“Cade!” shrilled Fledwick. “Listen!”
The radio was saying on what must be the official band: “. . . Claiming to be the late Gunner Cade of France and the unbooked Klin Teacher Fledwick Zisz. Use medium-range gas guns. The Cade-impostor is known to be armed with a gas gun, and has the strength of a maniac. Zisz is unarmed and not dangerous. Repeat, all-Watch alert: Bring in two men escaped this morning from Seventh District Watch House. They are an unidentified man claiming to be the late Gunner Cade of France—” If droned through a repeat and fell silent.
“They haven’t missed the car yet,” said Cade.
“They will,” Fledwick assured him mournfully. “Or they have missed it and haven’t connected it with us yet.” He was gloomily silent for three blocks and then muttered angrily: “Unarmed and not dangerous!” He fingered the gas gun through his blouse. “Unarmed indeed! Sir, a little way more and we’re out of the city. If they haven’t got the noose tight yet—”
“Noose?”
“Blocking-of-exits-from-the-city-by-Watchers. They’ll have every gate covered soon enough, but if they don’t know about the car they’ll cover the public transports first. We do have a chance.” It was the first faint note of hope from the little crook.
Cade drove on at a steady fifteen per. The sun was up and cityward traffic grew heavier by the minute. Once they passed a city-bound car trapped by speed bars that had risen, cagelike, from the paving to hold the speeder for the Watch.
“They stop at the city gates,” said Fledwick, “and then you can speed up. The Watchers have nothing faster than this.”
The noose was not yet tight. They rolled easily past a sleepy Watchman at the gate. Either he hadn’t got the alert or he assumed District Seven was no worry of his. Gunner’s instinct kept Cade from taking Fledwick’s advice and speeding. He rolled the car on at an inconspicuous twenty per, and the decision was sound. A green-topped Watch car from the city passed them and Fledwick shriveled where he sat. But it kept on going, never noticing the fugitives.
Ahead, off to the left of the highway now dotted with cars, was a gray crag. “Chapter House,” said Fledwick, pointing, and Cade sighed. The whole insanely unfitting episode at last was drawing to a close.
The radio spoke again: “To all Armsmen and Watchmen.” The voice was vibrant and commanding. “To all Watchmen and Armsmen,” said the voice again, slowly. “This command supersedes the previous all-Watch alert concerning the Cade-impostor and the unbooked Klin Teacher Fledwick Zisz. Both these men are heavily armed and both are dangerous. They are to be shot on sight. Armsmen: shoot to kill. Watchmen: use long-range gas guns. New orders for Watchmen and Armsmen both are: Shoot on sight! These men are both dangerous. There is to be no parleying; no calls to surrender; no offer or granting of quarter. Your orders are to shoot on sight. No explanation of any Armsman or Watchman who fails to shoot on sight will be accepted.
“Descriptions and records follow—”
Cade, in frozen shock had slowed the car to a crawl, not daring to make a conspicuous stop. He listened to fair physical descriptions of both of them.
His “record” was criminal insanity, homicidal mania. Fledwick’s was an interminable list of petty and not-so-petty offenses of the something-for-nothing kind. “He, too, was described as a homicidal maniac.
“You’re armed and dangerous now,” Cade said stupidly.
His answer was a volley of wild curses. “You got me into this!” raved the little man. “What a fool I was! I could have done my five years standing on one foot! I had friends who could have raised my fine. And you had to bully me into making a break!”
Cade shook his head dazedly. Fledwick’s flood of rage poured over him and drained away, powerless to affect him after the shock of the radio announcement.
“But I am Gunner. Cade,” he said quietly, aloud, as much to himself as to the unbooked Teacher. “A Gunner of the Order.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Gunner Cade
Second of Three Parts. Gunner Cade was a sincere, and most exceedingly stubborn man. He was loyal to his government—and nothing is more dangerous to a government than making an outlaw of a stubbornly honest man!
Synopsis
Throughout the Realm of Man—on Earth, Mars, Venus, and the few settled asteroids—Gunner Cade’s name was known and his prowess admired. He was one of the youngest company commanders in the Order of Arms men, with a fabulous history of slaughtered enemies and victorious engagements behind him.
