my coat and back, touching even my neck. Then the match scratched and fizzed. I held it flaring, and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in flight amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket, and prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane. Then I looked at Weena. She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless, with her face to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed scarcely to breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the ground, and as it split and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her. The wood behind seemed full of the stir and murmur of a great company!
'She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder and rose to push on, and then there came a horrible realization. In manoeuvring with my matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several times, and now I had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my path. For all I knew, I might be facing back towards the Palace of Green Porcelain. I found myself in a cold sweat. I had to think rapidly what to do. I determined to build a fire and encamp where we were. I put Weena, still motionless, down upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as my first lump of camphor waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here and there out of the darkness round me the Morlocks' eyes shone like carbuncles.
'The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away. One was so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his bones grind under the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay, staggered a little way, and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor, and went on gathering my bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some of the foliage above me, for since my arrival on the Time Machine, a matter of a week, no rain had fallen. So, instead of casting about among the trees for fallen twigs, I began leaping up and dragging down branches. Very soon I had a choking smoky fire of green wood and dry sticks, and could economize my camphor. Then I turned to where Weena lay beside my iron mace. I tried what I could to revive her, but she lay like one dead. I could not even satisfy myself whether or not she breathed.
'Now, the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made me heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air. My fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary after my exertion, and sat down. The wood, too, was full of a slumbrous murmur that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes. But all was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box, and--it had gone! Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider's web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.
'The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined to make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree, swinging the iron bar before me. The whole wood was full of the stir and cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch of excitement, and their movements grew faster. Yet none came within reach. I stood glaring at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope. What if the Morlocks were afraid? And close on the heels of that came a strange thing. The darkness seemed to grow luminous. Very dimly I began to see the Morlocks about me--three battered at my feet--and then I recognized, with incredulous surprise, that the others were running, in an incessant stream, as it seemed, from behind me, and away through the wood in front. And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I stood agape, I saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of starlight between the branches, and vanish. And at that I understood the smell of burning wood, the slumbrous murmur that was growing now into a gusty roar, the red glow, and the Morlocks' flight.
'Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw, through the black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It was my first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she was gone. The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as each fresh tree burst into flame, left little time for reflection. My iron bar still gripped, I followed in the Morlocks' path. It was a close race. Once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that I was outflanked and had to strike off to the left. But at last I emerged upon a small open space, and as I did so, a Morlock came blundering towards me, and past me, and went on straight into the fire!
'And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hill-side were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blundering hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment. At first I did not realize their blindness, and struck furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them.
'Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time the flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would presently be able to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by killing some of them before this should happen; but the fire burst out again brightly, and I stayed my hand. I walked about the hill among them and avoided them, looking for some trace of Weena. But Weena was gone.
'At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this strange incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and making uncanny noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on them. The coiling uprush of smoke streamed across the sky, and through the rare tatters of that red canopy, remote as though they belonged to another universe, shone the little stars. Two or three Morlocks came blundering into me, and I drove them off with blows of my fists, trembling as I did so.
'For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the ground with my hands, and got up and sat down again, and wandered here and there, and again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and calling upon God to let me awake. Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads down in a kind of agony and rush into the flames. But, at last, above the subsiding red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and the whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.
'I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which it seemed destined. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself. The hillock, as I have said, was a kind of island in the forest. From its summit I could now make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of Green Porcelain, and from that I could get my bearings for the White Sphinx. And so, leaving the remnant of these damned souls still going hither and thither and moaning, as the day grew clearer, I tied some grass about my feet and limped on across smoking ashes and among black stems, that still pulsated internally with fire, towards the hiding-place of the Time Machine. I walked slowly, for I was almost exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss. But that morning it left me absolutely lonely again--terribly alone. I began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you, and with such thoughts came a longing that was pain.
'But as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches. The box must have leaked before it was lost.
X
'About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world. I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.
'I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes--to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
'It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
'So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection--absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. So I say I saw it in my last view of the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One. It may be as wrong an explanation as mortal wit could invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to you.
'After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days, and in spite of my grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm sunlight were very pleasant. I was very tired and sleepy, and soon my theorizing passed into dozing. Catching myself at that, I took my own hint, and spreading myself out upon the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep.
'I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being caught napping by the Morlocks, and, stretching myself, I came on down the hill towards the White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the other hand played with the matches in my pocket.
'And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal of the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into grooves.
'At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.
'Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner of this was the Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here, after all my elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx, was a meek surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use it.
'A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal. For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks. Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.
'Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the dark--trapped. So the Morlocks thought. At that I chuckled gleefully.
'I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me. Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers and depart then like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little thing. The matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.
'You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were close upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then came one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight against their persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time feel for the studs over which these fitted. One, indeed, they almost got away from me. As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with my head--I could hear the Morlock's skull ring--to recover it. It was a nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.
'But at last the lever was fitted and pulled over. The clinging hands slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.
XI
'I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch--into futurity.
'As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating greyness grew darker; then--though I was still travelling with prodigious velocity--the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set--it simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth. Very cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands until the thousands one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew visible.
'I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight.
'The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.
'Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
'As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.
'I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun--a little larger, a little duller--the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.
'So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.
'I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow sandbank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.
'Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that was creeping over the day, and then I realized that an eclipse was beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of an inner planet passing very near to the earth.
'The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.
'A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal--there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing--against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
XII
'So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses, the evidences of decadent humanity. These, too, changed and passed, and others came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.
'I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before that I seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed like a flash.
'Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off the thing very shakily, and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old workshop again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the whole thing have been a dream.
'And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east corner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west, against the wall where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks had carried my machine.
'For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on the table by the door. I found the date was indeed to-day, and looking at the timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight o'clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated--I felt so sick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you. You know the rest. I washed, and dined, and now I am telling you the story.
'I know,' he said, after a pause, 'that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures.'
He looked at the Medical Man. 'No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?'
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the Time Traveller's face, and looked round at his audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar--the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. 'What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!' he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller's shoulder.
'You don't believe it?'
'Well----'
'I thought not.'
The Time Traveller turned to us. 'Where are the matches?' he said. He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. 'To tell you the truth ... I hardly believe it myself.... And yet...'
His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw he was looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers. 'The gynaeceum's odd,' he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see, holding out his hand for a specimen.
'I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one,' said the Journalist. 'How shall we get home?'
'Plenty of cabs at the station,' said the Psychologist.
'It's a curious thing,' said the Medical Man; 'but I certainly don't know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?'
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: 'Certainly not.'
'Where did you really get them?' said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. 'They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.' He stared round the room. 'I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times--but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from? ... I must look at that machine. If there is one!'
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch--for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it--and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along the damaged rail. 'It's all right now,' he said. 'The story I told you was true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.' He took up the lamp, and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling good night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. 'I'm frightfully busy,' said he, 'with that thing in there.'
'But is it not some hoax?' I said. 'Do you really travel through time?'
'Really and truly I do.' And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. 'I only want half an hour,' he said. 'I know why you came, and it's awfully good of you. There's some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you'll forgive my leaving you now?'
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment--a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. 'Has Mr. ---- gone out that way?' said I.
'No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.'
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
EPILOGUE
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now--if I may use the phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know--for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made--thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank--is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers--shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle--to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
THE TERROR FROM THE DEPTHS
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
Commander John Hanson challenges an appalling denizen of the watery world Hydrot.
"Good afternoon, sir," nodded Correy as I entered the navigating room. He glanced down at the two glowing three-dimensional navigating charts, and drummed restlessly on the heavy frames.
"Afternoon, Mr. Correy. Anything of interest to report?"
"Not a thing, sir!" growled my fire-eating first officer. "I'm about ready to quit the Service and get a job on one of the passenger liners, just on the off chance that something exciting might eventually happen."
"You were born a few centuries too late," I chuckled. Correy loved a fight more than any man I ever knew. "The Universe has become pretty well quieted down."
"Oh, it isn't that; it's just this infernal routine. Just one routine patrol after another; they should call it the Routine Patrol Service. That's what the silver-sleeves at the Base are making of it, sir."
At the moment, Correy meant every word he said. Even old-timers develop cases of nerves, now and then, on long tours of duty in small ships like the Ertak. Particularly men like Correy, whose bodies crave physical action.
There wasn't much opportunity for physical activity on the Ertak; she was primarily a fighting ship, small and fast, with every inch of space devoted to some utilitarian use. I knew just how Correy felt, because I'd felt the same way a great many times. I was young, then, one of the youngest commanders the Special Patrol Service had ever had, and I recognized Correy's symptoms in a twinkling.
"We'll be re-outfitting at the Arpan sub-base in a couple of days," I said carelessly. "Give us a chance to stretch our legs. Have you seen anything of the liner that spoke to us yesterday?" I was just making conversation, to get his mind out of its unhealthy channel.
"The Kabit? Yes, sir; we passed her early this morning, lumbering along like the big fat pig that she is." A pig, I should explain, is a food animal of Earth; a fat and ill-looking creature of low intelligence. "The old Ertak went by her as though she were standing still. She'll be a week and more arriving at Arpan. Look: you can just barely make her out on the charts."
I glanced down at the twin charts Correy had indicated. In the center of each the red spark that represented the Ertak glowed like a coal of fire; all around were the green pinpricks of light that showed the position of other bodies around us. The Kabit, while comparatively close, was just barely visible; her bulk was so small that it only faintly activated the super-radio reflex plates upon the ship's hull.
"We're showing her a pretty pair of heels," I nodded, studying our position in both dimensions. "Arpan isn't registering yet, I see. Who's this over here; Hydrot?"
"Right, sir," replied Correy. "Most useless world in the Universe, I guess. No good even for an emergency base."
"She's not very valuable, certainly," I admitted. "Just a ball of water whirling through space. But she does serve one good purpose; she's a sign-post it's impossible to mistake." Idly, I picked up Hydrot in the television disk, gradually increasing the size of the image until I had her full in the field, at maximum magnification.
* * * * *
Hydrot was a sizable sphere, somewhat larger than Earth--my natural standard of comparison--and utterly devoid of visible land. She was, as I had said, just a ball of water, swinging along uselessly through space, although no doubt there was land of some kind under that vast, unending stretch of gray water, for various observers had reported, in times past, bursts of volcanic steam issuing from the water.
Indeed, as I looked, I saw one such jet of steam, shooting into space from a spot not far from the equator of the strange world. In the television disk, it looked like a tiny wisp of white, barely visible against the gray water, but in reality it must have been a mighty roaring column of smoke and steam and erupted material.
"There's life in the old girl, anyway," I commented, indicating the image in the disk. "See her spout?"
We bent over the disk together, watching the white feather of steam.
"First time I've ever seen that," said Correy. "I know volcanic activity has been reported before, but--look, sir! There's another--two more!"
Undoubtedly, things were happening deep in the bowels of Hydrot. There were now three wisps of steam rising from the water, two of them fairly close together, the other a considerable distance away, arranged to form a very long pointed triangle, the short base of which ran close to the equator, its longer sides reaching toward one of the poles; the north pole, as we happened to view the image.
The columns of steam seemed to increase in size. Certainly they mounted higher into the air. I could imagine the terrific roar of them as they blasted their way through the sullen water and hurled it in steaming spray around their bases, while huge stones fell hissing into the water on all sides. The eruption must have shaken the entire sphere; the gushing of those vomiting throats was a cataclysm of such magnitude that I could not guess its effect.
Correy and I watched tensely, hardly breathing. I think we both felt that something was about to happen: a pent-up force had been released, and it was raging. We could almost hear the rumble of the volcanic explosions and the ear-splitting hiss of the escaping steam.
Suddenly Correy clutched my arm.
"Look!" he whispered, "Look!"
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I could see the water crawling inside the triangle formed by the three wisps of steam: crawling in white, foaming waves like tiny scraps of thread as it rushed headlong, in mighty tidal waves, away from the center of that triangle.
The columns of steam flared up with fresh strength, darkening as though with smoke. Here and there within the triangle black specks appeared, grew larger, and ran together in crooked lines that widened continually.
"A--a new continent, sir!" said Correy almost reverently. "We've seen a new continent born."
Correy had put my thoughts into words. We had seen a new continent born; on the gray surface of Hydrot there was now a great irregular black blotch from which mounted three waving pillars of smoke and steam. Around the shores of the new continent the waters raged, white and angry, and little threads of white crawled outward from those shores--the crests of tidal waves that must have towered into the air twice the Ertak's length.
Slowly, the shore-line changed form as fresh portions arose, and others, newly-risen, sank again beneath the gray water. The wisps of steam darkened still more, and seemed to shrivel up, as though the fires that fed them had been exhausted by the travail of a new continent.
"Think, sir," breathed Correy, "what we might find if we landed there on that new continent, still dripping with the water from which it sprang! A part of the ocean's bed, thrust above the surface to be examined at will--Couldn't we leave our course long enough to--to look her over?"
I confess I was tempted. Young John Hanson, Commander of the Special Patrol ship, Ertak, had his good share of natural curiosity, the spirit of adventure, and the explorer's urge. But at the same time, the Service has a discipline that is as rigid and relentless as the passing of time itself.
Hydrot lay off to starboard of our course: Arpan, where we were to re-outfit, was ahead and to port, and we were already swinging in that direction. The Ertak was working on a close schedule that gave us no latitude.
"I'm afraid it can't be done, Mr. Correy," I said, shaking my head. "We'll report it immediately, of course, and perhaps we'll get orders to make an investigation. In that case--"
"Not the Ertak!" interrupted Correy passionately. "They'll send a crew of bug-eyed scientists there, and a score or so of laboratory men to analyze this, and run a test on that, and the whole mess of them will write millions of words apiece about the expedition that nobody will ever read. I know."
"Well, we'll hope you're wrong." I said, knowing in my heart that he was perfectly right. "Keep her on her present course, Mr. Correy."
"Present course it is, sir!" snapped Correy. Then we bent together over the old-fashioned hooded television disk staring down silently and regretfully at the continent we had seen born, and which, with all its promise of interest and adventure, we must leave behind, in favor of a routine stop at the sub-base on Arpan.
I think both of us would have gladly given years of our lives to turn the Ertak's blunt nose toward Hydrot, but we had our orders, and in the Service as it was in those days, an officer did not question his orders.
* * * * *
Correy mooned around the Arpan sub-base like a fractious child. Kincaide and I endeavored to cheer him up, and Hendricks, the Ertak's young third officer, tried in vain to induce Correy to take in the sights.
"All I want to know," Correy insisted, "is whether there's any change in orders. You got the news through to Base, didn't you, sir?"
"Right. All that came back was the usual 'Confirmed.' No comment." Correy muttered under his breath and wandered off to glare at the Arpanians who were working on the Ertak. Kincaide shrugged and shook his head.
"He's spoiling for action, sir," he commented. Kincaide was my second officer; a cool-headed, quick-witted fighting man, and as fine an officer as ever wore the blue-and-silver uniform of the Service. "I only hope--message for you, sir." He indicated an Arpanian orderly who had come up from behind, and was standing at attention.
"You're wanted immediately in the radio room, sir," said the orderly, saluting.
"Very well," I nodded, returning the salute and glancing at Kincaide. "Perhaps we will get a change in orders after all."
I hurried after the orderly, following him down the broad corridors of the administration building to the radio room. The commander of the Arpan sub-base was waiting there, talking gravely with the operator.
"Bad news, Commander," he said, as I entered the room. "We've just received a report from the passenger liner Kabit, and she's in desperate straits. At the insistence of the passengers, the ship made contact with Hydrot and is unable to leave. She has been attacked by some strange monster, or several of them--the message is badly confused. I thought perhaps you'd like to report the matter to Base yourself."
"Yes. Thank you, sir. Operator, please raise Base immediately!"
* * * * *
The Kabit? That was the big liner we had spoken to the day before Correy and I had seen the new continent rise above the boundless waters of Hydrot. I knew the ship; she carried about eighteen hundred passengers, and a crew of seventy-five men and officers. Beside her, the Ertak was a pygmy; that the larger ship, so large and powerful, could be in trouble, seemed impossible. Yet--
"Base, sir," said the operator, holding a radio-menore toward me.
I placed the instrument on my head.
"John Hanson, Commander of the Special Patrol ship Ertak emanating. Special report for Chief of Command."
"Report, Commander Hanson," emanated the Base operator automatically.
"Word has just been received at Arpan sub-base that passenger liner Kabit made contact with Hydrot, landing somewhere on the new continent, previously reported by the Ertak. Liner Kabit reports itself in serious difficulties, exact nature undetermined, but apparently due to hostile activity from without. Will await instructions."
"Confirmed. Commander Hanson's report will be put through to Chief of Command immediately. Stand by."
I removed the radio-menore, motioning to the operator to resume his watch.
Radio communication in those days was in its infancy. Several persons who have been good enough to comment upon my previous chronicles of the Special Patrol Service, have asked "But, Commander Hanson! Why didn't you just radio for assistance?" forgetting as young persons do, that things have not always been as they are to-day.
The Ertak's sending apparatus, for example, could reach out at best no more than a day's journey in any direction, and then only imperfectly. Transmission of thought by radio instead of symbols or words, had been introduced but a few years before I entered the Service. It must be remembered that I am an old, old man, writing of things that happened before most of the present population of the Universe was born--that I am writing of men who, for the larger part, have long since embarked upon the Greatest Adventure.
* * * * *
"Base, sir," said the operator after a moment, and I hastily slipped on the radio-menore.
"Commander John Hanson, standing by," I shot at the operator at Base. "Have you orders?"
"Orders for Captain John Hanson, Commander of the Special Patrol ship Ertak," emanated the operator in a sort of mental drone. "Chief of Command directs that the Ertak proceed immediately to the scene of the reported difficulty, and take any necessary steps to relieve same. I will repeat the orders," and he droned through them a second time.
"Orders are understood. The results of our operations will be reported to Base as soon as possible." I tore off the radio-menore and hurried from the room, explaining to the sub-base commander as I went.
Correy was standing beside the Ertak, talking to Kincaide, and as I approached, they both looked around quickly and hopefully.
"What's up, sir?" asked Correy, reading news in my face. "A change in orders?"
"Correct! That big liner, the Kabit, landed on Hydrot, and she's in some sort of mysterious trouble. Orders from the Chief himself are to proceed there immediately. Are any men away from the ship on leave?"
"If there are, we can do without them!" shouted Correy. "I'll stand a double watch."
"The crew is on duty, sir," said Kincaide quietly. "Mr. Hendricks is aboard directing the taking on of supplies. We can leave any time you order, sir."
"We leave immediately, gentlemen," I said. "Mr. Correy, will you give the necessary orders?"
"Yes, sir!" grinned Correy, his eyes dancing like a schoolboy's. He was in the navigating room jabbing attention signals and snapping orders into the microphone before Kincaide and I, moving more leisurely, had entered the ship.
* * * * *
Hurtling through space at maximum speed, it took us two days, Earth time, to come close enough to Hydrot so that we could locate the unfortunate Kabit. She had landed on a level plain near the shore of the new continent, where she lay, just a tiny bright speck, even under the maximum power of our television disk.
