KAY sat up in bed, snapped on the light. “Who’s there?” she demanded.
“Me,” whispered Ballister. “Let me in!”
“What?” In spite of herself she smiled. “What on Earth made you think that I—”
“Pipe down! This isn’t lust; it’s terror. We’ve got to get moving fast! They’re onto us somehow.”
The girl slipped into some clothes, threw on a coat. The moment she was through the door, Ballister grabbed her arm and hurried her out of the hostel along the street.
“What time is it?” she asked, squinting at the full moon.
“Three Ayem—wish I could say all’s well.”
There was a shot in the night; the long streak of flame that a rifle-barrel throws split the darkness of the street. Ballister reeled a little and cursed.
“Where to?” asked the girl, supporting him. He was hit in the shoulder.
“Garage. Hurry it up.” They slunk into the darkness of a double lane of trees, slipping along like a pair of shadows. The girl was still wearing bedroom slippers; Ballister was in his stocking feet. There was no noise whatsoever and scarcely a light in all the residential area.
Again the streak of flame, again the sudden crack of the rifle. “Nowhere near,” said Ballister, his voice barely audible. “Faster.”
Running in the dark, making no noise at all, speeding through relatively unfamiliar ground, they made good time. The garage loomed before them, one of the squat, white, solid buildings of the city.
Ballister, flinging off her helping arm, tore open the wide wing doors and darted in. She slipped behind like a ghost.
“Light!” he said. She fumbled for the switch, snapped it on.
Kay watched as Ballister hunted for a crowbar among the little group of municipal automobiles, found one, and proceeded to bash the mechanical guts out of all the cars save one. Kay started the motor of that one.
HE had hurled the bar through the last motor and collapsed beside her in the driver’s seat when the custodians appeared, and in arms. One of the tall, solid Basque types raised a long rifle, took steady aim.
Kay hurled three tons of metal square at him and through the’ door. The pick-up of the auto was superb; its mechanical springs took up the shock of the body as though they had never hit it.
Through the streets of the city they rocketed, lightless while Ballister fumbled for the switch. The construction was somewhat unfamiliar; he collapsed totally before finding it. Kay snapped the running lights on, not daring to glance at the man by her side.
She turned onto the airport road. Behind her there was the roar of a second motor. In the rear-vision mirror she saw two pale purple circles that were the running-lights of a pursuing car.
A brief chatter of metallic slugs on the car’s tail told her of a semi-automatic rifle at the least. If it were a machine gun she knew they’d never get out of this chase scene alive. The rattle sounded again. There was no whang of bullets penetrating metal. Kay breathed again, in relief.
Europeans in special cars used to hold the speed-records for ground-travel, on a straight track. That was probably because no American girl had ever bothered to enter the lists against them. Kay had teethed on a piston-ring and broken the speed-laws by the age of twelve. Since then her progress had been rapid; she knew cars backwards and forwards and overturned. She knew every trick of the throttle and gas, knew how to squeeze another mile-per-minute out of the most ancient wreck on the roads.
The municipal car was of unfamiliar make; it took her about five minutes to size up its possibilities; when she had, she sped quite out of sight of the pursuing car.
“Wake up,” she yelled at the man by her side. “If you aren’t dead, for heaven’s sake, wake up!”
There was a vague gesture from the figure, and a dim smile on its face. “Knew you’d do it,” Ballister murmured. “Keep going, Kay. Get Sir Mallory’s plane out, Kay. Back to Oslo we go—” The murmured words were stilled.
Wondering if her friend were dead, she stepped more speed out of the car, hauled up before the deserted airfield. The hangar-doors were merely latched against the weather; she swung them open and switched on the lights.
The ornate, fast plane of the noble was balanced feather-like on its dozen retractable landing wheels; she trundled it out of the shed and managed to load Ballister into it.