To Cade, however, the adoration of the Commoners was meaningless. He worked, and fought, only to fulfill the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience
he had taken in the Order. He lived decorously within the meaning of those vows, and meant to die fittingly, within the precepts of the Klin Philosophy. As a child he had learned loyalty to the Emperor and the Power Master. As a youthful Novice in the Denver Chapter House, he had learned devotion to the Gunner Supreme. And as Armiger, and later Gunner of the Order, he had sworn his fealty to the Star of France, the ruler of a large part of central Europe.
For Cade, life was a neatly solved puzzle, in which each perfect section had its perfect place. The ten-thousand-year history of the Order was the history of the Empire, was the history of man. Each morning, as he woke, he repeated to himself the mental ritual that prepared him for the day:
It is fitting that the Emperor rules.
It is fitting that the Armsmen serve the Emperor through the Power Master and our particular Stars.
While this is so, all will be well to the end of time.
Secure in the ritualistic duties of the Chapter House, Cade knew nothing of the storms that troubled the depths beneath the unruffled surface of the Realm. But after thirteen successful years in the Order, Gunner Cade made his first mistake—he let himself be trapped in the basement of a captured house during an action against the Star of Muscovy’s Armsmen.
His captor, strangely, was not a Brother in the Order, but a withered old hag of a Commoner, whose obvious subservience and helplessness made it possible for her to give the invulnerable Gunner a drink of doped cider.
When Cade regained consciousness, he was in the underground rooms of a Mystery Cult, and, he shortly realized, in the hands of an unbelievable conspiracy against the Emperor himself. He managed one escape from the beautiful Commoner girl who guarded him, only to be recaptured, drugged, and hypnotized. Hours later, he was released in a bar in the red-light district of Aberdeen, the capitol city of the Realm.
Through his mind a single posthypnotic command was powerfully repeated:
Go to the Palace and kill the Power Master.
All his training, all his instincts, all his loyalties rebelled. But his hands were ready, and his body was eager. Only the unexpected intercession of the girl he had first seen in the Mystery saved him. She appeared again in the bar, dressed as a prostitute of the District, and forced him to drink a fiery fluid that acted as an antidote to the hypnotic drug.
As his head cleared, Cade realized fully the importance of all that had occurred. He left the bar abruptly, determined to make his way to the local Chapter House and tell his story.
Ignoring the warnings of the girl, who would not leave him, he approached a City Watchman, demanding directions to the Chapter House. Not till he found himself being booked for disorderly behavior in the Watch House did he begin to understand the impossibility of obtaining an audience while dressed in the Commoner’s clothes with which the Mystery had supplied him. But the immediate problems faded almost into insignificance as he began to understand something even more serious:
The incident in the captured cellar had occurred a full week ago—and the blaster-charged body of “Cade” had been found in the cellar. To the whole world, he was a dead man!
One night in a cage in the Watch House convinced him that his only hope was to appeal directly to the Order of Armsmen. Only there could his identity be established. In the early hours of the morning, with the assistance of an unb
ooked Klin Teacher, Fledwick Zisz, who shared his cage, he managed an escape. Together they stole a ground car, and made their way almost to the Chapter House, when they were stopped by a shocking and incredible order issued over the car radio:
“To all Watchmen and Armsmen” the voice said, “this command supersedes the previous all-Watch alert concerning the Cade-impostor and the unbooked Klin Teacher Fledwick Zisz. Both these men are heavily armed and both are dangerous. They are to be shot on sight—!”
PART 2
VIII.
“It’s a mistake—that’s all,” Cade said numbly.
“Very well.” The little man’s voice was acid. “Before we are killed because of this curious mistake will you decide on a course of action? We’re still approaching your Brothers’ House and I want none of their hospitality.”
“You’re right,” said Cade. “The Brothers,” he said, feeling an unwarranted note of apology creeping into his voice, “would obey the official-frequency command. It’s their duty. I would myself, though the command was most—unusual. I don’t think I’ve ever heard its like, not even for the worst criminal.”