"It's an odd thing, sir, that we can't raise her by radio," commented Hendricks, who was on duty. "Have we tried recently?"
"We've been trying constantly, at intervals of but a few minutes," I replied grimly. "Several times, the operator reports, he has been able to get a muffled and garbled response, utterly unintelligible. He says that the signals sound as though the radio emanation-plates in her outer hull were damaged or grounded. We'll just have to wait until we get there."
"As soon as we are near enough, please make an analysis of her atmosphere, so that we can break out masks, if necessary." Hendricks, while young and rather too impulsive, was a good rough-and-ready scientist, as well as a courageous and dependable officer. "When Mr. Correy relieves you, please inform him that I am taking a watch below, should he need me." Hydrot was looming up in the television disk, and I wished to be rested and ready for action when we landed.
* * * * *
I was awakened by an uncomfortable warmth, and when I glanced at my watch the explanation was obvious. We had penetrated the outer gaseous envelope of the world that had so recently given birth to a continent, and Correy was driving the Ertak through at reckless speed.
When I entered the navigating room, Correy glanced up guiltily at the surface-temperature gauge and then hastily saluted.
"We're reducing speed, sir," he said. "Atmosphere is rather denser than I had expected. Hendricks reports the air breathable, with a humidity of one hundred. And--tell me, sir, what do you make of the appearance of the Kabit now?"
I bent over the hooded television disk anxiously. The Kabit was in the center of the field, and the image was perhaps a third of the disk's diameter in length.
Instead of a tiny bright speck, I could see now the fat bulk of the ship, its bright metal gleaming--but across or around the ship, were broad spiral bands of black or dark green, as sharp as though they had been painted there.
"What are the bands, Mr. Correy?" I asked sharply. "Have you formed any opinion?"
"I have, sir, but I'd rather not offer it at this time," said my first officer gravely. "Look about the ship, in the immediate vicinity, and see if you find anything of interest. My eyes may be playing me tricks."
I glanced curiously at Correy, and then bent my attention on the image in the disk.
* * * * *
It was impossible to make out any details of the background, save that the country round seemed to be fairly level, with great pools of gray water standing here and there, and a litter, as of gigantic, wilted vegetation, spread over everything.
And then, as I looked, it seemed to me that the Kabit shifted position slightly. At the same time, the spiral bands seemed to move, and upon the ground around the ship, there was movement also.
I looked up from the disk, feeling Correy's eyes upon me. We stared at each other, neither wishing to speak--hardly daring to speak. There are some things too monstrous to put into words.
"You--you saw it, sir?" asked Correy at last, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.
"I don't know. I think I saw something like a--a snake. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes. Something like a snake. A snake that has wrapped itself around the Kabit, holding it helpless ... a serpent...." He gestured helplessly, a sort of horror in his eyes. I think he had convinced himself he had only imagined the serpent, until I had seen the same thing.
"Have you stopped to think, Mr. Correy," I asked slowly, "how long the creature would have to be to wrap itself like that around a liner the size of the Kabit? It--it can't be!"
"I know it, sir," nodded Correy. "I know it. And still, I saw it, and you saw it."
"Yes," I muttered. "I saw it. I--I saw it move!"
* * * * *
We maintained a speed that kept the surface-temperature gauge dangerously close to maximum permissible reading, and despite the forced ventilation of the ship, we were dripping with perspiration.
Atmospheric speeds are maddeningly low after the reckless, hurtling speed of space travel, but our vaunted scientists haven't yet found a way of eliminating friction, and we had to make the best of it.
With maddening slowness the image in the television disk grew larger and clearer, relentlessly confirming our original conclusion.
The Kabit was wrapped in the coils of a mighty serpent; a monster that must have been the height of a man in diameter, and whose length I could not even guess.
Four coils were looped tightly about the Kabit, and we could now see the terrible tail of the thing, and its head.
I have always been glad that the details of that ghastly head became visible gradually: viewed suddenly, in full relief, it was a sight that might well have threatened the reason of any man.
The serpent's mouth was lined with a triple row of long, fang-like teeth, tilted gullet-ward at a sharp angle, and the breathing holes were elevated to form warty excrudescences near the end of the snoutish upper jaw. Long colorless tentacles fringed the horrible mouth: barbels that writhed incessantly, as though they sought food for the rapacious jaws they guarded. From a point slightly above and to the rear of the tiny, ruby eyes, two slim and graceful antennae, iridescent and incongruously beautiful, rose twice the height of a man. Like the antennae of a butterfly, they were surmounted by tiny knobs, and were in constant motion.
The whole head was armored with great plates or scales, dark green in color; and apparently of tremendous thickness. A short distance behind the head were two tremendous reddish-brown fins, with strong supporting spines that seemed to terminate in retractile claws. In the water, these fins would undoubtedly be of tremendous value in swimming and in fighting, but on land they seemed rather useless. Aside from a rudimentary dorsal fin, a series of black, stubby spines, connected by a barely visible webbing, the thing had no other external evidences of its marine origin.
"You've been restless for action, Mr. Correy," I commented grimly. "I believe this chap will give us all you could desire."
Correy, still staring down into the disk, fascinated by the terrible details there, shook his head.
"It shouldn't be such a stiff battle, sir," he said. "The ray will make quick work of him once we're within distance."
"Yes--and of the Kabit and all on board," I reminded him. "If he has the strength his size would indicate, he would crush the liner in his death agonies, or, failing that, would heave it about so violently that those within would be maimed or killed outright. This is a case for cunning, and not might."
"I think, sir, both cunning and might will be needed," said Correy soberly, looking up from the disk. "Cunning alone will not dispose of that lad. Have you any plans?"
"Rough plans only; we'll have to develop them as we go along. We don't know what we'll be up against. We'll land a safe distance away, and a small expeditionary force will attack as it sees fit; probably, dividing itself into two or three units. The Ertak will be manned by a skeleton crew and ready to take any necessary action to protect itself or, if possible, to aid any of the expeditionary parties."
"What weapons, sir?" asked Correy, his eyes gleaming. "I'll give the orders now!"
"It's too soon for that; it'll be an hour at least before we land. But I believe every man, including officers, should be armed with pistols, at least six atomic bombs, and there should be a field disintegrator-ray unit for each party. And each member must be equipped with a menore; communication will be by menore only. You might call Mr. Kincaide and Mr. Hendricks, and we'll hold a little council of war."
"Right, sir!" said Correy, and picked up the microphone. Kincaide and Hendricks were in the room almost within the minute.
We laid our plans as best we could, but they weren't very definite. Only a few things were certain.
Somehow, we must induce the monster to release his grasp on the Kabit. We could take no action against the serpent until the big liner and her passengers were safe. It was a desperate mission; an enterprise not of the Ertak, but of individuals.
"One thing is certain, sir," commented Correy, taking over by visual navigation, and reducing speed still more, "you must remain in charge of the ship. You will be needed--"
"I understand your motives, Mr. Correy," I interrupted, "but I do not agree with you. As Commander of the Ertak, I shall command the activities of her men. You will have charge of one landing force, and Mr. Hendricks of another. You, Mr. Kincaide, I shall ask to remain in charge of the ship."
"Very well, sir," nodded Kincaide, swallowing his disappointment. I should have liked to have Kincaide with me, for he was level-headed and cool in an emergency--but it was because of these very things that I wanted him in charge of the Ertak.
"We're close enough now, sir, to select a landing place," put in Correy. "There's a likely spot, a safe distance away and apparently level, almost on the shore. Shall I set her down there?"
"Use your own judgment, Mr. Correy. You may order the landing force to arm and report at the exit port. As soon as you have made contact, you and Mr. Hendricks will report to me there.
"Mr. Kincaide, you will remain on duty here. I am leaving the conduct of the ship entirely to your judgment, asking you to remember only that the rescue of the Kabit and her nearly two thousand souls is the object of this expedition, and the safety of our own personnel cannot be given primary consideration."
"I understand, sir," nodded Kincaide gravely. He held out his hand in that familiar gesture of Earth, which may mean so much more than men ever dare put into words, and we shook hands silently.
There were to be three landing parties of five men and one officer each--eighteen men against a creature that held a mighty passenger liner in its coils!
"I wish, sir, that I were going in your place," said Kincaide softly.
"I know that. But--waiting here will be the hardest job of all. I'm leaving that for you." I turned and hurried out of the room, to make my entries in the log--perhaps my last entries--and secure my equipment.
* * * * *
There are times, in setting down these old tales of the Special Patrol Service as it was before they tacked a "Retired" after my name and title, that I wish I had been a bit more studious during my youth. I find myself in need of words, and possessed only of memories.
I wish I could think of words that would describe the sight that confronted us when we emerged from the Ertak and set foot upon the soil of that newly-born continent of Hydrot, but I find I cannot. I have tried many times, and I find my descriptions fall far short of the picture I still carry in my mind.
The ground was a vast littered floor of wilted marine growths, some already rotting away, while others, more hardy, or with roots reaching into as yet undried ooze, retained a sort of freshness. Crab-like creatures scuttled in all directions, apparently feasting upon the plentiful carrion. The stench was terrible, almost overpowering at first, but after a few minutes we became accustomed to it, and, in the intensity of the work we had undertaken, it was forgotten.
Progress was not possible on the ground. Sheltered from the sun by the thick growths it supported, it was still treacherously soft. But the giant marine vegetation that had retained something of its vigor provided a highway, difficult and dangerous and uncertain, but passable.
I remained with the party taking the most direct route to the unfortunate Kabit, while Correy and Hendricks led the parties to my left and right, respectively. We kept in constant touch with each other by means of our menores.
"I believe," emanated Correy, "that the beast sees us. I had a good view of him a few seconds back, and his head was elevated and pointed this way."
"It's possible," I replied. "Be careful, however, to do nothing to alarm or excite him. All men must keep under cover, and proceed with as little noise and commotion as possible. I'm going to see, now, if I can get in touch with anyone on the Kabit; with full power, communication might be possible even through the Kabit's grounded hull."
"It's worth trying," agreed Hendricks. "These new menores are powerful."
I adjusted the little atomic generator to maximum, and replaced the instrument on my head.
"On board the Kabit!" I emanated, trying by sheer mental effort to drive the thought over that stinking waste, and through the massive double hull of the liner. "Ahoy the Kabit!"
"This is Captain Gole," flashed back the answer instantly. "Captain Gole of the passenger liner Kabit. You are from the Ertak?"
"Commander Hanson of the Ertak emanating. How are conditions on the Kabit?"
"Ghastly!" I could sense the feeling in the word, faintly as it smote upon my consciousness. "My officers are keeping the crew under some sort of control, but the passengers are unmanageable. They are frantic--insane with terror. Two or three have already gone mad. I am on the verge of insanity myself. Have you seen the thing that has us trapped?"
"Yes. We are coming to your aid. Tell your passengers to calm themselves. We'll find a way out of this somehow. You know the motto of our Service."
"Yes: 'Nothing Less Than Complete Success!' I have already issued a bulletin to the effect that I am in contact with your ship. I think it has had a good effect. The clamor is quieting somewhat; you don't know what a terrible strain this has been, sir!"
I could well imagine his mental state. The captain of the Kabit was a Zenian, and the Zenians are too high-strung to stand up under a severe strain.
"It may help us if you'll tell us, very briefly, the history of your experience here," I suggested. "We're going up against something we know nothing about. Perhaps you can give us some valuable information."
"I doubt it, for there's very little to tell. Undoubtedly, you have the report which I managed to get through to Arpan before our radio emanation plates were put out of commission.
"Against my better judgment, we set down here upon the insistence of the passengers. The television instruments revealed nothing more dangerous than the small life in the marine growths left stranded by the receding water.
"I unsealed one of the exit ports, and a small party of the more curious passengers, under the escort of my second officer and six men, ventured forth on a little tour of exploration. A goodly portion of the remaining passengers huddled close to the ship, contenting themselves with souvenir-hunting close by.
"Suddenly there was a great sound of shouting from the exploring party. Not knowing the danger, but realizing that something was wrong, the passengers rushed into the ship. Helplessly, for we are utterly defenseless, I watched the fleeing party of explorers.
"For a moment, I could not see why they fled; I could only see them scrambling desperately toward the ship, and casting frightened glances behind them. Then I saw the thing's head rear itself from the slimy tangle of vegetation, and behind it the wilting growths were lashed to shreds.
"The head drove forward. My second officer, courageously bringing up the rear, was the first victim. Perhaps his bright uniform attracted the beast's attention. I don't know.
"They were close now; very close. I knew that we were in danger, and yet I could not bear to seal the port in the faces of those helpless men racing towards the ship.
"I waited. Twice more the terrible head shot out and both times a man was picked from the fleeing ranks. It was terrible--ghastly.
"The rest of them reached the ship, and as the last man came reeling through the port, the door swung shut and began spinning upon its threads. Almost instantly I gave the order for vertical ascent at emergency speed, but before the order could be obeyed, the ship lurched suddenly, rolled half over, and swung back with a jolt. As the power was applied, the ship rose at a crazy angle, hung there trembling for a moment, and then sank back to the ground. The load was too great. I knew then that we were in the power of the thing that had come wriggling out of that sea of rotting weeds.
"I got the message off to Arpan before our radio emanation plates were grounded or destroyed by the coils of the monster. At intervals, I have tried to pull away, but each time the thing tightens its coils angrily, until the fabric of the ship groans under the strain. We have heard you calling us, faintly and faultily. I have been waiting for you to reach me with the menore. You have come at last, and I am at your orders. If you cannot help us, we are lost, for we shall all go mad."
"We'll have you in the clear very soon," I assured him with a confidence I did not feel. "Stand by for further communications, and--are your generators working?"
"Yes. They're in perfect order. If only the beast would uncoil himself--"
"We'll see to that very shortly. Stand by."
* * * * *
I reduced power and asked Correy and Hendricks if they had both followed the conversation. They had, and had now reduced power, as I had done. We all realized that our counsels might not be reassuring to Captain Gole.
"As I see it, gentlemen, the first thing we must do is to induce the beast to leave the Kabit. And the only way that can be accomplished is by--bait."
"Exactly!" snapped Correy. "He's hungry. He knows there's food in the Kabit. If we can get him to leave the liner and come after us, the problem's solved."
"But he can run faster than we. I can hardly crawl over this slimy mess," objected Hendricks. "I'm ready to try everything, but remember that we've got to lead him away far enough to make him release the Kabit."
"I've got it!" emanated Correy suddenly, his enthusiasm making the vibrations from the menore fairly hammer into my brain. "I'll cut a long, narrow swath with one of the portable disintegrator rays; long enough to take him far away from the Kabit, and just wide enough to pass a man. I'll run along this deep groove, just below the reach of the monster. I can make good time; the serpent'll have to slash and wriggle his way over or through this slimy growth. How's that for an idea?"
It was daring enough to have some hope of success, but its dangers were obvious.
"What happens when you reach the end of the path the ray cuts?" I asked grimly.
"You and Hendricks, with your men, will be on both sides of the path, not opposite each other. When he passes, you'll let go your disintegrator rays and the atomic bombs. He'll be in a dozen pieces before we reach the end of the path."
* * * * *
Spread out here before me, in all its wordy detail, it would seem that a long time must have elapsed while Captain Gole related his story, and my officers and myself laid our plans. As a matter of fact, communicating as we were by menore, it was only a minute or so since Correy had emanated his first comment: "I believe the beast sees us. His head was elevated and pointed this way."
And now Hendricks, who was peering over the ruffled edge of an undulating, rubbery leaf of seaweed, turned and waved both arms. Disobeying my strictest orders, he fairly screamed his frantic warning:
"He sees us! He sees us! He's coming!"
I ran up the twisted, concave surface of a giant stem of some kind. To my left, I could hear the shrill whine of Correy's disintegrator ray generator, already in action, and protesting against a maximum load. To the right, Hendricks and his men were scrambling into position. Before me was the enemy.
Slowly, deliberately, as though he did not doubt his terrible ability, he unwrapped his coils from the Kabit. His head, with its graceful antennae searching the air, and the tentacles around his mouth writhing hungrily, reared itself ten times a man's height from the ground. His small red eyes flashed like precious stones. Beyond, the mighty greenish coils slashed the rotting weed as he unwrapped them from the Kabit.
I snatched off my menore and adjusted it again for maximum power.
"Captain Gole!"
"Yes. What's happening? Tell me! We're rolling and pitching."
"In a moment you'll be free. When I signal 'Rise!' ascend as quickly as possible to a safe distance. Stand by!"
"Hendricks! Be ready to follow Correy's plan. It's our only chance. In a second, now--"
The last coil moved, slipped from the blunt nose of the liner.
"Rise!" I ordered. "Rise!"
I saw the ship rock suddenly, and roar hollowly toward the sky. I felt the rush of wind made by her passing.
Then, head still elevated and swaying, the two great reddish-brown fins fanning the air like grotesque wings, the serpent lashed out towards us, coming at amazing speed.
* * * * *
Correy, sure that he was observed by the serpent, leaped down from the huge leaf upon which he had been standing. Hendricks and I, followed by our men, scrambled desperately toward the deep path or lane that Correy's ray had cut through the tangled, stinking growth. Correy's plan had given some promise of success, had we had time to put it into proper operation. As it was, neither Hendricks or I had had time to get into position.
Hendricks, on my right, was working his way as rapidly as possible toward the path, but he had a long way to go. Unless a miracle happened, he would be too late to help. The portable ray machines would be helpless against such a mighty bulk, except at close range.
I reached the path and glanced hastily to the right, the direction, from which the great serpent was sweeping down on us. He was less than the Ertak's length away.
"Hide, men!" I ordered. "Under the vegetation--in the muck--anywhere!" I glanced down the lane to the left, and saw, to my relief, that Correy and his men were a goodly distance away, and still far from the end of the swath their ray had cut for them. Then, with the monster towering almost over my head. I darted behind a spongy, spotted growth, listening, above the pounding of my heart, to the rapid slithering of the serpent's ponderous body.
Of a sudden the sound stopped. I was conscious of an excited warning from Hendricks: "He's stopped, sir! Run! He's seen you ... he--"
Startled, I glanced up--directly into the hideous face of the snake.
* * * * *
It seemed to me he was grinning. His mouth was partially open, and the pale, writhing barbels that surrounded his mouth seemed to reach out toward me. The long and graceful antennae were bent downward inquiringly, quivering tensely, and his small eyes glowed like wind-fanned coals of fire. The brownish fins were rigid as metal, the retractile claws unsheathed and cruelly curved. He was so close that I could hear the air rushing through his crater-like breathing holes.
For an instant we stared at each other; he with confident gloating: myself, too startled and horrified to move. Then, as his head shot downward, I leaped aside.
The scaly head raked the clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of sagging weeds.
I heard the sharp whine of my ray generator going into action, but I took no chances on the accuracy of my men. They were working under tremendous difficulties. As I fell, I snatched an atomic bomb from my belt, and, as the horrid head drew back to strike again, I threw the bomb with all my strength.
I had thrown from an exceedingly awkward position, and the bomb exploded harmlessly some distance away, showering us with muck and slimy vegetation.