From the road came the roar of a motor; far in the night was the gleam of headlights. Kay fiddled with the controls, backed the plane into the wind. The car shot onto the landing field, tried to cross before the plane and force her around. She lifted a little, swung around the auto, ducked at the rattle of a gun. The control panel splintered into fragments of plastic and metal; alcohol ran over her knees.
Mercifully, the plane rose as she yanked wildly at the stick with no response. It headed diagonally up, its course quite straight. The stick and the pedals were quite dead. And there were no dual controls.
Into the night they flew, at the mercy of the wind, far above the landing field, in the heart of the jagged Pyrenees.
Their luck, such as it was, didn’t last; one of the peaks loomed before them. Kay had just enough time to cover the body of Ballister, wondering if he were still alive, if he would survive this, if she would, when the plane struck.
CHAPTER V
REVELATION
SOMEONE was singing, she noticed, with an altogether inappropriate glee, an objectionable song about his Majesty, the King of Spain.
“Stow it, Hoe,” ordered the voice of Ballister. “Let the lady rest.”
She sat up violently. “You!” she said. “What happened—” She felt a curious weakness in the middle and sat back again. “What’s up?”
Ballister approached, relief glowing all over his face. “You had us worried. You’ve been on a liquid diet for a week without once coming up for air. How’d you like to tear into a steak?”
“Love it,” she snapped, realizing that the sense of weakness had been hunger. “Any potatoes?”
“You’ll have rice instead. May I present Jose Bazasch.” He led forward by one hand a shy little old man who wore the Basque beret.
“An honor,” he muttered incoherently. “Fine ladies—noble gentlemen in my cave—”
“Tell your story, Hoe,” suggested Ballister grimly. He speared a broiled steak from its string where it turned over the fire. A slab of washed bark served very well for a platter.
“The story? This. I am Jose Bazasch, a Basque. A dozen years ago, during the wars, there were many Basques. I was sheep-thief—outlaw. Lived here in the cave. I am no more thief because there are no more sheep. There are no more Basques except me.”
“If you’ll excuse the omission,” said Kay, chomping busily, “I’m eating too energetically to register surprise. Kindly explain in words of one syllable or less.”
“Okay, child. Your brains would be addled after your long illness. I’ll begin at the beginning. There was a slew of Iberians along about the beginnings of the Christian era who were decimated by, in rapid succession, the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, Saracens and their most holy majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella.
“That brings us down to 1939, the beginning of the war. The few Basques left fight with the French, the Spanish and any other army they fancy. Most of them die. A few thousand are left in the lower mountain villages. One day in 1951 the villages are bombed by German planes—blown right off the map. Squads of soldiers hunt down the rest of the Basques in the hills and pop them off.”
“But not Jose!” interjected the old man with considerable excitement and a little pride.
“That’s right. Not Jose. Hoe was so well hidden that half the time he couldn’t find his own den for a month once he had left it. Anyway—there aren’t any Basque villages nor any Basques. Yet the next year the Pyrenese Peoples’ Republic is announced and in the next they held DeCuerva’s army, which never did get through. Now, a dozen years later we see this uncannily perfect city of the future, achieved by a handful o
f men and women—whom we’ve seen—and that’s that.”
“THAT’s what?” asked the girl abstractedly.
“That’s what I was planning to ask you as soon as you regained consciousness.”
“You’ve waited in vain,” said Kay, licking her fingers. “I can’t think on a full stomach. Nobody can. By the way, you neglected to explain the events of the night of a week ago. How did you know they suspected us of suspecting them of being not what they seemed to be?”
“You know the Mayor’s office building?”
“Like a book. I might almost say I know it backwards.”
“Right, child. You do know it backwards, and what’s more you don’t know the half of it. Because more than the half of it is underground. I bumbled on the Mayor that night going down into the basement of his building and asked if I could go too. Taking something of a chance I pushed by him before he could make an excuse.
“I guess he didn’t have a gun, because I wasn’t shot in the back for seeing what I saw. There were some machines there that make their hydroelectric turbines look like a pinwheel. Big—very big—and mysterious in function, to me at least. Simply didn’t look like anything at all—except maybe a glorified and electric concrete mixer. And a couple of people mucking around with oiling-cans.