Fledwick was past his first fury. He studied Cade’s bewilderment and said slowly: “Back in the crock I saw you fix the lock and I thought you were either a Gunner or a master burglar—the greatest master I ever heard of. And when you laid out five Watchers without working up a sweat I thought you were either a Gunner or a master burglar and the greatest strongarm bucko I ever saw. But when you tossed away that gas gun because it wasn’t fitting, I knew you were a Gunner. Cade or not, you’re a Gunner. So it’s a mistake, but what can we do and where can we go?”
Cade suddenly laughed. The Order was perfect after all; the answer was so easy. He sent the car swinging in a bumpy U-turn over the parkway strips. “To the Gunner Supreme!” he said.
“The Gunner Supreme,” echoed Fledwick blankly. “The chief of all the Gunners. Wouldn’t he shoot us twice as fast as an ordinary Gunner? I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t,” said Cade. He tried to think of some way to make the wonderful presence clear, knowing he would fail. Of all things in the Order the meaning and being of the Gunner Supreme had most of all to be felt. “We in the Order are Brothers,” he carefully began. “He is the father. The Power Master disposes of us to the several Stars, but the assignment is without force until it has been sealed with the seal that is in the gun hilt of the Gunner Supreme.
“He touches his gun to ours before we first put them on as Armigers. If he didn’t touch them we wouldn’t be actual members of the Order. The memory of him touching our guns steadies our hands and makes our eyes keen and our wits quick in battle.”
And there was more he could never tell to anybody. Those in the Order knew it without telling; those outside would never know. There were the times you didn’t like to remember, times when your knees trembled and you sweated advancing into fire. Then you thought of him, watching you with concern clouding his brow, and you stopped trembling and sweating. You felt warm and sure advancing into fire to play your fitting part.
“This paragon of Gunners—” began Fledwick ironically.
“Silence, thief! I will not tolerate disrepect.”
“I’m sorry . . . may I speak?”
“With decorum.”
“You were right to rebuke me.” His voice didn’t sound quite sincere, but he had, Cade reflected, been through a lot. And, being what he was, he didn’t realize that the problem was solved—that the Gunner Supreme would understand and everything would be all right again.
“Where,” Fledwick asked, “does the Gunner Supreme live?”
From beloved ritual Cade quoted the answer: “Nearby to the Caves of Washington, across the River Potomac to the south, in a mighty Cave that is not a Cave; it is called Alexandria.”
“The Caves of Washington!” squalled Fledwick. “I’ll take my chances with the Watchers. Let me out! Stop the car and let me out!”
“Be still!” Cade yelled at him. “You ought to be ashamed. An educated man like you mouthing the follies of ignorant Commoners’. You were a Teacher of Klin, weren’t you?” Fledwick shuddered and subsided for a moment. Then he muttered: “I’m not such a fool. You know yourself it’s dangerous. And don’t forget, I was born ‘an ignorant Commoner.’ You sprang it at me before I had time to think, that’s all. I felt as if I were a child again, with my mother telling me: ‘You be good or I’ll take you to the Caves.’ I can remember her very words.” He shuddered. “How could I forget them?
“ ‘I’ll take you to the Caves.
“ ‘And the Beetu-Nine will come to tear your fingers and toes off with white-hot knives of metal.
“ ‘And the Beetu-Five will come to pepper you with white-hot balls of metal.
“ ‘And the Beefai-voh will come and grate your arms and legs with white-hot metal graters.
“ ‘And last, if you are not a good boy, the Beethrie-Six will come in the dark and will hunt you out though you run from Cave to Cave in the darkness, screaming. The Beethrie-Six, which lumbers and grumbles, will breath on you with its poison breath and that is the most horrible of all for your bones will turn to water and you will burn forever.’ ”
Fledwick shuddered and was sweating greasily from his forehead. “I’m not a fool,” he said belligerent, “but you don’t deny there’s something about the Caves, do you?”
Cade said shortly: “I wouldn’t care to spend a night there, but we’re not going to.” Fledwick’s reminiscence of his mother’s threat had shocked him. No wonder, he thought, Commoners were what they were. There was nothing in the Caves—he supposed. One simply, as a matter of course, calmly and rationally avoided the horrible things.