Evidently, however, the explosion startled the serpent, for his head slewed around nervously, and I felt the ground tremble under me as his mighty coils lashed the ground in anger. Scrambling to my feet, I seized the projector tube of the disintegrator ray and swept the beam upward until it beat upon that terrible head.
The thing screamed--a high, thin sound almost past the range of audibility. Reddish dust sifted down around me--the heavy dust of disintegration. In the distance, I could hear the slashing of the tail as it tore through the rubbery growth of weeds.
With half his head eroded by the ray, the serpent struck again, but this time his aim was wild. The mighty head half buried itself in the muck beside me, and I swung the projector tube down so that the full force of the ray tore into the region above and behind the eyes, where I imagined the brain to be. The heavy reddish dust fairly pelted from the ugly head.
Correy had come running back. Dimly, I could hear him shouting.
"Look out!" I warned him. "Keep back, Correy! Keep the men back! I've got him, but he'll die hard--"
As though to prove my words true, the head, a ghastly thing eroded into a shapeless mass, was jerked from the mud, and two tremendous loops of tortured body came hurtling over my head. One of the huge fins swung by like a sail, its hooked talons ripping one of Correy's men into bloody shreds. Correy himself, caught in a desperate endeavor to save the unfortunate man, was knocked twenty feet. For one terrible instant, I thought the beast had killed Correy also.
Gasping, Correy rose to his feet, and I ran to assist him.
"Back, men!" I shouted. "Hendricks! Get away as far and as fast as you can. Back! Back!" Half dragging Correy, who was still breathless from the blow, I hurried after the men.
Behind us, shaking the earth in his death agonies, the monstrous serpent beat the plain about him into a veritable sea of slime.
* * * * *
From a point of vantage, atop the Ertak, we watched for the end.
"I have never," said Correy in an awed voice, "seen anything take so long to die."
"You have never before," I commented grimly, "seen a snake so large. It took ages to grow that mighty body; it is but natural that, even with the brain disintegrated into dust, the body would not die immediately."
"Undoubtedly he has a highly decentralized nervous system," nodded Hendricks, who was, as I have said, something of a practical scientific man, although no laboratory worker or sniveling scientist. "And instinct is directing him back toward the sea from which, all unwillingly, he came. Look--he's almost in the water."
"I don't care where he goes," said Correy savagely, "so he goes there as carrion. Clark was a good man, sir." Clark was the man the serpent had killed.
"True," I said. Making the entry of that loss would hurt; even though the discipline of the Service is--or at least, used to be--very rigid, officers get rather close to their men during the course of many tours of duty in the confines of a little ship like the Ertak. "But the Kabit, with her nearly two thousand souls, is safe."
We all looked up. The Kabit was no longer visible. Battered, but still space-worthy, she had gone on her way.
"I suppose," grinned Correy, "that we'll be thanked by radio." The grin was real; Correy had had action enough to make him happy for a time. The nervous tension was gone.
"Probably. But--watch our friend! He's in the water at last. I imagine that's the last we'll see of him."
* * * * *
Half of the tremendous body Was already in the water, lashing it into white foam. The rest of the great length slid, twitching, down the shore. The water boiled and seethed; dark loops flipped above the surface and disappeared. And then, as though the giant serpent had found peace at last, the waters subsided, and only the wreaths of white foam upon the surface showed where he had sunk to the ooze that had given him birth.
"Finish," I commented. "All that's left is for the scientists to flock here to admire his bones. They'll probably condemn us for ruining his skull. It took them a good many thousand years to find the remains of a sea-serpent on Earth, you remember."
"Some time in the Twenty-second Century, wasn't it, sir?" asked Hendricks. "I think my memory serves me well."
"I wouldn't swear to it. I know that sailors reported them for ages, but that wouldn't do for the laboratory men and the scientists. They had to have the bones right before them, subject to tests and measurements."
That's the trouble with the scientists, I've found. Their ability to believe is atrophied. They can't see beyond their laboratory tables.
Of course, I'm just an old man, and perhaps I'm bitter with the drying sap of age. That's what I've been told. "Old John Hanson" they call me, and smile as if to say that explains everything.
Old? Of course I'm old! But the years behind me are not empty years. I didn't spend them bending over little instruments, or compiling rows of figures.
And I was right about the scientists--they did put in a protest concerning our thoughtlessness in ruining the head of the serpent. They could only estimate the capacity of the brain-pan, argue about the cephalic index, and guess at the frontal angle: it was a terrible blow to science.
Bitter old John Hanson!
VAMPIRES OF SPACE
By Sewell Peaslee Wright
Commander John Hanson recounts his harrowing adventure with the Electites of space.
Sometimes, I know, I must seem a crotchety old man. "Old John Hanson," they call me, and roll their eyes as though to say, "Of course, you have to forgive him on account of his age."
But the joke isn't always on me. Not infrequently I gain much amusement observing these cocky youngsters who strut in the blue-and-silver uniforms of the Service in which, until more or less recently, I bore the rank of Commander.
There is young Clippen, for instance, a nice, clean youngster; third officer, I believe, on the Caliobre, one of the newest ships of the Special Patrol Service. He drops in to see me as often as he has leave here at Base, to give me the latest news, and to coax a yarn, if he can, of the old days. He is courteous, respectful ... and yet just a shade condescending. The condescension of youth.
"Something new under the sun after all, sir," he commented the other day. That, incidentally, is a saying of Earth, whence the larger part of the Service's officer personnel has always been drawn. Something new under the sun! The saying probably dates back to an age long before man mastered space.
"Yes?" I leaned back more comfortably, happy, as always, to hear my native Earth tongue, and to speak it. The Universal language has its obvious advantages, but the speech of one's fathers wings thought straightest to the mind. "What now?"
"Creatures of space!" announced Clippen importantly, in the fashion of one who brings surprising news. "'Electites,' they call them. Beings who live in space--things, anyway; I don't know that you could call them beings."
* * * * *
"Hm-m." I looked past him, down a mighty corridor of dimming years. Creatures that lived in space.... I smiled in my beard. "Creatures perhaps twice the height of a man in their greatest dimension? In shape like a crescent, with blunted horns somewhat straightened near the tips, and drawn close together?" I spoke slowly, drawing from my store of memories. "A pale red in color, intangible and yet--"
"You've heard, sir!" said Clippen disappointedly to me. "My news is stale."
"Yes, I've heard," I nodded. "'Electites,' they call them, eh? That's the work of our great scientific minds, I presume?"
"Er--yes. Undoubtedly." Clippen started to wander restlessly around the room. He had a great respect for the laboratory men, with their white coats and their wise, solemn airs, and he disliked exceedingly to have me present my views regarding these much overrated gentlemen. I have always been a man of action, and pottering over coils and glass vials and pages of figures has always struck me as something not to be included in a man's proper sphere of activity. "Well, I believe I'll be shoving off, sir; just dropped in for a moment," Clippen continued. "Thought perhaps you hadn't heard of the news; it seems to be causing a great deal of discussion among the officers at Base."
"Something new under the sun, eh?" I chuckled.
"Why, yes. You'll agree to that, sir, surely?" I believe the lad was slightly nettled by my chuckle. No one likes to bear stale news.
"I'll agree to that," I said, smiling broadly now. "'Tis easier than debating the matter, and an old man can't hope to hold his own in argument with you quick-witted youngsters."
"I've never noticed," replied young Clippen rather acidly, "that you were particularly averse to argument, sir. Rather the reverse. But I must be moving on; we're shoving off soon, I hear, and you know the routine here at Base."
* * * * *
He saluted me, rather carelessly, I should say, and I returned the salute with the crispness with which the gesture was rendered in my day. When he was gone, I turned to my desk and began searching in that huge and capacious drawer in which were kept, helter-skelter, the dusty, faded, nondescript mementoes of a thousand adventures.
I found, at last, what I was seeking. No impressive thing, this: a bit of metal, irregular in shape, no larger than my palm, and three times the thickness. One side was smooth; the other was stained as by great heat, and deeply pitted as though it had been steeped in acid.
Silently, I turned the bit of metal over and over in my hands. I had begged hard for this souvenir; had obtained it only by passing my word its secret would never reach the Universe through me. But now ... now that seal of secrecy has been removed.
As I write this, slowly and thoughtfully, as an old man writes, relishing his words for the sake of the memories they bring before his eyes, a bit of metal holds against the vagrant breeze the filled pages of my script. A bit of metal, no larger than my palm, and perhaps three times the thickness. It is irregular in shape, and smooth on one side. The other side is eroded as though by acid.
Not an imposing thing, this ancient bit of metal, but to me one of my most precious possessions. It is, beyond doubt, the only fragment of my old ship, the Ertak, now in existence and identifiable.
And this story is the story of that pitted metal and the ship from which it came; one of the strangest stories in all my storehouse of memories of days when only the highways of the Universe had been charted, and breathless adventure awaited him who dared the unknown trails of the Special Patrol Service.
* * * * *
The Ertak, as I recall the details now, had just touched at Base upon the completion of a routine patrol--one of those monotonous, fruitless affairs which used to prey so upon Correy's peace of mind. Correy was my first officer on the Ertak, and the keenest seeker after trouble I have ever known.
"The Chief presents his compliments and requests an immediate audience with Commander Hanson," announced one of the brisk, little attaches of Base, before I'd had time to draw a second breath of fresh air.
I glanced at Correy, who was beside me, and winked. That is, I quickly drew down the lid of one eye--a peculiar little gesture common to Earth, which may mean any one of many things.
"Sounds like something's in the wind," I commented in a swift aside. "Better give 'no leaves' until I come back."
"Right, sir!" chuckled Correy. "It's about time."
I made my way swiftly to the Chief's private office, and was promptly admitted. He returned my salute crisply, and wasted no time in getting to the point.
"How's your ship, Commander? Good condition?"
"Prime, sir."
"Supplies?"
"What's needed could be taken on in two hours." In the Service, Earth time was an almost universal standard except in official documents.
"Good!" The Chief picked up a sheaf of papers, mostly standard charts and position reports, I judged, and frowned at them thoughtfully. "I've some work cut out for you, Commander.
"Two passenger ships have recently been reported lost in space. That wouldn't be so alarming if both had not, when last reported, been in about the same position. Perhaps it is no more than a coincidence, but, with space travel still viewed with a certain doubt by so many, the Council feels something should be done to determine the cause of these two losses.
"Accordingly, all ships have been rerouted to avoid the area in which it is presumed these losses took place. The locations of the two ships, together with their routes and last reported positions, are given here. There will be no formal orders; you are to cruise until you have determined, and if possible, eliminated the danger, or until you are certain that no further danger exists."
* * * * *
He slid the papers across his desk, and I picked them up.
"Yes, sir!" I said. "That will be all?"
"You understand your orders?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Very well. Good luck, Commander!"
I saluted and hurried out of the room, back to my impatient first officer.
"What's up, sir?" he asked eagerly.
"Can't say that I know, to be truthful about it. Perhaps nothing; perhaps a great deal. Give orders to take on all necessary supplies--in double-quick time. I've promised the Chief we'll be ready to shove off in two hours. I'll meet you in the navigating room, and give you all the information I have."
Correy saluted and rushed away to give the necessary orders. Thoughtfully, I made my way through the narrow, ethon-lighted passageways to the navigating room, where Correy very shortly joined me.
Briefly, I repeated the Chief's conversation, and we both bent over the charts and position reports.
"Hm-m!" Correy was lost in thought for a moment as he fixed the location in his mind. "Rather on the fringe of things. Almost anything could happen out there, sir. That would be on the old Belgrade route, would it not?"
"Yes. It's still used, however, as you know, by some of the smaller, slower ships making many stops. Or was, until the recent order. Any guesses as to what we'll find?"
"None, sir, except the obvious one."
"Meteorites?"
Correy nodded.
"There's some bad swarms, now and then," he said seriously. I knew he was thinking of one disastrous experience the Ertak had had ... and of scores of narrow escapes. "That would be the one likely explanation."
"True. But those ships were old and slow, they could turn about and dodge more easily than a ship of the Ertak's speed. At full space speed we're practically helpless; can neither stop nor change our course in time to avoid an emergency."
"Well, sir," shrugged Correy, "our job's to find the facts. I took the liberty of telling the men we were to be ready in an hour and a half. If we are, do we shove off immediately?"
"Just as soon as everything's checked. I leave it to you to give the necessary orders. I know I can depend upon you to waste no time."
"Right, sir," said Correy, grinning like a schoolboy. "We'll waste no time."
In just a shade less than two hours after we had set down at Base, we were rising swiftly at maximum atmospheric speed, on our way to a little-traveled portion of the universe, where two ships, in rapid succession, had met an unknown fate.
* * * * *
"I wonder, sir, if you could come to the navigating room at once?" It was Kincaide's voice, coming from the instrument in my stateroom.
"Immediately, Mr. Kincaide." I asked no questions, for I knew my second officer's cool-headed disposition. If something required my attention in the navigating room, in his opinion, it was something important. I threw on my uniform hurriedly and hastened to Kincaide's side, wondering if at last our days of unrewarded searching were to bear fruit.
"Perhaps I called you needlessly, sir," Kincaide greeted me apologetically, "but, considering the nature of our mission, I thought it best to have your opinion." He motioned toward the two great navigating charts, operated by super-radio reflexes, set in the surface of the table before him.
In the center of each was the familiar red spark which represented the Ertak herself, and all around were the glowing points of greenish light which gave us, in terrestial terms, the locations of the various bodies to the right and left, above and below.
"See here, sir--and here?" Kincaide's blunt, capable forefingers indicated spots on each of the charts. "Ever see anything like that before?"
I shook my head slowly. I had seen instantly the phenomena he had pointed out. Using again the most understandable terminology, to our right, and somewhat above us, nearer by far than any of the charted bodies, was something which registered on our charts, as a dim and formless haze of pinkish light.
"Now the television, sir," said Kincaide gravely.
* * * * *
I bent over the huge, hooded disk, so unlike the brilliantly illuminated instruments of to-day, and studied the scene reflected there.
Centered in the field was a group of thousands of strange things, moving swiftly toward the ship. In shape they were not unlike crescents, with the horns blunted, and pushed inward, towards each other. They glowed with a reddish radiance which seemed to have its center in the thickest portion of the crescents--and, despite their appearance, they gave me, somehow, an uncanny impression that they were in some strange way, alive! While they remained in a more or less compact group, their relative positions changed from time to time, not aimlessly as would insensate bodies drifting thus through the black void of space, but with a sort of intelligent direction.
"What do you make of them, sir?" asked Kincaide, his eyes on may face. "Can you place them?"
"No," I admitted, still staring with a fixed fascination at the strange scene in the television disk. "Perhaps this is what we've been searching for. Please call Mr. Correy and Mr. Hendricks, and ask them to report here immediately."
Kincaide hastened to obey the order, while I watched the strange things in the field of the television disk, trying to ascertain their nature. They were not solid bodies, for even as I viewed them, one was superimposed upon another, and I could see the second quite distinctly through the substance of the first. Nor were they rigid, for now and again one of the crescent arms would move searchingly, almost like a thick, clumsy tentacle. There was something restless, hungry, in the movement of the sharp arms of the things, that sent a chill trickling down my spine.
Correy and Hendricks arrived together; their curiosity evident.
"I believe, gentlemen," I said, "that we're about to find out the reason why two ships already have disappeared in this vicinity. Look first at the charts, and then here."
* * * * *
They bent, for a moment, over the charts, and then stared down into the television disk. Correy was first to speak.
"What are they?" he gasped. "Are they ... alive?"
"That is what we don't know. I believe they are, after a fashion. And, if you'll observe, they are headed directly towards us at a speed which must be at least as great as our own. Is that correct, Mr. Kincaide?"
Kincaide nodded, and began some hasty figuring, taking his readings from the finely ruled lines which divided the charts into little measured squares, and checking speeds with the chronometers set into the wall of the room.
"But I don't understand the way in which they register on our navigating charts, sir," said Hendricks slowly. Hendricks, my youthful third officer, had an inquiring, almost scientific mind. I have often said he was the closest approach to a scientist I have ever seen in the person of an action-loving man. "They're a blur of light on the charts--all out of proportion to their actual size. They must be something more than material bodies, or less."
"They're coming towards us," commented Correy grimly, still bent over the disk, "as though they knew what they were doing, and meant business."
"Yes," nodded Kincaide, picking up the paper upon which he had been figuring. "This is just a rule-of-thumb estimate, but if they continue on their present course at their present speed, and we do likewise, they'll be upon us in about an hour and a quarter--less, if anything."
* * * * *
"But I can't understand their appearance in the charts," muttered Hendricks doggedly, still turning that matter over in his mind. "Unless ... unless ... ah! I'll venture I have it, sir! The charts are operated by super-radio reflexes; in others words, electrically. They would naturally be extremely sensitive to an electrical disturbance. Those things are electrical in nature. Highly so. That's the reason for the flare of light on the charts."
"Sounds logical," said Correy immediately. "The point, as I see it, is not what they are, but what we're to do about them. Do you believe, sir, that they are dangerous?"
"Let me ask you some questions to answer that one," I suggested. "Two ships are reported lost in space--in this immediate vicinity. We come here to determine the cause of those losses. We find ourselves the evident objective of a horde of strange things which we cannot identify; which Mr. Hendricks, here, seems to have good reason to believe are somehow electrical in nature. Putting all these facts together, what is the most logical conclusion?"
"That these things caused the two lost ships to be reported missing in space!" said Hendricks.
* * * * *
I glanced at Kincaide, and he nodded gravely.
"And you, Mr. Correy?" I asked.
Correy shrugged.
"I believe you're, right, sir. They seem like such rather flimsy, harmless things, though, that the disintegrator rays will take care of without difficulty. Shall I order the ray operators to their stations, sir?"
"Do that, please. And take personal charge of the forward projectors, will you? Mr. Hendricks, will you command the after projectors? Mr. Kincaide and I will carry on here."
"Shall we open upon them at will, or upon orders, sir?" asked Correy.
"Upon orders," I said. "And you'll get your orders as soon as they're in range; I have a feeling we're in for trouble."
"I hope so, sir!" grinned Correy from the door.
Hendricks followed him silently, but I saw there was a deep, thoughtful frown between his brows.
"I think," commented Kincaide quietly, "that Hendricks is likely to be more useful to us in this matter than Correy."
I nodded, and bent over the television disk. The things were perceptibly nearer; the hurtling group nearly filled the disk, now.
There was something horribly eager, horribly malignant, in the way they shone, so palely red, and in the fashion in which their blunt tentacles reached out toward the Ertak.
I glanced up at the Earth clock on the wall.
"The next hour," I said soberly, "cannot pass too quickly for me!"
* * * * *
We had decelerated steadily during the hour, but we were still above maximum atmospheric speed when at last I gave the order to open the invaders with disintegrator rays. They were close, but of course the rays are not as effective in space as when operating in a more favorable medium, and I wished to make sure of our prey.
I pressed the attention signal to Correy's post, and he answered instantly.
"Ready, Mr. Correy?"
"Ready, sir!"
"Then commence action!"
Before I could repeat the command to Hendricks, I heard the deepening note of the atomic generators, and knew Correy had already begun operations.