“They drew and fired; I shoved the mayor in and rolled the hall-desk against the door, propped that with my walking-stick for leverage and beat it for your flat.”
“Nice condensed narration,” she said thoughtfully. “But what made you poke around in the first place? Dashed if I had any grounds for suspicion of conspiracy and such.”
“You’ve forgotten a lot since we took those psych courses. How do you tell a louse from an honest man?”
“A louse doesn’t trust anybody.”
“Right. Not even when he’s middle aged does he trust a couple of moonstruck lovers. Any nasty old man who’d break in on a tete-a-tete is bad from head to toe.
“And the clincher, to me at least, was this bloody, mysterious and cancerous growth of the so-called Basque people in less than two decades. There was something too awfully methodical about their city. It didn’t show any of the right traits. No, not a single one. It was as though they’d deliberately set out to build themselves a city of the future intended to impress and amaze—one, also, geared to the maximum in efficiency.”
Kay listened quietly. Finally she suggested, with a little shudder: “Gestapo?”
“Couldn’t be anything else, sweet.” Ballister fell silent in the contemplation of bucking the secret police that had held the German empire of conquest together by torture, fire and sword for years beyond its normal lifespan. They were wise, villainous and tricky, the Gestapo.
It had been thought that the majority of them had been killed off by the Captives’ Revolt years ago. Surely there couldn’t be enough left to fill that city!
“IT’s a bridgehead,” he said at last. “A stepping-stone for attack on an unprecedented scale and in an altogether new technique. You guess what that is?”
“Like the story about the rabbits, perhaps,” Kay suggested diffidently. “There were two rabbits being chased by a pack of hounds. They were tired, completely winded. There was no chance of them outrunning the hounds, who were young and fresh. So one rabbit said to the other rabbit: ‘Let’s hide in that bush until we outnumber them.’ ”
“Maybe,” said Ballister. “Too bad reconnaissance is out of the question. They must be patrolling the woods seven deep looking for us.” He brooded for a while, then exploded: “And the young monster of a hydro-dam? What’s that for?”
“Electric light,” said Kay. She reconsidered after a moment. “No. Because they have a strict curfew, so they don’t need street-lights. And that dam would deliver twenty times the power needed for street-lighting. Maybe a hundred times that. I’m no installations engineer, boy.”
“It’s very important, that dam. Otherwise they wouldn’t risk building a big, suspicious thing like that. And they do want to hide it; they did their best along that line to keep us from noticing it.”
“What?” squeaked the girl. “That chauffeur stopped the car and pointed it out, and we’ve been taken to inspect it half a dozen times! Keep us from noticing it, forsooth!”
Ballister sat quietly and grinned like a cat.
The girl considered, then blushed and admitted shamefacedly: “You’re right. They even fooled me, the psychist. They threw it into our faces so often that we were supposed to take it for granted and not think about the thing. The Purloined Letter, et seq.”
“Good kid!” said Ballister with faked heartiness. “I wish to heaven that one of us was a real scientist—physics and nuclear chemistry. Because the one purpose of that dam is obviously to power the machinery I saw in the basement before the chase-scene. And I don’t know what the machinery does . . .”
“So it’s all solved, huh?” Kay asked belligerently. “As simple as pi square? The Gestapo’s been repudiated by the German people, so they choose this method as a bridgehead on the continent for future use when the Swastika shall ride again.”
“That’s what it looks like,” said Ballister self-satisfiedly.
“Things are seldom what they seem. That’s what it ain’t. How would even a heavily-disciplined Gestapo unit do what they’ve done in the time they’ve had?”
Ballister was rocked back on his heels. “Blast it,” he said bitterly. “The man-hour formulae make it a rank impossibility. It’s so far outside the realms of possibility that I’d bet my boots on it.” A thought struck him: “But the city’s there, Kay!”