“Alert, all Armsmen and Watchmen!” said the radio. It wasn’t the same vibrant, command voice that had issued the “shoot on sight” order, but it was bad news—the bad news Cade had been expecting since then. “The Cade-Impostor and the unbooked Klin Teacher Fledwick Zisz are now known to have stolen Glory of the Realm ground car AB-779 Watchmen are to shoot the occupants of this car on sight with long-range gas guns. When the occupants are paralyzed Watchmen are to take them with all possible speed to the nearest Chapter House of the Order for immediate execution by Armsmen. Armsmen’s orders are unchanged. Shoot to kill; destroy the ground car on sight; kill the occupants if seen outside the car. That is Glory of the Realm ground car AB-779.”
The broadcast cut off and the only sound in Glory of the Realm ground car AB-779 was the soft whimpering of Fled wick.
“Keep your nerve, man,” Cade urged. “We’ll be out of here in a moment.” He stopped the car and rummaged through its map case for the Maryland-Virginia sheet and yanked the little crook out bodily. Cade set the car’s panel on self-steering at twenty per and opaqued the windows before he started it cityward on the highway.
Standing in the roadside scrub, Fledwick followed the vanishing car with his eyes. “Now what are we going to do?” he asked lymphatically.
“Walk,” said Cade grimly. “That way we may live to reach the Supreme. And stop sniveling. There’s a good chance that an Armsman will spot the car and burn it without knowing it’s empty. And then they won’t have an easy time deciding that we got away.”
The little man wouldn’t stop sobbing.
“See here,” said Cade. “If you’re going to be like this all the way, it’ll be better for both of us if you dig in somewhere and take care of yourself for a few days while I make it alone.”
The unbooked Teacher gave a last tremendous sniff and declared shakily: “No cursed chance of that, Gunner. Lead the way.”
Cade led the way across a field for a starter. For the Gunner the five days of overland march were refreshing and reassuring. Here at last was something familiar, something his years of training had fitted him for, something he understood completely. And to his surprise, Fledwick was no burden.
On the first day, for instance, they belly-sneaked up to the chicken yard of a food
factory through, its great outlying vegetable fields. Cade was suddenly chagrined to discover that he didn’t know what to do next. In action, if there was food you demanded it or took it; if there was none you went without. Here there was food—and it would be self-destruction to seize it in his usual fashion. But Fledwick’s unusual belt gave up another instrument that sheared easily through the aluminum wire. Fledwick’s pockets gave up peas he had picked and shelled along the way, and he scattered a few through the gap in the wire. A few repetitions and there were clucking chickens on their side of the barrier. The little man pounced silently four times and they belly-sneaked back through the vegetable field with a brace of fowl each at their belts.
After that Cade left the commissary to Fledwick, only reminding him that he did not eat meat before sundown and warning him that he wouldn’t look kindly on Fledwick devouring a chicken while he chewed carrots.
Once they thought they were in danger of discovery. At an isolated paper mill on the second day they saw Watchmen, a dozen of them, drive up and fan out to beat a field—the wrong one. If they had picked the right one, Cade could have slipped through them with laughable ease, and so perhaps could Fledwick. Cade guessed he would be expert enough at slipping across an unfamiliar room in the dark without betraying himself by squeaks and bumps. From that to a polished job of scouting and patrolling was not as far a cry as he would have thought a few days earlier.
After the incident at the paper mill Cade surrendered to the ex-Teacher’s pleading that he be taught the use of the gas gun. Disdainfully, for he still disliked handling the weapon, Cade stripped it a few times, showed Fledwick the correct sight-picture and told him that the rest was practice—necessarily dry-runs, since the number of pellets was limited. Fledwick practiced faithfully for a day, which was enough for the ignoble weapon in Cade’s eyes. He went to some pains to explain to the ex-Teacher that gas gun and gun were two entirely different things—that there was a complex symbolism and ceremony about the gun of the Order which the gas gun, weapon of Commoners, could not claim.
Collected Short Fiction Page 144