Together, and silently, Kincaide and I bent over the television disk. We watched for a moment, and then, with one accord, lifted our heads and looked into each other's eyes.
"No go, sir," said Kincaide quietly.
I nodded. It was evident the disintegrator rays were useless here. When they struck into the horde of crescent-shaped things coming so hungrily toward us, the things changed from red to a sickly, yellowish pink, and seemed to writhe, as though in some discomfort, but that was all.
"Perhaps at closer range...?" ventured Kincaide.
"I think not. If Mr. Hendricks is correct--and I believe he is--these things aren't material; they're not matter, as we comprehend the word. And so, they can't be disintegrated."
"Then, sir, how are to best them?"
"First, we'll have to know more about them. For one thing, their mode of attack. We should know very soon. Please recall Mr. Hendricks, and then order all hands to their posts. We may be in for it."
* * * * *
Hendricks came rushing in breathlessly.
"The rays are useless, sir," he said. "They'll be on us in a few minutes. Any further orders?"
"Not yet. Have you any ideas as to their mode of attack? What they can do to us?"
"No, sir. That is, no reasonable idea."
"What's your unreasonable theory, then, Mr. Hendricks?"
"I'd prefer, sir, to make further observation first," he replied. "They're close enough now, I think, to watch through the ports. Have I your permission to unshutter one of the ports?"
"Certainly, sir." The Ertak, like all Special Patrol ships of the period, had but few ports, and these were kept heavily shuttered. Her hull was double; she was really two ships, one inside the other, the two skins being separated and braced by innumerable trusses. Between the outer and the inner skin the air pressure was kept about one half of normal, thus distributing the strain of the pressure equally between the two hulls.
In order to arrange for a port or an exit, it was necessary to bring these two skins close together at the desired point, and strengthen this weak point with many braces. As a further protection against an emergency--and a fighting ship must be prepared against all emergencies--the ports were all shuttered with massive doors of solid metal, hermetically fitted. I am explaining this so much in detail for the benefit of those not familiar with the ships of my day, and because this information is necessary that one may have a complete understanding of subsequent events.
Hendricks, upon receiving my permission, sprang to one of the two ports in the navigating room and unshuttered it.
"The lights, please?" he asked, over his shoulder. Kincaide nodded, and switched off the ethon tubes which illuminated the room. The three of us crowded around the recessed port.
* * * * *
The things were not only close: they were veritably upon us! Even as we looked, one of them swept by the port so close that, save for the thick crystal, one might have reached out into space and touched it.
The television disk had represented them very accurately. They were, in their greatest dimension, perhaps twice the height of a man, and at close range their reddish color was more brilliant than I had imagined; in the thickest portion of the crescent, which seemed to be the nucleus, the radiance of the thing was almost blinding.
It was obvious that they were not material bodies. There were no definite boundaries to their bodies; they faded off into nothingness in a sort of fringe, almost like a dim halo.
An attention signal sounded sharply, and Kincaide groped his way swiftly to answer it.
"It's Correy, sir," he said. "He reports his rays are utterly useless, and asks for further orders."
"Tell him to cease action, and report here immediately." I turned to Hendricks, staring out the port beside me. "Well, what do you make of them now?"
Before he could reply, Kincaide called out sharply.
"Come here, sir! The charts are out of commission. We've gone blind."
It was true. The charts were no more than twin rectangles of lambent red flame, with a yellow spark glowing dimly in the center of each, the fine black lines ruled in the surface showing clearly against the wavering red fire.
"Mr. Hendricks!" I snapped. "Let's have your theory--reasonable or otherwise."
* * * * *
Hendricks, his face pressed at an angle against one side of the port, turned toward me, and swung the shutter into place. Kincaide snapped on the lights.
"It's no longer a theory, sir," he said in a choked, hushed voice, "although it's still unreasonable. These things--are eating us!"
"Eating us?" Correy's voice joined Kincaide's and mine in the exclamation of amazement. He had just entered the navigating room in response to my order.
"Eroding us, absorbing us--whatever you want to call it. There's one at work close enough to the port so that I could see it. It is feeding upon our hull as an electric arc feeds upon its electrodes!"
"Farewell Ertak!" said Correy grimly. "Anything the rays can't lick--wins!"
"Not yet!" I contradicted him. "Kincaide, what's the nearest body upon which we can set down?"
"N-127, sir," he replied promptly. "Just logged her a few minutes ago." He poured hastily through a dog-eared index. "Here it is: 'N-127, atmosphere unbreathable; largely nitrogen, oxygen insufficient to support human life; no animal life reported; insects, large but reported non-poisonous; vegetation heroic in size, probably with edible fruits, although reports are incomplete on this score; water unfit for drinking purpose unless distilled; land area approximately--'"
"That's enough," I interrupted. "Mr. Correy, set a course for N-127 by the readings of the television instrument. Mr. Kincaide, accelerate to maximum space speed, and set us down on dry land as quickly as emergency speed can put us there. And you, Mr. Hendricks, please tell us all you know--or guess--about the enemy."
* * * * *
Hendricks waited, moodily silent, until the ship was coming around on her course, picking up speed every instant. Kincaide had gradually increased the pull of the gravity pads to about twice normal, so that we found it barely possible to move about. The Ertak was an old-timer, but she could pick up speed when she had to that would have thrown us all headlong were it not for the artificial gravity anchorage of the pads.
"It's all guess-work," began Hendricks slowly, "so I hope you won't place too much reliance in my theories, sir. I'll just give you my line of reasoning, and you can evaluate it for yourself.
"These things are creatures of space. No form of life, as we know it, can live in space. Therefore, they are not material; they are not matter, like ourselves.
"From their effect upon the charts, we decided they were electrical in nature. Not made up of atoms and electrons, but of pure electrical energy in an unfamiliar form.
"Then, remembering that they exist in space, and concluding that they were the destroyers of the two ships we know of, I began wondering how they brought about the destruction--or at least, the disappearance--of these two ships. Life of any kind must have something to feed upon. To produce one kind of energy we must convert, apparently consume, some other kind of energy. Even our atomic generators slowly but surely eat up the metal in which is locked the power which makes this ship's power possible.
"But, in space, what could these things feed upon? What--if not those troublesome bodies, meteorites? And meteorites, as we know, are largely metallic in composition. And ships are made of metal.
"Here are the only proofs, if proofs you can call them, that these are not wild ideas: first, the disintegrator rays, working upon an electrical principle, reacted upon but did not destroy these things, as might be expected from the meeting of two not dissimilar manifestations of energy; and the fact that I did, from the port, see one of these space-things, or part of one, flattened out upon the body of the Ertak, and feeding upon her skin, already roughened and pitted slightly from the thing's hungry activities."
* * * * *
Hendricks fell silent, staring down at the floor. He was only a youngster, and the significance of his remarks was as plain to him as it was to the rest of us. If these monsters from the void were truly feeding on the skin of our ship, vampire-like, it would not be long before it would be weakened; weakened to the danger point, weakened until we would explode in space like a gigantic bomb, to leave our fragments to whirl onward forever through the darkness and the silence of outer space.
"And what, sir, do you plan to do when we reach this N-127?" asked Correy. "Burn them off with a run through the atmosphere?"
"No; that wouldn't work, I imagine." I glanced at Hendricks inquiringly, and he shook his head. "My only thought was to land, so that we would have some chance. Outside the ship we can at least attack; locked in here we're helpless."
"Attack, sir? With what?" asked Kincaide curiously.
"That I can't answer. But at least we can fight--with solid ground under our feet. And that's something."
"You're right, sir!" grinned Correy. It was the first smile that had appeared on the faces of any of us in many minutes. "And fight we will! And if we lose the ship, at least we'll be alive, with a hope of rescue."
Hendricks glanced up at him and shook his head, smiling crookedly.
"You forget," he remarked, "that there's no air to breathe on N-127. An atmosphere of nitrogen. And no water that's drinkable--if the reports are accurate. A breathing mask will not last long, even the new types."
"That's so," said Kincaide. "The tanks hold about a ten-hours' supply; less, if the wearer is working hard, or fighting."
Ten hours! No more, if we did not find some way to destroy these leeches of space before they destroyed the Ertak.
* * * * *
During the next half hour little was said. We were drawing close to our tiny, uninhabited haven, and both Correy and Kincaide were busy with their navigation. Working in reverse, as it were, from the rough readings of the television disk settings, an ordinarily simple task was made extremely difficult.
I helped Correy interpret his headings, and kept a weather eye on the gauges over the operating table. We were slipping into the atmospheric fringe of N-127, and the surface-temperature gauge was slowly climbing. Hendricks sat hunched heavily in a corner, his head bowed in his hands.
"I believe," said Kincaide at length, "I can take over visually now." He unshuttered one of the ports, and peered out. N-127 was full abreast of us, and we were dropping sideways toward her at a gradually diminishing speed. The impression given us, due to the gravity pads in the keel of the ship, was that we were right side up, and N-127 was approaching us swiftly from the side.
"'Vegetation of heroic size' is right, too," said Correy, who had been examining the terrain at close range, through the medium of the television disk. "Two of the leaves on some of the weeds would make an awning for the whole ship. See any likely place to land, Kincaide?"
"Nowhere except along the shore--and then we'll have to do some nice work and lay the Ertak parallel to the edge of the water. The beach is narrow, but apparently the only barren portion. Will that be all right, sir?"
"Use your own judgment, but waste no time. Correy, break out the breathing masks, and order the men at the air-lock exit port to stand by. I'm going out to have a look at these things."
"May I go with you, sir?" asked Hendricks sharply.
"And I?" pleaded Kincaide and Correy in chorus.
"You, Hendricks, but not you two. The ship needs officers, you know."
"Then why not me instead of you, sir?" argued Correy. "You don't know what you're going up against."
"All the more reason I shouldn't be receiving any information second-hand," I said. "And as for Hendricks, he's the laboratory man of the Ertak. And these things are his particular pets. Right, Hendricks?"
"Right, sir!" said my third officer grimly.
Correy muttered under his breath, something which sounded very much like profanity, but I let it pass.
I knew just how he felt.
* * * * *
I have never liked to wear a breathing mask. I feel shut in, frustrated, more or less helpless. The hiss of the air and the everlasting flap-flap of the exhaust-valve disturb me. But they are very handy things when you walk abroad on a world which has no breathable atmosphere.
You've probably seen, in the museums, the breathing masks of that period. They were very new and modern then, although they certainly appear cumbersome by comparison with the devices of to-day.
Our masks consisted of a huge shirt of air-tight, light material which was belted in tightly around the waist, and bloused out like an ancient balloon when inflated. The arm-holes were sealed by two heavy bands of elastic, close to the shoulders, and the head-piece was of thin copper, set with a broad, curved band of crystal which extended from one side to the other, across the front, giving the wearer a clear view of everything except that which was directly behind him. The balloon-like blouse, of course, was designed to hold a small reserve supply of air, for an emergency, should anything happen to the tank upon the shoulders, or the valve which released the air from it.
They were cumbersome, uncomfortable things, but I donned mine and adjusted the menore, built into the helmet, to full strength. I wanted to be sure I kept in communication with both Hendricks and the sentries at the air-lock exit, and of course, inside the helmets, verbal communication was impossible.
I glanced at Hendricks, and saw that he was ready and waiting. We were standing inside the air-lock, and the mighty door of the port had just finished turning in its threads, and was swinging back slowly on its massive gimbals.
"Let's go, Hendricks," I emanated. "Remember, take no chances, and keep your eyes open."
"I'll remember, sir," replied Hendricks, and together we stepped out onto the coarse gravel of the beach.
* * * * *
Before us, waves of an unhealthy, cloudy green rolled slowly, heavily shoreward, but we had no eyes for this, nor for the amazing vegetation of the place, plainly visible on the curving shores. We took a few hurried steps away from the ship, and then turned to survey the monsters which had attacked it.
They literally covered the ship; in several places their transparent, glowing bodies overlapped. And the sides of the Ertak, ordinarily polished and smooth as the surface of a mirror, were dull and deeply eroded.
"Notice, sir," emanated Hendricks excitedly, "how much brighter the things are! They are feeding, and they are growing stronger and more brilliant. They--look out, sir! They're attacking! Our copper helmets--"
But I had seen it as quickly as he. Half a dozen of the glowing things, sensing in some way the presence of a metal which they apparently preferred to that of the Ertak's hull, suddenly detached themselves and came swarming directly down upon us.
I was standing closer to the ship than Hendricks, and they attacked me first. Several of them dropped upon me, their glowing bodies covering the vision-piece, and blinding me with their light. I waved my arms and started to run blindly, incoherent warnings coming to me through the menore from Hendricks and the sentries.
The things had no weight, but they emitted a strange, electric warmth which seemed to penetrate my entire body instantly as I ran unseeingly, trying to find the ship, tearing at the fastenings of my mask as I ran. I could not, of course, enter the ship with these things clinging to my garments.
Suddenly I felt water splash under my feet; felt its grateful coolness upon my legs, and with a gasp I realized I had in my confusion been running away from the ship, instead of toward it. I stopped, trying to get a grip on myself.
The belt of the breathing mask came loose, and I tore the thing from me, holding my breath and staring around wildly. The ship was only a few yards away, and Hendricks, his mask already off, was running toward me.
* * * * *
"Back!" I shouted. "I'm all right now. Back!" He hesitated for an instant until I caught up with him, and then, together, we gained the safety of the air-lock. Without orders, the men swung shut the ponderous door, and Hendricks and I stood there panting, and drawing in breaths of the Ertak's clean, reviving air.
"That possibility was one we overlooked, sir," said Hendricks. "Let's see what's happening."
We opened the shutter of a port nearby and gazed out onto the beach we had so hurriedly deserted. There were three or four of the glowing things huddled shapelessly around our abandoned suits, and ragged holes showed in several places in the thin copper helmets. Even as we looked, they dissolved into nothingness, and after a few seconds of hesitation, the things swarmed swiftly back to the ship.
"Well," I commented, trying to keep my voice reasonably free from the feelings which gripped me, "I believe we're beaten, Hendricks. At least, we're helpless against them. Our only chance is that they'll leave us before they have eaten through the second skin; so long as we still have that, we can live ... and perhaps be found."
"I doubt they'll leave us while there's a scrap of metal left, sir," said Hendricks slowly. "Something's brought them from their usual haunts. There's no reason why they should leave a certainty for an uncertainty. But we're not quite through trying. I saw something--have I your permission to make another try at them? Alone, sir?"
"Any chance of success, lad?" I asked, searching his eyes.
"A chance, sir," he replied, his glance never wavering. "I can be ready in a few minutes."
"Then, go ahead--on one condition: that you let me come with you."
"Very good, sir; as you wish. Have two other breathing masks ready. I'll be back very soon."
And he left me hastily, taking the steps of the companionway two at a time.
* * * * *
It was nearly an hour before Hendricks returned, bringing with him two of the most amazing pieces of apparatus I have ever seen.
To make each of them, he had taken a flask of compressed air from our emergency stores, and run a flexible tube from it into a cylindrical drinking water container. Another tube, which I recognized as being a part of our fire-extinguishers, and terminating in a metal nozzle, sprouted from the water container. Both tubes were securely sealed into the mouth of the metal cylinder, and lengths of hastily-knotted rope had been bound around each contrivance so that the two heavy containers, the air flask and the small water tank could be slung from the shoulders.
"Here, sir," he said hastily, "get into a breathing mask, and put on these things as you see me do. No time to explain anything now, except this: as soon as you're outside the ship, turn the valve that opens the compressed air flask. Hold this hose, coming from the water container, in your right hand. Don't touch the metal nozzle. Use the hose just as you'd use a portable disintegrator-ray projector."
I nodded, and followed his instructions as swiftly as possible. The two containers were heavy, but I adjusted their ropes across my shoulders so that my left hand had easy access to the valve of the air flask, and the water container was under my right arm where I could have the full use of the hose.
"Let me go first, sir," breathed Hendricks as we stood again in the air-lock, and the door turned out of its threaded seat and swung open. "Keep your eyes on me, and do as I do!"
* * * * *
He ran heavily out of the ship, his burdens lurching. I saw him turn the pet-cock of the air flask, and I did likewise. A fine, powerful spray shot from the nozzle of the tube in my right hand, and I whirled around to face the ship.
Several of the things were detaching themselves from the ship, and instinctively, I turned the spray upon them. Hendricks, I could see out of the corner of my eye, did likewise. And now a most amazing thing happened.
The spray seemed to dissolve the crescent-shaped creatures; where it hit, ragged holes appeared. A terrible hissing, crackling sound came to my ears, even through the muffling mask I wore.
"It works! It works!" Hendricks was crying over and over, hardly aware, in his excitement, that he was wearing a menore. "We're saved!"
I put down three of the things in as many seconds. The central nucleus, in the thickest portion of the crescent, was always the last to go, and it seemed to explode in a little shower of crackling sparks. Hendricks accounted for four in the same length of time.
"Keep back, sir!" he ordered in a sort of happy delirium. "Let them come to us! We'll get them as they come. And they'll come, all right! Look at them! Look at them! Quick, sir!"
The things showed no fear, no intelligence. But one by one they sensed the nearness of the copper helmets we wore, and detached themselves from the ship. They moved like red tongues of flame upon the fat sides of the Ertak; crawling, uneasy flames, releasing themselves swiftly, one after the other.
* * * * *
Our sprays met them in mid-air, and they dissolved like mist, one after the other.... I directed my death-dealing spray with a grim delight, and as each glowing heart crackled and exploded, I chuckled to myself.
The sweat was running down my face; I was shaking with excitement One side of the ship was already cleared of the things; they were slipping over the top now, one or two at a time, and as rapidly as they came, we wiped them out.
At last there came a period in which there were none of the things in sight; none coming over the top of the sorely tried ship.
"Stay here and watch, Hendricks," I ordered. "I'll look on the other side. I believe we've got them all!"
I hurried, as best I could, around to the other side of the Ertak. Her hull was pitted and corroded, but there was no other evidence of the crescent-shaped things which had so nearly brought about the ship's untimely, ghastly end.
"Hendricks!" I emanated happily. "'Nothing Less Than Complete Success!' And that's ours right now! They're gone--all of them!"
I slipped the contrivances from my shoulders and ran back to the other side of the ship. Hendricks was executing some weird sort of dance, patting the containers, swinging them wildly about his body, with an understandable fondness.
"Come inside, you idiot," I suggested, "and tell us how you did it. And see how it feels to be a hero!"
* * * * *
"It was just luck," Hendricks tried to make us believe, a few minutes later, when Kincaide, Correy, and myself were through slapping his back and shaking his hands. "When you, sir, splashed into the water, I had just torn off my mask. I saw some of the water fall on one of the things clustered upon your helmet, and I distinctly heard it hiss, as it fell. And where it fell, it made a ragged hole, which very slowly closed up, leaving a dim spot in the tentacle where the hole had been. As I figure it, the water--to put it crudely--short-circuited the electrical energy of the things. That, too, is just a guess, but I think it's a good one.