“Ignore it, boy. There’s trickery involved. We’ll have to find out where.” He looked at her glumly. “Reconnaissance?”
“Yep. Both of us.”
BAZASCH knew things about stalking that would pop the eyes of a Scottish stag-hunter. He had the knack of slipping along without enough covering to hide a rabbit, and in the little space of a week he tried to teach Kay and Ballister what he knew. In his own inarticulate way he got some of the principles over, though he despaired of ever making guerillistas of them.
Mournfully he explained that one had to be born to the fellowhood of stalkers and then be taken in hand by a wise old man who could explain things. He, Jose, could not explain. So long he had not talked to anybody but himself that the language sometimes seemed to be going altogether.
And between the grueling hikes-under-cover in the mountains the two Americans were gathering together their data, inferring wildly, working sometimes by association rather than logic, jumping through time and space in their reasoning rather than let go of a theory.
They evolved conclusive—to them—proof that Sir Mallory was the prime scoundrel behind the Pyrenese Peoples’ Republic. Checking back on his mental notebook Ballister recalled what might be considered evidence to that effect:
“I had my eyes on him the moment he showed up in our little twosome. Whether he’s the real Sir Mallory turned traitor doesn’t matter much. He may have popped the real Sir Mallory and taken his place with disguises. Anyway, you recall the outrageous bombing of the Hotel de Oslo et d’Universe, or whatever it was. That was the feeblest bombing I ever encountered, and yet Sir Mallory and a few old hens got excited about it.
“He proposed a military police of unlimited powers. That was a very bad sign. It was the first step towards wrecking the Conference. It denied democracy itself, the principle the Conference was constructed on. There could have been no bombing or killing half so disruptively effective as that move.”
Kay wearily agreed. Her knees were scratched, and her hands were calloused with crawling. But she’d got over her illness and felt hard as nails. The rough-and-ready bullet extraction that Bazasch had performed on Ballister had healed nicely.
CHAPTER VI
SHOWDOWN
ON THE big night there was no moon. Jose had planned it that way, he claimed. They started at dusk, carrying their first two meals.
It was a horrible
grind for an old man, a girl and a recently-shot person. They made crevasses that seemed impossible, climbed lofty trees to sight. After some hours of the terrible labor they sighted the lights of the landing field glowing dimly through the night. Fearing no cars they made good time along the highway, turning quietly into three roadside shadows when they passed the blockhouse that surmounted the dam. They found the city to be a bigger blotch of black in the general darkness.
Slipping down the alleys and lanes of the city, silent as so many ghosts, the three made their way to the center of town. By prearranged plan Ballister unlatched the front door of the Mayor’s little office building.
They entered behind him; Ballister felt for the cellar door. It swung open and a blaze of light poured through, shocking, dazzling after the hours-long trek through pitch-blackness.
“Aha!” whispered Bazasch. His cat’s eyes contracted; from his belt flicked a knife, eight wicked inches of blank steel. It slipped through the air, lodged in the throat of a burly “Basque” who had made the mistake of drawing his gun.
“Close it,” said Kay, dashing down the stairs to kick the gun away from the hand of the “Basque,” wounded but not yet dead. She finished him for the moment with a kick to the side of his head.
Ballister and Bazasch tore after her, the door bolted as securely as it could be.
Kay inspected the tower of machinery, marvelling. “Don’t ask me,” she finally griped. “I agree with my ignorant colleague. Whatever it is, it drinks lots of juice and it looks like a concrete mixer.”
Ballister picked up the gun. It was a hefty hand-weapon, a wide-gage projector of lead slugs that mushroomed effectively. “What do we do now?” he asked weakly. “That individual sent in an alarm, to be sure, before he even drew.”
“Take a good look,” said Kay. She indicated the man on the concrete flooring. “Isn’t the face familiar?”
“There’s a swell resemblance to that old rascal, Sir Mallory Gaffney. You mean it?”
“Nothing but that. What’s it signify?”
Collected Short Fiction Page 64