"Of course, it was a long chance, but it seemed like our only one. There was nothing more or less than acidulated water in the containers; and the air flasks, of course, were merely to supply the pressure to throw the water out in a powerful spray. It happened to work, and there isn't anybody any happier about it than I am. I'm young, and there're lots of things I want to do before I bleach my bones on a little deserted world like this, that isn't important enough to even have a name!"
That was typical of Hendricks. He was a practical scientist, willing and eager to try out his own devices. A man of action first--as a man should be.
* * * * *
None of us, I think, spent a really easy moment until the Ertak was back at Base. Our outer hull was weakened by at least half, and we were obliged to increase the degree of vacuum there and thus place the major portion of the load on the inner skin. It was a ticklish business, but those old ships were solidly built, and we made it.
As soon as I had completed my report to the Chief, the Ertak was sent instantly to a secret field, under heavy guard, and a new outer hull put in place.
"This can't be made public," the Chief warned me. "It would ruin the whole future of space travel, as people are just learning to accept it as a matter of course. You will swear your men to utter secrecy, and pass me your word, in behalf of your officers and yourself, that you will not divulge any details of this trip."
The scientists, of course, questioned me for days; they turned up their noses at the crude apparatus Hendricks had made, and which had saved the Ertak and all her crew--but they kept it, I noticed, for future reference.
All ships were immediately supplied with devices very similar, but more compact, the use of which only chief officers knew. And the scientists, to my knowledge, never did improve greatly on the model made for them by my third officer.
Whether or not these devices were ever used, I do not know. The silver-sleeves at Base are a close-mouthed crew. Hendricks always held that the group of things which so nearly caused the deaths of all of us had wandered into our portion of Universe from some part of space beyond the fringe of our knowledge.
* * * * *
But the same source which supplied one brood may supply another. Evidently, from young Clippen's report, this thing has happened. And since starting this account, I have determined why the powers that be are willing now to have the knowledge made public. The new silicide coating with which all space ships have been covered, is proof against all electrical action. That it is smoother and reduces friction, is, in my opinion, no more than a rather halty explanation. It is, in reality, the decidedly belated scientific answer to a question raised back in the hey-day of the Ertak, and my own youth.
That was many, many years ago, as the crabbed, uncertain writing on these pages proves.
And now, rather thankfully, I am about to place the last of these pages under the curious weight which has held the others in place as I have written. That irregular bit of metal from the hull of the Ertak, so deeply pitted on the one side, where the hungry things had sapped our precious strength.
"Electites," the scientists have dubbed these strange crescent-shaped things, young Clippen said. "Electites!" Something new under the sun!
New to this generation, perhaps, but not to old John Hanson.
UNSPECIALIST
BY MURRAY F. YACO
A machine can be built to do any accurately described job better than any man. The superiority of a man is that he can do an unexpected, undescribed, and emergency job ... provided he hasn't been especially trained to be a machine.
Banner ripped open his orders, read them, stared in disbelief for a quick moment, then cursed wildly while reaching for the telephone.
"Hello, Gastonia? Yes, I got 'em. What kinda way to waste our time you lunkheads think ... oh, it's you, colonel!"
Banner dropped the receiver and let it dangle. He sank into the only soft chair in the apartment and watched hypnotically as the phone's receiver limply coiled and uncoiled at the end of the wire.
Somebody knocked on, then opened the door. "Hi, pretty boy, you got our orders?"
"Come on in and hear about it," Banner said. He got up from the chair, ran his hands compulsively through his recently short-cropped red hair, hung up the phone and shoved the orders into his co-pilot's hands.
Warcraft read them over three times, then sank into the chair just vacated by Banner. Finally--while Banner poured them both a drink--he managed to blurt, "Potato fertilizer and tractor fuel--Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no!"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes," Banner said bitterly. "We are heroes of the spaceways; yes, indeed. We train for ten years. Acquire great skill in the art of the patrol. We dedicate ourselves to the protection of the Federation. We ready ourselves for war. We gird our young, strong loins, we--"
"You're getting hysterical," said Warcraft, who poured himself another drink, began pacing the floor and took up where Banner had left off. "We've never even been lost on patrol. And now they do this. It's unbelievable! Potato fertilizer and tractor fuel. We're supposed to travel thirty-six light-years, pick up one thousand sleds of the stuff, deliver it to some God-forsaken farm planet another thirty years out, and return to base. You know what they'll do then?" He turned to Banner, pointed his finger accusingly and repeated, "You know what they'll do then?"
"How would I know," said Banner, glumly staring into his drink.
"Well, I can tell you what they'll do. Yes, sir, I can tell you." Warcraft's pudgy face and oversize brown eyes seemed to melt into each other, giving him the appearance of an angry, if not very bright, chimpanzee.
"O.K., what'll they do?" Banner said.
"They'll give us medals. That's what they'll do. For safe delivery of one million tons of tractor fuel, you two fine specimens of manhood are hereby presented with the Order of the Oil. And for your courageous service in delivering two million tons of potato fertilizer, you are also awarded the shield of--"
"Never mind," Banner said. "It could be worse. They could've saddled us with a Bean Brain. Come on. Let's go to some bar and get sober. We're leaving for freight duty at 1700."
* * * * *
The Bean Brain met them at the air lock. "Name is Arnold. Here's my orders." Banner stared at Warcraft, Warcraft stared at Arnold.
"Get inside," said Banner.
The Bean Brain smiled, "Er ... could you sort of lead the way? I've never been inside a ship before. If you got some kind of can, it would save a mess. I'll probably vomit a while."
They stopped calling him Bean Brain three days later. He was still sick, miserably spacesick, and neither Banner nor Warcraft had the heart to keep needling him. On the fourth day he managed to get up and around. They ate their first meal together that day. "Let's get something straight right off the bat," Banner said. "Neither Warcraft nor I got anything against you 'cept prejudice. That right, Warcraft?"
"Right," Warcraft said.
"In short," continued Banner, between puffs on a cigarette, "all we know is what we've heard."
"And that's not good," said Warcraft.
"Item one," said Banner, blowing smoke at the ceiling ventilator. "Patrol Command came up with the Bean Brain idea about six months ago. Patrol Command, in its infinite wisdom, has never seen fit to explain why Bean Brains are sometimes assigned, evidently at random, to small patrol vessels such as this. The orders always state that the 'passenger' will accompany pilot and co-pilot throughout the entire trip, will obey orders, yet is equal in rank to the ship's commanding officer. The Bean Brain has no duties aboard. This seems to make sense, at least, since Bean Brains aren't trained for anything and can't do anything."
"Item two," said Banner, taking his eyes off the ceiling and pointing a finger at Arnold. "I have, or had, two good friends--both patrol captains--who had the honor of taxiing Bean Brains around the universe. One never came back. The other, Captain Slatkin, came back and got a big medal for reasons he'll never talk about."
"And Slatkin liked to brag," said Warcraft, knowingly.
Arnold stood up slowly. He was a small man, but as he looked up at the ship's pilot and co-pilot, he gave both the impression of height and strength. "I'll tell you something, too," he said, speaking slowly as if in pain. "I don't know why Bean Brains are assigned to ships like this either. I've never been told. I took the job because I didn't like what I was doing before. I've never had any real training, and this seemed like a chance to do something that sounded like fun.
"Like I said, I've never been told anything. They tested me for a lot of things, then gave me my orders and told me to come along. And if you're wondering, I flunked the ESP tests, so there's nothing there. You want to consider me dead weight? O.K., your privilege. Leave me alone if you want to, I'll do the same. Be friendly, I'll be friendly. Ask me to help. I'll do my best."
Then he got up and went back to his bunk.
* * * * *
During the next six weeks, Arnold spent most of the time in his bunk, scanning tapes from the ship's micro-library on an overhead viewer. At meal times he was polite, offering no further information about himself, yet entering into any conversation that centered around such trivia as terrestrial sports, taxes, money, liquor, food, government agencies. By mutual, if silent, agreement, neither women nor work were discussed.
Working in the ship's control room, sometimes together, sometimes spelling each other, Banner and Warcraft speculated bitterly and endlessly about their passenger. Theories to explain his presence--most of them propounded by Warcraft--were created, torn apart, modified, exploded, in giant sequences of effort which left both men finally exhausted and tired of the whole business.
On the second day of the seventh week out, their ennui vanished. A ship was picked up by the spec-spanner, and at their delight at the break in routine, they summoned Arnold up to the cabin.
"Take a good look," said Banner, "it's an Ankorbadian ship. Probably the first and last you'll ever see." Arnold watched as Banner's finger tracked a slowly moving point of light across a recessed ceiling screen.
"Yes, sir," said Warcraft, "you are looking at the representatives of mankind's only sibling. The noble Ankorbades." Then he recited in a singsong voice:
"A simple race the Ankorbades They wear no clothes and live in caves But out in space they do in minutes What our ships do at speeds infinite."
"Cultural paranoia," added Warcraft.
"Huh?"
"I mean just what I said. You and a million others recite that ditty, or variations of it every day of the week. It all adds up to the fact that the world is full of small-egged animals who for ten years have done nothing but just scream that we're about to be attacked by the savage Ankorbades."
"Tch, tch," said Banner, "treason, my lieutenant, treason. Of you I had expected at least a show of chauvinism."
"Stop tch-tching me," Warcraft said irritably. "You've known how I felt about this mess for a long time."
"Yes, indeed," said Banner, yawning, "ever since you took that micro-course in culturology you have insights into the situation denied to the rest of the race."
"Anyway," Warcraft said, making a small adjustment on the screen, "you and countless other atavisms are reacting in a very predictable way. Since you can't reconcile the naked Ankorbades and their superior technology, and since they are alien to point of showing no interest whatsoever in our elaborate art, institutions, rituals--"
"And since," piped up Arnold, startling both men, "the human unconscious can't help but equate nakedness with savagery, we have armed our mighty planet to the teeth, convinced that Armageddon is around the corner."
"Well," said the surprised Warcraft.
"Where'd you pick that up," asked Banner.
"From Captain Slatkin," said Arnold, smiling. "I met him when I was indoctrinated. He took the same micro-course in culturology. 'Course, he only believed that stuff when he was scared."
"Oh, you don't say," said Banner. "Tell us, my little friend, are you too, convinced that Armageddon is around the corner? Not that I really think you're capable of having an opinion."
"I got plenty of opinions, all right," said Arnold quietly, staring at his shoes. "Opinion number one is this: We're not really at war yet, but within the past two years, fifty-six patrol ships have disappeared in the vicinity of our friendly neighbor."
"That's not an opinion," Banner said. "And disappeared can mean a lot of things."
"Opinion number two," continued Arnold, scratching himself under an arm. "About the only diplomatic relations we got with them animals is when they write a note complaining about some Patrol ship getting too close to some piece of dirt in their system."
"Speaking of that, you'll have to excuse me for a moment," Warcraft said.
"Stop clowning," snapped Banner. "Listen to him. Here's your chance to get some insight into the nature of the thorn in your side. Go on, Bean Brain. Any more opinions?"
"Yeah. If you're such a wise guy, tell me why you're here right now. Why?" Arnold's mouth screwed itself into a knowing, bitter smile. "When both of you were children you heard the story about the Big Fleet. So you made it into the Patrol, spent the rest of your life training, looking, thinking that some day--"
Warcraft broke in, "That tale about an Ankorbadian fleet build-up has been discredited a full thousand times. When they pried that crazy scout out of his ship, he was an hour away from the crematorium. You try spending forty-six days in space without food or water sometime! You'll see hidden arsenals of alien ships till hell won't have it."
"And," added Banner, "where is this fleet build-up supposed to take place? The patrol has had every planet in reachable space under scheduled surveillance for the past twenty years. You don't hide a thousand S-type cruisers in somebody's pocket."
"So nobody's scared, huh?" said Arnold. "So the entire space command has been playing footsie all over the galaxy for twenty years looking for a thousand ships that aren't there in the first place, huh?"
"Routine surveillance," said Warcraft.
"A thousand ships," said Arnold, slapping his sweating forehead. "They'll burn through our defense system like--"
"You're a paranoid rabble rouser," said Banner lightly. "We've got work to do up here. How about getting back to your bunk?"
* * * * *
Two days later they made scheduled contact with the caravan of potato fertilizer and tractor fuel. One thousand sleds, in tandem, were in proper orbit two hundred miles above Sedor II. Their orders provided for a landing on the planet and a short ship-leave, at the discretion of the ship's pilot to refresh personnel.
Banner and Harcraft decided against landing. All necessary contact, now that they were out of hyperdrive, could be accomplished with the ship's radio. Short planetfalls were, psychologically, more trouble than they were worth, often destroying the hard-earned, delicate space orientation which was their only defense against the abysmal boredom.
"It's a dull place anyway," explained Harcraft to Arnold, who had come up to the control room. "It's a mining and processing settlement. Maybe five hundred families altogether. Got a funny religion, too."
"Huh, what kind?"
"Well," began Harcraft breezily, "sort of sacrificial you might say. They believe in killing strangers who annoy their women."
"A dull place," agreed Arnold, wiping his nose with his sleeve.
"Speaking of religion," said Banner, "I just talked to their monitor on the radio. They've picked up twelve big ships on their scanner during the past two days."
"Ankorbades?" asked Arnold quickly.
"Uh-huh. But not what you think. It's Easter time or some such thing at home. They all return to the home planet and stay there for about thirty days in the spring. Religious festival."
"Oh, yeah. They paint themselves blue and howl at both of their moons for a month. I read about it once."
"We'll be home, too, pretty soon," ventured Harcraft, for whom the return journey was subjectively always short.
"Let's hitch up to those sleds," Banner said. "It's time to get going."
Four weeks later two of the fertilizer sleds went out of phase and automatically cut the ship out of hyperdrive.
"A welcome diversion," said Banner to Harcraft, "you are now about to meet your mortal enemy face to face."
"Manual labor? Never," said Harcraft, assuming the pose of a man bravely facing the firing squad. "Patrol duty is my lifeblood. Even freight duty such as this I can stomach. But manual labor! Please captain, let the air out of the ship, if you will, but never shall these hands--"
"Somebody call me?" asked Arnold, appearing silently.
"Yeah," said Banner, "how'd you like to help?"
"Sure, what you got."
"Couple sleds are out of phase. You and Harcraft are going to slip into suits and go out and find the trouble."
Arnold shrugged, "O.K. with me, when do we start?"
"Pretty quick," said Banner, who had turned to look at the ship's spec-scanner. "Looks like we're in a belt of meteorites. We'll be able to match velocities, but we could still be creamed if the path gets too eccentric. Show him the way, Harcraft. I don't want to take any longer than necessary, either. Understand?"
Fifteen minutes later, both Arnold and Harcraft were out of the air lock, each clutching a new phase unit. Harcraft called instructions to Arnold over his suit's inter-com, but within minutes the smaller man was, if anything, more adept at the business of maneuvering himself through the void than his teacher. They replaced the phase unit in the first sled--the fiftieth from the ship--with Harcraft doing the work and Arnold watching.
"Can you do the next one alone?" Harcraft asked.
"Easy as pie," Arnold said. "Where is it?"
"About two hundred sleds farther back. Numbers on the side. Number two hundred sixty-three. Can you remember?"
"I ain't dumb. Where you gonna be?"
"Back in the ship. We'll be waiting for you."
* * * * *
Back again in the control cabin with Banner, Harcraft was about to congratulate himself on inventing the apprentice system, when a piercing scream brought both men to their feet. "It's Arnold," Banner said. "Arnold, you all right?"
Harcraft pushed Banner away from the speaker. "Arnold, what's wrong, you O.K.?" The speaker remained silent.
"You better suit up," Banner said quietly.
"Yeah," Harcraft said, staring dumbly at the speaker. "Yeah, I better suit up."
"Wait. Better take a look on the viewscreen."
"Hey, he's coming this way! Quick, get ready at the air lock!"
It was fifteen minutes before they could get anything out of him, and then he wasn't too coherent. They gave him an injection of herodine to quiet him down, but his eyes still rolled wildly and all he could manage was: "Big hunk of rock ... big hunk of rock ... rock, quick ... monkey ships."
"Any idea what he's talking about?"
"No," Banner said thoughtfully. "There was a sizable meteorite that came pretty close while you were on your way back to the ship, but I'd already tracked it before either one of you went outside."
"How close?"
"Hm-m-m. Visually, a dozen kilometers, I'd guess. I could run the tape if you--"
"Velocities almost the same?" asked Harcraft, who was now fiddling with the viewscreen controls.
"Yeah. Shouldn't be too hard to find. How about lugging Bean Brain back to his bunk. I'll run the tape, then you can plot it on the screen."
When Harcraft returned to the control cabin, Banner had already plotted it on the screen.
"I'll say it's a big piece of rock! About four kilometers in diameter."
"Yeah, but nothing out of order."
"Uh-huh. Let me turn up the magnification a little and see if--" Banner watched as Harcraft turned control buttons, skillfully increasing magnification without losing the held of view. Suddenly, the object exploded into iridescence. "What--"
"Watch," Harcraft said. He bumped the magnification as much as he dared.
"The Ankorbadian fleet," said Banner between clenched teeth.
They spent the next hour scanning the ship's micro-library for anything at all on Ankorbadian religious practices. There was nothing. Arnold awoke in another hour and seemed remarkably free of hysteria.
"What do you know about our friends' religious holiday?" asked Banner. "We checked the library without any luck."
Arnold scratched the side of his face. "Lemme think. Yeah, I remember. They go home to celebrate spring, like you said."
"They all go home?"
"Uh-huh. They got to. Only time they can mate. Only place, too."
"How long they stay? I've heard it's about one of our months, but we have to know exactly."
"That's all I know. Read it some place a long time ago. Can I go back to sleep now?"
"Go back to sleep," said Banner.
They spent the next three hours maneuvering carefully around the asteroid. They took six thousand feet of movies and stared at the projections for another three hours. One thousand seven hundred and thirty silvery needles flashed reflected starlight into astonished, wild eyes.
"At least," whispered Banner, "there's nobody there."
"A lot of good that does us. They'll be back from their home planet in a few weeks, just as soon as the breeding season is over. Why should they leave anybody here? There's not a map in the galaxy that indicates the position of this piece of rock. And we haven't any weapons."
"I don't suppose the computer--"
"You can't compute an orbit without at least one more reference point. Besides, we're four weeks from any kind of fleet contact."
"Great. In other words, they'll be back here, ready to roll before we can even tell anybody that we don't know how to find it again."
"Right. And since there's not any room left to park another ship of that size, it's a pretty safe assumption that they are ready to roll."
"Armageddon," muttered Harcraft.
"You sure we don't have anything to--"
"Weapons? Yeah. We have a pistol and three small nitro paks in a locker some place. You couldn't even blow your way inside one of those ships. And if you could, you'd spend two weeks and then blow yourself to hell before you'd know anything about the armament."
"O.K., let's land and look around. Go get Arnold."
* * * * *
They cut off the sleds and plunged down, landing between two of the ships. Before putting on suits, Banner sent Arnold to the locker to get the three nitro paks. He hoped it would help him overcome the terrible feeling of nakedness and impotence.
They spent only a little time out of the ship. There was nothing to see that hadn't been seen before, and the heavy artificial gravity generated by the alien ships--coupled with a maze of deep crevices--made walking difficult and dangerous.
Back in the control cabin, Banner turned to Harcraft, "Any ideas?"
"Ideas? You mean for saving Homo sapiens? I'm afraid not. I simply do not feel up to saving six billion sentient organisms today. I feel--"
"You're getting hysterical," said Banner, whose own tight, small voice was barely audible.
"I got an opinion," said Arnold. "You guys stop crying for a minute and I'll tell you."
It took him five minutes to explain the whole thing. When he was through, both Banner and Harcraft turned him down flat. "Not a chance," said Banner. It would take a week to set the thing up, and then it wouldn't work. Our best chance is a long one, but maybe we'll make it. We're four weeks away from any fleet contact, but it's the only sensible course of action."
"That makes it a total of eight weeks, with four weeks to get back here. That's two months," said Arnold. "You think they're gonna wait two months before they shove out of here?"
"Maybe not," Banner said. "But that's the only thing to do. And the sooner we get started the better the chances. Let's get going."
"You look here--" Arnold began.
"No more opinions, Bean Brain. You're not entitled to an opinion. You think we should take your word for everything you told us? Tell me why. You said yourself you never had any training. So you're guessing and hoping. It would take a staff of two dozen highly specialized technicians to even evaluate your idea, much less put it into action. Hell, man, face it. What do you know about geology, chemistry, mining? What do you know about anything?"
Arnold pointed a trembling finger at Banner. "Look, I told you that I know rock. I know plenty of gardening, too. I gave you guys a chance to say O.K. You still say no? Have it your way, but we'll do it my way." Both Banner and Harcraft found themselves staring into the barrel of the ship's only weapon.
Harcraft recovered from his astonishment quicker than Banner. "O.K., Bean Brain, have it your way." Quickly, casually he started for the cabin door. Then, with such speed that Banner hardly saw the movement, he chopped down viciously toward Arnold's wrist with the edge of his hand.
Harcraft recovered consciousness a half hour later. "Don't try that again, little boy," said Arnold with unconcealed hatred. "I'll give you another thirty minutes to catch your breath. Then we all go to work."
It took ten days instead of seven. Under Arnold's close supervision, they made the ship perform like a tractor, an air hammer, a foundation borer and an angledozer.
Once, when they told him that some particular maneuver couldn't be done, he took the controls himself, and came so close to killing them all that Banner, out of sheer terror, took over and made it do the things Arnold decreed necessary.
Finally it was finished. Two million tons of potato fertilizer, one million tons of tractor fuel combined into a slimy pulp lay jammed into the largest crevice on the asteroid. A few hours later they were a thousand miles out in space.
"Now?" asked Banner.
"Now," said Arnold.
With the viewscreen at maximum magnification, they watched as the asteroid blew itself into a thousand million pieces.
* * * * *
In the control cabin, a short week away from fleet contact, Banner was still gloating over the movies. "Look at these. Before and After. How many medals you think we can carry on our strong, manly chests?"
"I really couldn't care less," answered Harcraft. "While you've been sitting there enriching your fantasy life, I've solved the mystery of mysteries."
"Out with it."
"O.K. While our little friend has been lying on his bunk ruining his beady eyes on the micro-viewer, I've been asking myself significant questions. Question number one: What kind of person does it take to survive the inactivity and boredom of three, four, maybe six months in a space can like this? Answer: It takes a highly trained and conditioned person such as yours truly or yourself. Arnold is obviously not such a person."
"Obviously."
"Question number two: Under what circumstances can a person as obviously intelligent as Arnold manage not to become a highly specialized member of society? And last, what kind of person can be so revoltingly unspecialized as to know, with fanatical certainty, that the main ingredient of a good potato fertilizer is ammonium nitrate; that such a substance is rather ineffective as an explosive unless you mix it with a good oxidizable material, such as Diesel fuel; that a four-square mile chunk of rock is 'brittle'--"
"And don't forget to add another nice facet--that he's a lot cleverer in the manly art of self-defense than you'll ever be."
"I acknowledge my humiliation and at the same time repeat my question: What kind of person can be so unspecialized and at the same time so miserably competent?"
"I give up. Do you really know the answer?"
"I know this. I know that whoever he is, it makes good sense to send somebody like him along with two overspecialized robots like us. Look at us. You couldn't pull a cotter pin with a pair of pliers if you knew what a cotter pin was. As for myself, if I'd of gotten that gun away from Arnold, I'm not even sure I'd have known how to fire it."
"Which still doesn't answer any questions."
"There are still a hundred places on our primitive homeland that provide the answer," said Harcraft thoughtfully. "Places where men spend half the year working with vegetables and fertilizer--"
"And the other half breaking rock with a sledge hammer?"
"Yes. And there's probably no better place than a cell to train for the isolation of space."
"Uh-huh. It also explains a certain familiarity with makeshift explosives and weapons."
"And, brother Bean Brain," summed up Harcraft wistfully. "What better place in the universe to find asylum from specialization."
THE END
STAR MOTHER
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
That night her son was the first star.
She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace.
Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot ...
Why don't they leave the stars alone? she thought. Why don't they leave the stars to God?
* * * * *
The general's second telegram came early the next morning: Explorer XII doing splendidly. Expect to bring your son down sometime tomorrow.
She went about her work as usual, collecting the eggs and allocating them in their cardboard boxes, then setting off in the station wagon on her Tuesday morning run. She had expected a deluge of questions from her customers. She was not disappointed. "Is Terry really way up there all alone, Martha?" "Aren't you scared, Martha?" "I do hope they can get him back down all right, Martha." She supposed it must have given them quite a turn to have their egg woman change into a star mother overnight.
She hadn't expected the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of answering a few questions."
Most of the questions concerned Terry, as was fitting. From the way the suave young man asked them, though, she got the impression that he was trying to prove that her son was just like any other average American boy, and such just didn't happen to be the case. But whenever she opened her mouth to mention, say, how he used to study till all hours of the night, or how difficult it had been for him to make friends because of his shyness, or the fact that he had never gone out for football--whenever she started to mention any of these things, the suave young man was in great haste to interrupt her and to twist her words, by requestioning, into a different meaning altogether, till Terry's behavior pattern seemed to coincide with the behavior pattern which the suave young man apparently considered the norm, but which, if followed, Martha was sure, would produce not young men bent on exploring space but young men bent on exploring trivia.
A few of the questions concerned herself: Was Terry her only child? ("Yes.") What had happened to her husband? ("He was killed in the Korean War.") What did she think of the new law granting star mothers top priority on any and all information relating to their sons? ("I think it's a fine law ... It's too bad they couldn't have shown similar humanity toward the war mothers of World War II.")
* * * * *
It was late in the afternoon by the time the TV crew got everything repacked into their cars and trucks and made their departure. Martha fixed herself a light supper, then donned an old suede jacket of Terry's and went out into the garden to wait for the sun to go down. According to the time table the general had outlined in his first telegram, Terry's first Tuesday night passage wasn't due to occur till 9:05. But it seemed only right that she should be outside when the stars started to come out. Presently they did, and she watched them wink on, one by one, in the deepening darkness of the sky. She'd never been much of a one for the stars; most of her life she'd been much too busy on Earth to bother with things celestial. She could remember, when she was much younger and Bill was courting her, looking up at the moon sometimes; and once in a while, when a star fell, making a wish. But this was different. It was different because now she had a personal interest in the sky, a new affinity with its myriad inhabitants.
And how bright they became when you kept looking at them! They seemed to come alive, almost, pulsing brilliantly down out of the blackness of the night ... And they were different colors, too, she noticed with a start. Some of them were blue and some were red, others were yellow ... green ... orange ...
It grew cold in the April garden and she could see her breath. There was a strange crispness, a strange clarity about the night, that she had never known before ... She glanced at her watch, was astonished to see that the hands indicated two minutes after nine. Where had the time gone? Tremulously she faced the southern horizon ... and saw her Terry appear in his shining chariot, riding up the star-pebbled path of his orbit, a star in his own right, dropping swiftly now, down, down, and out of sight beyond the dark wheeling mass of the Earth ... She took a deep, proud breath, realized that she was wildly waving her hand and let it fall slowly to her side. Make a wish! she thought, like a little girl, and she wished him pleasant dreams and a safe return and wrapped the wish in all her love and cast it starward.
* * * * *
Sometime tomorrow, the general's telegram had said--
That meant sometime today!
She rose with the sun and fed the chickens, fixed and ate her breakfast, collected the eggs and put them in their cardboard boxes, then started out on her Wednesday morning run. "My land, Martha, I don't see how you stand it with him way up there! Doesn't it get on your nerves?" ("Yes ... Yes, it does.") "Martha, when are they bringing him back down?" ("Today ... Today!") "It must be wonderful being a star mother, Martha." ("Yes, it is--in a way.")
Wonderful ... and terrible.
If only he can last it out for a few more hours, she thought. If only they can bring him down safe and sound. Then the vigil will be over, and some other mother can take over the awesome responsibility of having a son become a star--
If only ...
* * * * *
The general's third telegram arrived that afternoon: Regret to inform you that meteorite impact on satellite hull severely damaged capsule-detachment mechanism, making ejection impossible. Will make every effort to find another means of accomplishing your son's return.
Terry!--
See the little boy playing beneath the maple tree, moving his tiny cars up and down the tiny streets of his make-believe village; the little boy, his fuzz of hair gold in the sunlight, his cherub-cheeks pink in the summer wind--
Terry!--
Up the lane the blue-denimed young man walks, swinging his thin tanned arms, his long legs making near-grownup strides over the sun-seared grass; the sky blue and bright behind him, the song of cicada rising and falling in the hazy September air--
Terry ...
--probably won't get a chance to write you again before take-off, but don't worry, Ma. The Explorer XII is the greatest bird they ever built. Nothing short of a direct meteorite hit can hurt it, and the odds are a million to one ...
Why don't they leave the stars alone? Why don't they leave the stars to God?
* * * * *
The afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn and the sun grew red and swollen over the western hills. Martha fixed supper, tried to eat, and couldn't. After a while, when the light began to fade, she slipped into Terry's jacket and went outside.
Slowly the sky darkened and the stars began to appear. At length her star appeared, but its swift passage blurred before her eyes. Tires crunched on the gravel then, and headlights washed the darkness from the drive. A car door slammed.
Martha did not move. Please God, she thought, let it be Terry, even though she knew that it couldn't possibly be Terry. Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Someone coughed softly. She turned then--
"Good evening, ma'am."
She saw the circlet of stars on the gray epaulet; she saw the stern handsome face; she saw the dark tired eyes. And she knew. Even before he spoke again, she knew--
"The same meteorite that damaged the ejection mechanism, ma'am. It penetrated the capsule, too. We didn't find out till just a while ago--but there was nothing we could have done anyway ... Are you all right, ma'am?"
"Yes. I'm all right."
"I wanted to express my regrets personally. I know how you must feel."
"It's all right."
"We will, of course, make every effort to bring back his ... remains ... so that he can have a fitting burial on Earth."
"No," she said.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am?"
She raised her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher--and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ... And higher yet--and there flamed the exquisite flower beds of Taurus and Gemini, there burgeoned the riotous wreath of the Crab; there lay the pulsing petals of the Pleiades ... And down the ecliptic garden path, wafted by a stellar breeze, drifted the ocher rose of Mars ...
"No," she said again.
The general had raised his eyes, too; now, slowly, he lowered them. "I think I understand, ma'am. And I'm glad that's the way you want it ... The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they."
"More beautiful than they've ever been," she said.
* * * * *
After the general had gone, she looked up once more at the vast and variegated garden of the sky where her son lay buried, then she turned and walked slowly back to the memoried house.
THE END
THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY
By Arthur L. Zagat
Darl Thomas mopped the streams of perspiration from his bronzed face and lean-flanked, wiry body, nude save for clinging shorts and fiber sandals. "By the whirling rings of Saturn," he growled as he gazed disconsolately at his paper-strewn desk. "I'd like to have those directors of ITA here on Mercury for just one Earth-month. I'll bet they wouldn't be so particular about their quarterly reports after they'd sweated a half-ton or so of fat off their greasy bellies. 'Fuel consumption per man-hour.': Now what in blazes does that mean? Hey, Jim!" He swiveled his chair around to the serried bank of gauge-dials that was Jim Holcomb's especial charge, then sprang to his feet with a startled, "What's the matter?"
The chunky, red-haired control-man was tugging at a lever, his muscles bulging on arms and back, his face white-drawn and tense. "Look!" he grunted, and jerked a grim jaw at one of the dials. The long needle was moving rapidly to the right. "I can't hold the air pressure!"
"Wow, what a leak!" Darl started forward. "How's it below, in the mine?"
"Normal. It's the Dome air that's going!"
"Shoot on the smoke and I'll spot the hole. Quick, man!"
"Okay!"
Thomas' long legs shot him out of the headquarters tent. Just beyond the entrance flap was one of the two gyrocopters used for flying within the Dome. He leaped into the cockpit and drove home the starter-piston. The flier buzzed straight up, shooting for the misted roof.
* * * * *
The Earthman fought to steady his craft against the hurricane wind, while his gray eyes swept the three-mile circle of the vault's base. He paled as he noted the fierce speed with which the white smoke-jets were being torn from the pipe provided for just such emergencies. His glance followed the terrific rush of the vapor. Big as a man's head, a hole glared high up on the Dome's inner surface. Feathered wisps of tell-tale vapor whisked through it at blurring speed.
"God, but the air's going fast," Darl groaned. The accident he had feared through all the months he had captained Earth's outpost on Mercury had come at last. The Dome's shell was pierced! A half-mile high, a mile across its circling base, the great inverted bowl was all that made it possible for man to defy the white hell of Mercury's surface. Outside was an airless vacuum, a waste quivering under the heat of a sun thrice the size it appears from Earth. The silvered exterior of the hemisphere shot back the terrific blaze; its quartz-covered network of latticed steel inclosed the air that all beings need to sustain life.
Darl tugged desperately at the control-stick, thrust the throttle over full measure. A little more of this swift outrush and the precious air would be gone. He caught a glimpse of the Dome floor beneath him and the shaft-door that gave entrance to the mine below. Down there, in underground tunnels whose steel-armored end-walls continued the Dome's protection below the surface, a horde of friendly Venusians were laboring. If the leak were not stopped in a few minutes that shaft door would blow in, and the mine air would whisk through the hole in its turn. Only the Dome would remain, a vast, rounded sepulcher, hiding beneath its curve the dead bodies of three Earthmen and the silent forms of their Venusian charges.
* * * * *
Darl's great chest labored as he strove to reach the danger spot. Invisible fingers seemed to be clamped about his throat. His eyes blurred. The gyrocopter was sluggish, dipped alarmingly when it should have darted, arrow-like, to its mark. With clenched teeth, the Terrestrian forced the whirling lifting vanes to the limit of their power. They bit into the fast thinning air with a muffled whine, raised the ship by feet that should have been yards.
By sheer will he forced his oxygen-starved faculties to function, and realized that he had reached the wall. He was drifting downward, the hole draining the Dome's air was five feet above him, beyond his reach. The driven vanes were powerless to stem the craft's fall.
One wing-tip scraped interlaced steel, a horizontal girder, part of the vault's mighty skeleton. Darl crawled along the wing, dragging with him a sheet of flexible quartzite. The metal foil sagged under him and slanted downward, trying like some animate thing to rid itself of the unwonted burden. He clutched the beam, hung by one leg and one arm as his craft slid out from beneath him. The void below dragged at him. He put forth a last tremendous spurt of effort.
Two thousand feet below, Jim Holcomb, dizzy and gasping, manipulated the controls frenziedly, his eyes fastened on the dropping pressure-gauge. From somewhere outside the tent a dull thud sounded. "Crashed! Darl's crashed! It's all over!" Hope gone, only the instinct of duty held him to his post. But the gauge needle quivered, ceased its steady fall and began a slow rise. Jim stared uncomprehendingly at the dial, then, as the fact seeped in, staggered to the entrance. "That's better, a lot better," he exclaimed. "But, damn it, what was that crash?"
* * * * *
The headquarters tent was at one edge of the circular plain. Jim's bleary eyes followed the springing arch of a vertical girder, up and up, to where it curved inward to the space ship landing lock that hung suspended from the center of the vaulted roof. Within that bulge, at the very apex, was the little conning-tower, with its peri-telescope, its arsenal of ray-guns and its huge beam-thrower that was the Dome's only means of defense against an attack from space. Jim's gaze flickered down again, wandered across the brown plain, past the long rows of canvas barracks and the derrick-like shaft-head. Hard by the further wall a crumpled white heap lay huddled.
"My God! It was his plane!" The burly Earthman sobbed as his ten-foot leaps carried him toward the wreck.
Darl was his friend as well as Chief, and together they had served the Interplanetary Trading Association, ITA, for years, working and fighting together in the wilds of the outer worlds. A thought struck him, even as he ran. "What in th' name o' Jupiter's nine moons stopped th' leak?" He glanced up, halted, his mouth open in amazement. "Well, I'm a four-tailed, horn-headed Plutonian if there ain't th' boy himself!"
Far up in the interlaced steel of the framework, so high that to his staring comrade he seemed a naked doll, Darl stood outstretched on a level beam, his tiny arms holding a minute square against the wall. Lucky it was that he was so tall and his arms so long. For the saving plate just lapped the upper rim of the hole, and stemmed the fierce current by only a half-inch margin.
* * * * *
The throbbing atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that curved up and in, to swing down and merge with the bulge of the air-lock's wall.
"Like a bloomin' monkey! Can't he wait till I get him down with th' spare plane?"
But Darl wasn't thinking of coming down. Something he had seen through the translucent repair sheet was sending him to the look-out tower within the air-lock. Hand over hand he swung, tiny above that vast immensity of space. In his forehead a pulse still jumped as his heart hurried new oxygen to thirsty cells. He held his gaze steadily to the roof. A moment's vertigo, a grip missed by the sixteenth of an inch, the slightest failure in the perfect team-play of eye and brain, and rippling muscle, and he would crash, a half mile beneath, against hard rock.
At last he reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed through the air.
Breathless, Jim saw the far-off figure flick across the chasm toward the jutting platform. He saw Darl strike its edge, bit his lip as his friend teetered on the rim and swayed slowly outward. Then Darl found his balance. An imperative gesture sent the watcher back to his post, his sorrel-topped head shaking slowly in wonderment.
* * * * *
Darl Thomas ran headlong up the staircase that spiralled through the dim cavern. "No mistake about it," he muttered. "I saw something moving outside that hole. Two little leaks before, and now this big one. There's something a lot off-color going on around here."
Quickly he reached the little room at the summit. He flung the canvas cover from the peri-telescope screen. Tempered by filters as it was the blaze of light from outside hit him like a physical blow. He adjusted the aperture and beat eagerly over the view-table.
Vacation jaunts and travel view-casts have made the moon's landscape familiar to all. Very similar was the scene Darl scanned, save that the barren expanse, pitted and scarred like Luna's, glowed almost liquid under the beating flame of a giant sun that flared in a black sky. Soundless, airless, lifeless, the tumbled plain stretched to a jagged horizon.
The Earthman depressed the instrument's eye, and the silvered outside of the Dome, aflame with intolerable light, swept on to the screen disk. The great mirror seemed alive with radiant heat as it shot back the sun's withering darts. The torrid temperature of the oven within, unendurable save to such veterans of the far planets as Darl and Jim Holcomb, was conveyed to it through the ground itself. The direct rays of the sun, nearer by fifty million miles than it is to Earth, would have blasted them, unprotected, to flaked carbon in an eye-blink.
An exclamation burst from Darl. A half-inch from the Dome's blazing arc, a hundred yards in actuality, the screen showed a black fleck, moving across the waste! Darl quickly threw in the full-power lens, and the image leaped life-size across the table. The black fleck was the shadow of a space-suited figure that lumbered slowly through the viscous, clinging footing. How came this living form, clad in gleaming silver, out there in that blast-furnace heat? In one of the space suit's claw-like hands a tube flashed greenly.
* * * * *
Darl's hand shot out to the trigger of the beam-thrower. Aimed by the telescope's adjustment, the ray that could disintegrate a giant space flier utterly flared out at his finger's pressure. Against the lambent brown a spot glowed red where the beam struck. But, warned by some uncanny prescience, the trespasser leaped aside in the instant between Thomas' thought and act. Before Darl could aim and fire again the foe had dodged back and was protected by the curve of the Dome itself.
Two white spots showed on either side of Darl's nostrils. His mouth was a thin white slit, his eyes gray marbles. Standing against the wall beside him was a space suit, mirror-surfaced and double-walled against the planet's heat. In a few moments he was encased within it, had snatched a pocket ray-gun from the long rack, and was through the door to the auxiliary air-lock. The air soughed out in response to his swift thrust at a lever, a second door opened, and he was on the outside, reeling from the blast of that inferno of light and heat.
For a moment the Earthman was dazzled, despite the smoked quartz eye-pieces in his helmet. Then, as his eyes grew used to the glare, he saw, far below, the erect figure of the stranger. The man was standing still, waiting. His immobility, the calm confidence with which he stood there, was insolently challenging. Darl's rage flared higher at the sight.
* * * * *
Scorning the ladder that curved along the Dome to the ground, he threw himself at the polished round side of the great hemisphere. With increasing speed he slid downward, the gleaming surface breaking only slightly the velocity of his fall. On Earth this would have been suicidal. Even here, where the pull of gravity was so much less, the feat was insanely reckless. But the heat-softened ground, the strength of his metal suit, brought Darl safely through.
He whirled to meet the expected onslaught of the interloper. The green tube was aimed straight at him! The Earthman started to bring his own weapon up when something exploded in his brain. There was a moment of blackness; then he was again clear-minded. But he could not move--not so much as the tiny twist of his wrist that would have brought his own weapon into play.
Frozen by this strange paralysis, Darl Thomas saw the giant figure approach. The apparition bent and slung him to its shoulder. Glowing walls rose about him, dimmed. The Terrestrian knew that he was being carried down into one of the myriad openings that honeycombed the terrain. The luminescence died; there was no longer light enough to penetrate to his helmet's darkened goggles.
Frantic questions surged through the captured Earthman's mind. Who was his captor? From where, and how, had he come to Mercury? Jim, Angus McDermott, and himself were the only Terrestrians on the planet; of that he was certain. Only one or two of the reptile-skinned Venusian laborers had sufficient intelligence to manipulate a space suit, and they were unquestionably loyal.
This individual was a giant who towered far above Darl's own six feet. The Mercurian natives--he had seen them when ITA's expedition had cleaned out the burrows beneath the Dome and sealed them up--were midgets, the tallest not more than two feet in height. Whatever he was, why was the stranger trying to destroy the Dome? Apparently Thomas himself was not to be killed offhand: the jolting journey was continuing interminably. With enforced patience the Earthman resigned himself to wait for the next scene in this strange drama.
* * * * *
In the headquarters tent Jim's usual grin was absent as he moved restlessly among the switches and levers that concentrated control of all the Dome's complex machinery. "Darl's been gone a devilish long time," he muttered to himself. "Here it's almost time for shifts to change and he's not back yet."
A bell clanged, somewhere up in the mass of cables that rose from the control board. For the next ten minutes Holcomb had no time for worry as he rapidly manipulated the innumerable wheels and handles in accord with the vari-colored lights that flickered on a huge ground-glass map of the sub-Mercurian passages. On the plain outside there was a vast rustling, a many-voiced twittering and squeaking that was not quite bird-like in tone. Through the opened tent-flap one could see the stream of Venusian workers, their work-period ended, pouring out of the shaft-head and filing between the ordered ranks of others whose labors were about to begin.
They were queer-looking specimens, these gentle, willing allies of the Earthmen. Their home planet is a place of ever-clouded skies and constant torrential rains. And so the Venusians were amphibians, web-footed, fish-faced, their skin a green covering of horny scales that shed water and turned the sharp thorns of their native jungles. When intrepid explorers discovered in the mazes of Mercury's spongy interior the surta that was so badly needed as a base material for synthetic food to supply Earth's famine-threatened population, it was to these loyal and amiable beings that ITA's engineers turned for workers who could endure the stifling heat of the underground workings.
The tent-flap was thrust aside, and a hawk-nosed Scot came sleepily in, to be enthusiastically greeted by Jim.
"Hello, you old Caledonian. 'Bout time you showed up."
* * * * *
The newcomer fixed the speaker with a dour gaze. "An' why should I commence my tour o' dooty befair the time?"
"Because your chief, Mr. Darl Thomas, decided that he's a filliloo bird or somethin', flew to his little nest up top, an' forgot to come down again."
"Is this ain o' your jests, James Holcomb? I eenquire mairly that I may ken when to laugh."
"It's no joke, Mac. Last I see o' him he's skippin' around the roof like he has a buzzin' propeller stuck to his shoulder blades. He lights on th' air-lock platform, pops inside, an' goes dead for all I know."
From his bony legs to his scrawny neck the Scotchman's angular body, as nearly nude as that of the others, radiated the doubt that was expressed in every seam and wrinkle of his hatchet face.
"That's straight, Angus, may I kiss a pink-eared vanta if it ain't. Here's what happened." The bantering grin disappeared from Jim's countenance as he detailed the events that had preceded Darl's vanishing. "That was two hours ago," he concluded, "and I've been getting pretty uneasy about him."
"Why did na ye call me, so that ain o' us micht eenvestigate?"
"Hell. Darl wasn't born yesterday, he can take care of himself. Besides, your last shift was pretty strenuous, an' I thought I'd let you sleep. No tellin' what might happen next; this forsaken place has been givin' me the jim-jams lately."
"Your conseederation is touching, but--" A scratching at the door, accompanied by a high squeak, interrupted him.
* * * * *
To Jim's shouted "Come in," there entered a Venusian, whose red rosette fastened to the green scales of his skin marked him an overseer. In the thread-like fingers of his hand he held a time-sheet, but the nervous pulsing of his gill-membranes caused Holcomb to exclaim anxiously: "What's wrong, Ran-los? No accident, I hope?"
The shrill combination of squeaks and twitterings that came from the man-reptile's toothless mouth meant nothing to the Scot, but Jim's last service had been on Venus and he had gained a working knowledge of the language. Finally the interchange was ended, and Ran-los bowed himself out. Jim turned to his companion.
"There's some more queer stuff for you, Angie. Just before shift-change, Ran-los heard odd sounds from the other side of the barrier at the end of gallery M-39. Says they seemed like signals o' some kind. He's a wise old bird and if he's worried about something it's damn well worth lookin' into. I don't know whether to find out first what's happened to Darl, or--"
Again there was an interruption; this time from the usually silent radio-communication set in the far corner. Jim leaped to the instrument and snapped on the head-set. Angus leaned over him, watching his intent face.
Faintly, as from an immense distance, came the thin whistle of space-radio. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... S-W-A...." The general attention signal for all Earth's far-flung outposts from Jupiter to Mercury! The signal was coming from "M-I-T-A," the Earth company's home station on the Moon, outside the Heaviside layer. "S-W-A ... S-W-A ... M-I-T-A ... M-I-T-A." Again the signal rose and fell.
* * * * *
Jim reached for the sending key and pounded out his acknowledgement: "K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R ... K; M-E-R." He listened again, heard Venus answer, and Jupiter. Across five hundred million miles of space ITA men were responding to the roll-call of Earth. A reminiscent smile crossed Jim's face as he recognized the stuttering fist of Rade Perrin, on Eros. Rade always sent as if he were afraid the instrument would snap at his fingers.
M-I-T-A was signalling again, and now came the message: "S-W-A. All trading posts, mines and colonies are warned to prepare for possible attack. The Earth Government has just announced the receipt of an ultimatum from--" A raucous howl cut across the message and drowned it out. The siren blast howled on and on, mocking Jim's straining ears. "Well I'll be--Interference! Deliberate blanketing! The rats! The--" He blazed into a torrent of profanity whose imaginativeness was matched only by its virulence.
Mac was clutching his shoulder, stirred for once out of his vaunted "deegnity." "What is it, mon, what is it?"
"War, you bloody Scotchman, war! That's what it is!"
"War! Foosh, man, 'tis eempossible!"
"The hell it's impossible! Damn, and Darl not here! Take over, Mac; I've got to go up an' get him!"
* * * * *
In the meantime Thomas' helpless journey had come to an end. After an interminable descent in what to him had been pitch darkness, the giant who was carrying him halted. Darl had heard the whistling inrush of air into some lock, then the clanging of a door. He felt himself hurled to the ground. Fumbling hands tugged at him, drew off his space suit.
The dim light of the cavern, as the helmet was dragged from his head, hurt Darl's eyes. Salt sweat stung them. It was hot, hotter than the Dome, hot as it was in the surta mine, where only the nerveless Venusians could work for any length of time.
Darl struggled to focus his eyes on a blurred blue form that towered above him. He felt sharp claws scratch at him and realized that cords were being passed around his limp body. They cut tightly into his legs and his arms. Then he was staring at a tube in the hand of his captor. Its end glowed with a brilliant purple light, and he felt a flood of reawakened energy warm him. His head jerked up, he strained against the taut, strong fibers binding him. The paralysis was gone, but he was still helpless.
A husky, rumbling voice broke the silence. "I wouldn't struggle, Earthman, if I were you. Even should you get free I still have my ray-tube. And my little friends would ask nothing better than your body to play with."
Darl writhed to a sitting posture. Now he could see his mysterious abductor clearly. This eight-foot, blue-feathered individual, with curved beak and beady eyes glittering from his naked, repulsively wrinkled head, was a Martian! Despite the human shape of his body, despite his jointed limbs and thumbed hands, this denizen of the red planet resembled a vulture far more than he did any other Earth creature.
* * * * *
The Earthman's pride of race came to his rescue. "What's the game?" he growled. "Looking for trouble?" There was nothing in Darl's voice to show the fear that chilled him. Behind the Martian he could see vaguely a group of little yellow Mercurians.
"I'll ask all the questions here. And you'll answer them, too, if you're wise. Even your dull mind should comprehend that you are in my power."
Darl decided to proceed more cautiously. "What do you want from me?" he asked.
"I want," the Martian answered, "the recognition signal of Earth's space-ships."
"What!" The ejaculation burst from Darl's throat. This alien wanted the secret code, the watch-word that distinguished Earth's space ships, that gained for them free admittance to ITA's armed posts on the outer planets! This could mean only one thing, that the long rivalry, the ancient dispute between Earth and Mars was about to flare into open war. Any friendly visit from a foreign flier would be heralded by word from M-I-T-A. Thomas' face became a stony mask, covering the tumult of his mind.
"You understood. I want the Earth recognition signal at once--and after that, the surrender of the Dome." The very calmness of the husky tones was a threat.
"Never!"
"I warn you, Darl Thomas. It would be the better part of wisdom for you to yield willingly what I ask. You will give in eventually, and the means of persuasion I shall use will not be exactly--pleasant."
"You'll get nothing from me!"
The outlander's lidless eyes were filmed with a gray membrane. His head thrust forward, the feathered ruff beneath it bristled. Darl braced himself to withstand the swooping pounce that seemed imminent, the slash of the sharp beak. A burring rattle broke the momentary hush. The Martian relaxed, turned to the Mercurian from whom the sound had come and replied with staccato vibrance.
* * * * *
As the cave filled with a whirring tumult Darl had a chance to examine the Mercurian natives crowding around his prostrate body. They were little yellow midgets, ranging from eighteen inches to two feet in height. Half of their small stature was taken up by snouted heads, with saucer-like, crimson eyes, and long white tusks jutting from foam-flecked mouths. The trunks were globular. The spindling legs and thin arms ended in sharp claws. There was an impression of animal ferocity about these tiny beings that stamped them as utter savages.
His captor was speaking to the Earthman again, his horny beak parted in what might have been a grim smile. "My friends remind me that I promised you to them. They have not forgotten how you and your fellows drove them from their burrows."
Darl was suddenly cold, though the sweat still streamed from his bound body. An uncontrollable shudder took him as he saw what the diminutive claws of the midgets held. While the Dome was still an unfinished framework one of the Terrestrian artisans had somehow been isolated from his fellows. Thomas had been of the party that found what was left of him, and the memory was still a throbbing nightmare.
"Once more! Will you give me the recognition signal?"
Darl shook his head, and prayed for sudden death. The Martian spoke to the dwarfs. They started forward, saliva drooling from their tusks. Darl gritted his teeth. He would hold out as long as was humanly possible.
A shrill rhythmic whistle came from somewhere outside. The blue giant started and snapped something to the Mercurians. Then he turned to Darl. "I must leave you for a little while," he said. "You have till I return to change your mind." With a parting admonition to the savages he was gone through a side door that Thomas had not noticed before.
* * * * *
Grateful for the postponement, however short, of the inescapable ordeal, Darl took stock of his situation. He lay, firmly bound, on the gritty rock floor of a low-ceiled cave about twelve feet square. In one wall was a door of red metal. The portal through which the Martian had vanished was next to it. Darl repressed an exclamation when he saw the opposite wall. It was of solid metal, bluishly iridescent. That was beryllium steel, the alloy from which the barriers at the terminals of the surta mine were fashioned. He forced his head higher. There were the marks of the jointures, the weldings that he himself had made.
The discovery seemed only to emphasize the helplessness of his predicament. His faithful Venusians, Ran-los, Ta-ira, and the rest were just on the other side of the three-inch plate of toughened steel. Three inches--yet it might have been as many hundred miles for all the help they could give him.
The yellow pigmies were circling in a macabre dance, their crimson eyes turned always toward him, hate glowing from their crawling depths. The whistle beyond changed in character. Darl recognized it. It was a Martian space-radio, the code of which Earth scientists had never been able to decipher. The Mercurian circle tightened, the fetid smell of the dwarfs was overpowering. Low at first, then louder and louder came the rattling cacophony of their chant. It filled the confined space with an overpowering clamor.
Darl writhed again, rolling over and over till he had reached the barrier. The pigmies gave way before him; evidently they had been warned to keep their claws off. With his insteps Thomas could reach the helmet of his space suit, where it had been dropped against the wall. He drove it against the metal and the clangor of its striking reverberated through the chamber. Darl managed to regulate the sound. He was now hammering out double knocks, long and short, spaced in the dots and dashes of the Morse code. "H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P D-A-R-L H-E-L-P...."
It was like some scene out of a madman's dream, this dim-lit cavern with its circling, dancing pigmies, the human figure lying sidewise on the ground, the rattling, savage chant and the metallic tattoo of Darl's hopeless message. A diabolic orgy of weird sound and crisscrossing shadows.
* * * * *
It seemed hours that he pounded the helmet against the wall, hoping that the sound of it would be audible above the clamor of the midgets. His knees and hips were aching and numb, his leg ripped, almost to the bone by the sharp edges of the jagged floor. A sudden thought struck him. The fiber thongs that bound him were also rubbing against the rock. His flesh was terribly torn. Perhaps the thongs, too, had been frayed, weakened by the long continued friction.
He stopped the pounding signals and began to force his knees apart with all the power of his burly calves. The cords cut into his bulging muscles, cut into and through his skin. The veins stood out on his forehead, his neck was a corded pillar, his teeth bit through his lip as he stifled a scream of pain. Then, startlingly, the fibers snapped. His legs at least were free! He could fight, die fighting, and take these others with him into oblivion!
Darl leaped to his feet. Before the astounded natives realized what was up he was charging into their circle. A well aimed kick sent one crashing against the further wall. Another crunched against the rock. Then they were on him, a frothing wave of tiny furies. A score or more, they swarmed over him as a pack of African wild dogs swarms over a huge water-buffalo marked for the kill. Their claws scratched and tore, their sharp fangs stabbed into his flesh. His arms were still tightly bound to his sides, and he lashed out with his sandaled feet, swung his shoulders like battering rams, whirled in a dervish dance. Their brittle bones cracked under his hammer blows. They dropped from him like squashed flies. But, small as they were, he was terrifically outnumbered. By sheer weight of numbers they dragged him down, and piled on top of him as he lay, quivering and half-conscious, on the blood-soaked floor.
* * * * *
Through the blackness that welled and burst in his brain, one thought held. He had fooled the Martian, for in another instant the enraged savages, would kill him and the password to Earth's outposts would be safe. Already, he felt their fangs at his throat.
A whirring rattle cut through the turmoil like a whip-lash, and the heap of pigmies swiftly scattered. The man-bird from Mars was in the room. To Darl he was a blurred blueness from which glittered those two jet beads of eyes. As from a distance he heard a rumble, its meaning beating dully to him. "Not so easy, Thomas, not so easy. I want that signal, and by Tana, I'm going to have it."
The Earthman felt a current of cooler air. Instinctively he drew it into his lungs. It swept him up from the blackness that was closing in about him, brought him back to consciousness and despair. The chattering Mercurians crowded round to commence their interrupted orgy. "For the last time, Earthman, will you talk?"
Darl shook his head weakly and closed his eyes. In a moment--
Suddenly there was a crash of metal on metal. Another! The clangor of falling steel. Now someone was shouting, "Darl, Darl, are you alive?" All about him were shrill twitterings, squeaking calls, squeals and scutterings. Darl's nostrils stung with the odor of burned flesh. A door slammed....
He opened his eyes on a confused riot, saw Jim crouched, flashing ray-gun in hand. There was a hole in the barrier, and a mob of green-scaled Venusians were crowding through. Jim's ray caught the last Mercurian and the dwarf vanished in a cloud of acrid, greasy smoke.
"Thank God you've come!" Darl managed to gasp. Then cool blackness closed around him.
* * * * *
Darl Thomas lay on a cot in the headquarters tent, swathed from head to foot in an inch-thick wrapping of bandages. Jim's theory was that if one bandage was good, two were better, and he had cleaned out the post's slender stock. The red-haired Earthman was seated at the cot's side, watching the taciturn Scot operating the control board. He was telling Darl of the stirring message from M-I-T-A, and of the blanketing interference that marred the completion of the message.
"I didn't know what to do first," he continued, "whether to go down below and find out what Ran-los was battin' about, or shoot up to you in the connin' tower with the message. Like the thick-head I am, I picked the wrong thing. I sure got the gimmicks when I found the look-out empty, an' a space suit an' ray-gun gone." Jim grinned mirthlessly. "I was runnin' around in circles. You were outside, God alone knows how long. Believe me, I had you crossed off the list! That left two of us. With a war on, somebody had to stand guard in the look-out, the control board here had to be watched, an' somebody else had to get below.
"I was just tryin' to figure out a way o' cuttin' myself in half when I thought o' Ran-los. For a Weenie he's got a heck of a lot of sense. I zoomed down, hauled him out o' his bunk, scooted back up, showed him how to work the peri-telescope an' the big beam-thrower, an' left him there on guard."
"Best thing you could have done." Darl's voice was muffled by the bandages in which his head, as well as the rest of his body, was swathed. "He's got a head on his shoulders, that bird."
"Somethin' told me to take a ray-gun down in the mine with me. I was just steppin' out o' the elevator when I caught your last signal; -L-P D-A-R-L was all I got, but it was enough. How you ever got the other side of the barrier had me wingin', but you were there right enough, and yellin' for help. Ran-los had been doin' some repairs on a head support an' his weldin' machine was still there. Takin' an awful chance on there bein' air on the other side, I butted it up against the wall, shot the flame against the steel, and when she was soft enough had some of the Weenies smash her in with sledge-hammers. First thing I see is you, stretched out in a pool o' blood, with a couple of those yellow imps just gettin' to work on you. I clipped them first--that gave the Martian a chance to get away. An' then--well, you know the rest."
* * * * *
"I owe you one for that, Jim. Too bad, though, the big fellow escaped; we'll hear from him again, or I don't know the breed. Wonder how he got on the planet."
"The sucker must 'a' stowed away on the last recruit ship from Venus, slipped in a case o' tools or somethin'. Mars has labor agents there, too, you know, for their farms on Ganymede."
"Possibly. He knew my name, and that I was chief here. He's rigged up an air-lock out there, though I can't figure out how he gets the air."
"That's easy. While I was repairin' the barrier I found a pipe runnin' through. He's been stealin' ours. Which, by the same token, is why he was punchin' holes in the Dome rather than down below, where he would have been safer from discovery."
"So that's it. Get anything more on the space-radio?"
"Nope. Angus has kept the ear-flaps on, but the ether is still jammed. Hey, what're you up to?"
Darl was swinging his bandaged body up from the cot that had been set up in the headquarters tent at his insistence. "Can't lie on my back," he panted, "with that devil loose on the planet. Lord knows what he's up to now. We're short-handed enough as it is."
He rose to his feet, staggering with weakness and loss of blood. But his indomitable will drove him on. "I'll take over the control board. Send Angus up to relieve Ran-los, and you get below and speed up production. Earth will need double quantities of surta for food, now that there's a war on."
* * * * *
Jim turned to convey the order to the Scot, but he whirled to the tent-flap instead as a riot of sound exploded outside. He tore aside the canvas, and now there was a burst of shrill, frightened Venusian cries, and a deeper, rattling chorus. Out on the Dome floor, pouring from the shaft-head in a panic torrent, came the Venusians. And among them, leaping, slashing, dragging them down, were countless little yellow men, their fangs and tusks and curving claws crimson with the blood of their victims.
"Darl, Mac, they've broken through! The Mercs have broken through!" The brown plain was a blood-spattered battlefield. Here and there little groups of the green men, braver than the rest, fought with spanner and hammer and whatever improvised weapon they may have found. "Come on, give 'em hell!" The three Earthmen dashed out, weapons in hand. But friend and foe were so intermingled that they could not use the devastating ray of their hand-guns. The fighting Venusians were vanishing under a tossing sea of yellow imps. And still the dwarfs poured forth from the mine entrance.
A blue form towered, far back, where all green had vanished, and only Mercurians were left. The Martian's beak opened in a rattling call. A group of hundreds of pigmies suddenly left the main fight, and came forward with short, swift steps. They dashed straight for the Earth trio and cut them off from the Venusians they were running to aid.
* * * * *
Side by side the three fought. Their weapons grew hot in their hands as the beams cut great swaths in the seething ranks. The attackers halted, gave back, then surged forward again as the roar of their alien commander lashed them on.
The Earthmen faced the frenzied throng. A cleared circle was still around them. Beyond, the Venusians were all down. The Mercurian mob was closing in, the Terrestrians' rays had lost half their range. In moments now the ray-guns would be exhausted.
"The plane!" Darl shouted. "Back to the plane, it's our only chance."
The gyrocopter that could carry them aloft, out of the rout, was fifty feet away. They fought through to it and reached it just as the last faint charge flashed from Mac's tube. Jim was at the controls, Darl smashed his useless projector into the chattering face of a dwarf that had leaped on the Scot's shoulders and dragged Angus into the cockpit.
The overloaded flier zoomed to the landing at the lofty air-lock's manhole and hovered as Darl and Angus slipped home the hooks that held it to the platform. "The spy has the Dome," Jim grunted, "but by God, he hasn't got us. We'll be safe in the lock up here, till help comes. And then--"
"Safe is it?" Angus broke in. "Mon, luik ye what those bairns fra hell are up to the noo."
A yellow tide was rising about the base of each of the latticed steel arches that vaulted to the Earthmen's refuge. On every side the dwarfs were climbing, were swarming up the walls in numbers so great that they concealed the metal beneath. Up, up they came, slowly but surely. And right in the center of the plain, ankle-deep in the torn fragments of the murdered Venusians, was the Martian, directing the attack.
* * * * *
Jim groaned. "I might've known he'd never let us get away. It's slow bells for us, I guess. Hey, where's Darl?"
"Gone weethin. No, guid losh, he's here!"
Darl appeared, his features pale and drawn, carrying an armful of ray-guns. "Grab these," he snapped. "We're not licked yet."
"Licked, hell!" Jim's roar reverberated. "We've just begun to fight!" The Scot was silent, but the battle light shone in his eyes. In another moment the Terrestrians were kneeling, were raking the roof girders as the mounting Mercurians came within range. Each had two ray-guns in his hands, and a little pile of extra tubes beside him. They fought silently, wasting not a single blast.
Six white rays flamed through the misty, humid air, and striking the teeming girders, swept them clean. A greasy, horrible smoke cloud gathered along the shell and drifted slowly down, till the concrete blocks from which the steel framework sprang were hidden in a black pall. Fighters, these three, true ITA men who had left memories of their battle-prowess on more than one wild planet! Gaunt-bodied demi-gods of war, they hurled crackling bolts of destruction from their perch at the Dome top. By hundreds, by thousands, the Mercurian pigmies vanished in dark vapor, or plunged, blackened corpses, into the fog that billowed below.
One by one the tubes were discharged and tossed down at the seething mob. The heaped weapons dwindled, and still the climbing hordes renewed themselves, came on in endless mounting streams to sure destruction. The open tunnel vomited forth a torrent of gibbering dwarfs. From the uttermost burrows of the planet the pigmies were flooding in at the call of the Martian who stood scatheless beneath and lashed them on with the strange dominance he held over them. The Earthmen fought on, endlessly, till they were sick of killing, nauseated with slaughter. And still the snouted, red-eyed imps came on.
* * * * *
Jim snatched up his last two ray-guns. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that Darl was using but one, the other, his last, was thrust into the chief's belt. He wondered at this, but a new spurt of yellow above the oily fog wiped the question from his lips. "Swallow that, you filthy lice! Hope you like the way it tastes!" His guns spouted death.
"I'm through!" The call came at last from McDermott. "Me too!" Jim Holcomb hurled his final, futile tubes down at the blue figure of the Mars man. A moment's hush held the trio. Then Jim flexed his great hands. "Well, these'll take care of a couple more o' them before I check in."
"No you don't," Darl barked, his face a graven image. "Inside with you. The lock will hold 'em off."
"Yeah? Look."
Thomas swung in the direction Jim was pointing. Rising above the murk, something glinted in the pale light. On the furthest upright a clumped group of climbing savages were struggling to drag up one of the welding machines, a long black hose snaking from its cylindrical bulk.
"They'll cut through the steel in fifteen minutes with that. The bloody bugger ain't missin' a trick."
"Inside, I tell you." Darl's crisp tone of command brooked no denial. The three crowded into the cool recesses of the manmade aerie. Angus slammed the steel door shut. Even if by some miracle the Dome wall should be pierced and the air in the main vault dissipated into outer space, this air-tight compartment hung from the hemisphere's roof would remain, a last refuge, till the atmosphere within had become poisonous through the Earthmen's slow breathing. But the Martian had anticipated Darl's final move. The oxy-hydrogen jet of the welding machine the dwarfs were hoisting would make short work of their final defense.
* * * * *
From the conning-tower above Ran-los called excitedly. Through all the long battle the Venusian had remained steadfast at the peri-telescope, scanning the vacant terrain outside, and the heavens. As Darl and Jim dashed for the stairs Mac ran after them, crying out, "What did he say, mon?"
"Space ship in sight," Darl flung over his shoulder as he reached the upper landing.
"Praise be! Noo the haythan weel get his desairts!"
"Yeah, maybe--if it's an Earth ship. But we won't be here to see it."
Jim's red head was bending over the peri-telescope view-screen. "She's still thirty thousand miles away. Give her a speed of fifteen per second--she'll have to slow up to land, can't make it under forty-five minutes. By then we'll be in little pieces. It took me ten minutes to burn through the barrier when I rescued Darl, and it won't take the Mercs any longer to get at us."
Darl was very sober as he looked on with narrowed eyes. Against a background of velvet black, gold spangled, the slim space-traveler showed. The sun's rays caught her, and she was a tiny silver fish in the boundless void.
"Luik ye, mon, luik ye!" Angus, fairly dancing with excitement, elbowed Darl aside. "She's from Airth, richt enow!" At the nose of the oncoming flier a rapid succession of colored lights had flashed, the recognition signal that should give her safe access to the Dome. Again there was a coruscation of coded flashes. "She's a battle cruiser, what's mair!" the Scot exclaimed.
* * * * *
Darl sprang to the keyboard that manipulated the signal lights from the Dome's roof. "No use," he said, after a short while. "The Martian has cut off the current from the dynamos. I can't warn the ship." He made a hopeless gesture.
Jim looked at him wonderingly. "Warn 'em? What for? Even if we are all dead when she reaches here, at least she'll clean up the Mercs, and retake the Dome for Earth."
"Don't you see it? When the Mars man has once blasted his way in here and disposed of us, he'll be ready for the space ship. Her captain can't suspect anything wrong. He must have left Earth at the time of the ultimatum, and would easily get here before any ship could be sent out from Mars. He'll come on till he's within range of the beam-thrower, and the Martian will aim, press the trigger and the Earth ship and her crew of a half a thousand brave lads will be star-dust."
"Oh God!" Jim was white-faced. "Isn't there anything we can do? Maybe if he doesn't get our all-clear signal he'll sheer off." This was clutching at straws.
"Why should he? He must know how short-handed we are, and will simply think we're not on watch, or that our signal lights are out of order. Matter of fact, if he were at all suspicious he should be alternating his course right now--and he hasn't. Look."
Seemingly motionless, but really splitting the ether with terrific speed, the warship was coming straight on to garrison the beleaguered post. She had never wavered from her straight course for the Dome. The little group was silent, watching the help that was coming at last, coming too late.
* * * * *
From below there came a thunder of sound. Jim slid down the stairs. An irregular disk on the wall was glowing cherry-red from the heat of the blow-torch without, and the metal was quivering under the Mercurian's sledge-hammer blows. "Darl's right," he almost sobbed as he gazed helplessly. "They'll be through in no time. The Dome's gone, we're gone, the space ship's gone!"
"Let me pass, Jim." Thomas' quiet voice sounded behind him. Holcomb turned. His leader was in a space suit, the helmet still unfastened.
"Blazes! Where the devil are you going?"
"Here, cover me with this till I reach the gyrocopter, then get back quick, and seal the air-lock." Darl thrust into Jim's hand the ray-gun he had previously reserved. "There's only one way to kill off the Martian and his mob. I'm taking it."
Suddenly Jim Holcomb understood. "No, Darl, no--you can't do it! Not you! Let me go! I'm just a dumbhead. Let me go!"
"Thanks, Jimmy, but it's my place." Darl's voice was low, and very calm. "I was in charge, and I lost the Dome. If I can save the boys on the ship, and you two, it's the least I can do. Good-by, old man. Give my regards to Earth."
Thomas' face was gray-white. The thick bandages that still swathed him, Jim glimpsed them through the open neckpiece of the suit, gave him the semblance of a mummy. The helmet clicked shut. Swallowing a lump that rose in his throat, Jim pulled open the door. A wave of Mercurians surged in, to be seared into nothingness by his weapon. He was in the doorway, his ray sweeping the platform clear.
Darl was out now, stepping into the flier that still hung by its hooked moorings. Jim caught a flash of blue and looked up. The Martian was hanging to a girder just above, his green tube pointing straight at Darl. A white ray spurted from Jim's gun. The Martian's weapon and the hand that held it vanished in the sizzling blast. The plane was loose! Jim leaped inside the air-lock, slammed the steel door shut, clamped it, and sprang for the quartz peer-hole.
* * * * *
Darl's gyrocopter was diving on a long slant for the Dome wall. Faster and faster it went, till all Jim could see was a white streak in the smoky dimness. And now he could see the vast interior, the teeming plain, the dwarf-festooned girders and roof-beams. He stood rigid, waiting breathlessly. Then the plane struck--fair in the center of a great panel of quartz. The wall exploded in a burst of flying, shattered splinters. A deafening crash rocked the Dome.
Jim clung to his port-hole, tears rolling down his cheeks, unashamed. The plane, and Darl, vanished. Jim saw the black smoke masses whirl through the jagged hole in the Dome's wall as the air burst out in a cyclonic gust. He saw the vast space filled with falling Mercurians, saw a blue form plunge down and crash far below. He knew that in all that huge hemisphere, and in the burrows beneath it, there was no life save himself, and Angus, and the faithful Ran-los. For only in this compartment that clung to the roof of the Dome was there left air to breathe. And, from the void beyond, the silver space ship sped on toward Mercury, sped on to a safe landing that, but for Darl Thomas's sacrifice, would have been her doom....
Guided by Jim and Angus, a party of men from the battle-flier, equipped with oxygen respirators, went to the aid of Darl. They dug him out from under his crumpled plane and the piled splinters of quartz. His metal was dented and twisted, but unpierced. They carried him tenderly to the space ship, and carefully set him down. The ship's physician listened long with his stethoscope, then looked up and smiled.
"He's alive," the doctor said, "just barely alive. The thick padding of bandages must have saved him from the full shock of the crash. They're hard to kill, these ITA men. I'll be able to bring him around, God willing."
Table of Contents
THE BARBARIAN by Poul Anderson
FLIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW by Stanton Coblentz
THE PLAYERS by Everett B. Cole
THE SOUND OF SILENCE by Barbara Constant
A CHOICE OF MIRACLES by James A. Cox
ONE OUT OF TEN by J. Anthony Ferlaine
THE CIRCUIT RIDERS by R. C. FitzPatrick
THE FLYING CUSPIDORS by V. R. Francis
I LIKE MARTIAN MUSIC by Charles E. Fritch
IRRESISTIBLE WEAPON by H. B. Fyfe
SATELLITE SYSTEM by H. B. Fyfe
BELLY LAUGH by Randall Garrett
FIFTY PER CENT PROPHET by Randall Garrett
THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW by Anthony Gilmore
THE STARS, MY BROTHERS by Edmond Hamilton
IT'S A SMALL SOLAR SYSTEM by Allan Howard
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES by Fritz Leiber
THE SKY TRAP by Frank Belknap Long
INFINITE INTRUDER by Alan E. Nourse
LETTER OF THE LAW by Alan E. Nourse
GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS by H. Beam Piper
DOGFIGHT—1973 by Mack Reynolds
THE DOPE ON MARS by Jack Sharkey
HELLHOUNDS OF THE COSMOS by Clifford D. Simak
HISTORY REPEATS by George O. Smith
PYGMALION'S SPECTACLES by Stanley G. Weinbaum
THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells
THE TERROR FROM THE DEPTHS by Sewell Peaslee Wright
VAMPIRES OF SPACE by Sewell Peaslee Wright
UNSPECIALIST by Murray F. Yaco
STAR MOTHER by Robert F. Young
Product Description
Included within this work are stories by Randall Garrett, H. Beam Piper, Fredric Brown, Randall Garrett, Clifford D. Simak, Murray Leinster, Edmond Hamilton, Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds and many others. This collection also includes the novellas THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES by Fritz Leiber and the classic story of time travel THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells.
This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.
Contents:
THE BARBARIAN by Poul Anderson
TWO TIMER by Fredric Brown
FLIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW by Stanton Coblentz
THE PLAYERS by Everett B. Cole
THE SOUND OF SILENCE by Barbara Constant
EGOCENTRIC ORBIT by John Cory
A CHOICE OF MIRACLES by James A. Cox
TRADER’S RISK by Roger Dee
DEAD WORLD by Jack Douglas
SHOW BUSINESS by Boyd Ellanby
DISOWNED by Victor Endersby
ONE OUT OF TEN by J. Anthony Ferlaine
THE CIRCUIT RIDERS by R. C. FitzPatrick
WIND by Charles L. Fontenay
THE FLYING CUSPIDORS by V. R. Francis
I LIKE MARTIAN MUSIC by Charles E. Fritch
IRRESISTIBLE WEAPON by H. B. Fyfe
SATELLITE SYSTEM by H. B. Fyfe
BELLY LAUGH by Randall Garrett
FIFTY PER CENT PROPHET by Randall Garrett
THE TENTACLES FROM BELOW by Anthony Gilmore
THE STARS, MY BROTHERS by Edmond Hamilton
IT’S A SMALL SOLAR SYSTEM by Allan Howard
MEX by Laurence Mark Janifer
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES by Fritz Leiber
MORALE by Murray Leinster
SAND DOOM by Murray Leinster
THE SKY TRAP by Frank Belknap Long
POISONED AIR by S. P. Meek
THE BLACK LAMP by S. P. Meek
INFINITE INTRUDER by Alan E. Nourse
LETTER OF THE LAW by Alan E. Nourse
GENESIS by H. Beam Piper
GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS by H. Beam Piper
DOGFIGHT—1973 by Mack Reynolds
FREEDOM by Mack Reynolds
NOVICE by James H. Schmitz
ONENESS by James H. Schmitz
THE DOPE ON MARS by Jack Sharkey
HELLHOUNDS OF THE COSMOS by Clifford D. Simak
DREAM TOWN by Henry Slesar
HEART by Henry Slesar
HISTORY REPEATS by George O. Smith
PYGMALION’S SPECTACLES by Stanley G. Weinbaum
THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells
THE TERROR FROM THE DEPTHS by Sewell Peaslee Wright
VAMPIRES OF SPACE by Sewell Peaslee Wright
UNSPECIALIST by Murray F. Yaco
STAR MOTHER by Robert F. Young
THE GREAT DOME ON MERCURY by Arthur L. Zagat