Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  She looked up into the scarlet eyes of the monster, and screamed uncontrollably. Shaggy white arms went round her and lifted her into the air; she could feel the muscles bulging like plastic iron against her, pressing her to the furry body that was almost painfully hot. Leila went wild for a few seconds, striking at the white mask of Big Bill’s face, struggling uselessly; then she made herself lie still.

  “Your idea of a joke . . .” she choked.

  “Quite a man, isn’t he?” chuckled Gedner. He made an unconcerned gesture, and Big Bill bent to deposit Leila with care in her place in the armchair again. The Woolly backed away to huddle as before against the naked wall, his mighty three-fingered hands resting on the floor.

  Leo Chaikoski had come to his feet, his scarred face distorted, hands clenched at his sides. He made an inarticulate sound; Gedner turned and looked at him for a long moment, then asked softly, “Don’t you think it’s your bedtime too, Doc?”

  Leo jerked out, “You damned . . . stinking . . . I’m not afraid . . .”

  “Take it easy,” said Gedner. He took Leo’s arm in a sure grip, turned him about and walked him firmly to the door. “You’re all worked up, Doc. You need a bit of sleep.” As if in a dream Leo walked on through the doorway; Gedner watched him go, pressed the stud that closed the door, and turned a key in the lock.

  Leila felt herself white and shaking from the reaction, and angrier thereby. It was a minute before she could command her voice; then she told Paul Gedner what he was, in terms that Leo Chaikoski would never have thought of, in English, Spanish, and Martian.

  Gedner laughed, thrusting the key into his pocket. “You’re all right. But for about two seconds I’ll bet you thought Big Bill was going to carry you off, like the gorillas do the beautiful white girls in the story books. Bill could hardly have a gorilla’s motives, though—the Woollies reproduce by budding when you feed them phosphorus. He couldn’t even eat you alive; you’d probably poison him. That’s not a crack; it’s metabolism.”

  Leila was relatively calm again. “I think it’s my bedtime too,” she said frozenly. “I’m tired from my trip—and this friendly reception—”

  “Not yet,” insisted Gedner. “We ought to have a lot to talk about. It’s been a long time since I saw you.” He added, “Or any woman, for that matter.” His eyes fell on the teacup, which had toppled unnoticed from the arm of Leila’s chair and rolled away across the floor. “You didn’t drink your tea . . . Maybe you’d like something more stimulating?” He bent to open a drawer of the file-cabinet and take out a half-filled bottle.

  “No,” the girl said sharply. Gedner shrugged, and put the bottle back. He crossed the room and leaned against the wall beside Big Bill, letting a hand rest on the great Woolly’s flattened head and running his fingers idly through the fine white hair. Leila could not face the intent, identical gaze in the eyes of man and monster.

  ABRUPTLY Gedner said, “That little crackpot was talking to you, wasn’t he?” At the girl’s nod, he went on, “He’s not particularly sane. They get that way, out in these stations.”

  She looked at him at last. “He seems to be about as sane as you are, Paul.”

  “So you think I’m crazy?” said Gedner amusedly.

  A surge of auger nerved Leila. “You’ve always been a little crazy. Now I think you’re crazy a lot. Power-crazy.”

  “That’s right,” answered the man unexpectedly. Something glowed in his black eyes, smothering the mocking light; he straightened. “And I’ve got it, now. Here—as you’ve seen—I’m the boss. And that’s not all.”

  “That’s not all!” echoed Leila with a scornful laugh. “Wait till the Company investigators get here. Where will your little kingdom be then?”

  “We won’t be here to meet them,” said Gedner readily. “The Zodiac will be back here inside sixty hours. It won’t be hard—with the Woollies’ help—to commandeer her.”

  “Now I know you’re crazy!” But there was a doubt behind her incredulity. In the confident figure of Gedner she saw the author of the fear and menace that had spread out from this remote moon to grip the whole Saturnian Subsystem. But the why was still unanswered.

  “I’m glad you showed up here, Leila darling,” he was saying. “I’d intended to catch up with you before you got out of the moons, anyway—but you’ve saved me a lot of trouble. From now on, you’re going along with me.”

  Leila knew a sinking sensation, but she rallied bravely. “What do you think you’re going to do—convert the Zodiac into a pirate warship, with a Woolly crew? Those days are gone.”

  “Nothing so stupid; she’ll go on schedule to Titan. I’ve made some discoveries, and I intend to use them. People have been using Woollies for fifty years, and nobody has realized their full possibilities. I’d already begun to a year ago, when I took this job on this God-forsaken rock; and here I’ve had the leisure and the opportunity to work the possibilities out.”

  “For murder?” asked Leila bluntly.

  “I had to get rid of Chandler—he had one of those single-track minds full of ideas about loyalty to the company and so on—But I see you don’t understand. Yet you must know better than I do just what’s happened in the Subsystem since I sent out the news that one Woolly had killed one man.” He paused, and when she did not answer, “Panic, financial collapse, the whole system starts falling to pieces. Before long, there are going to be more such incidents—not on Phoebe this time, but on Titan, right in the heart of Saturnian civilization. You can imagine what will happen then. Now suppose, in the midst of the turmoil, appears a small group of men who have learned to control the Woollies, fully control, so that no untrained human mind can challenge their commands. Like I control Big Bill.” He gestured at the immobile monster. “Look at him; he thinks only what I think, he wants only what I want—never before did two hearts beat so completely as one . . . Suppose, then, that this group—a few friends and I—take over the central offices of the Company, and incidentally the Colonial Government. Then, of course, the secret can come out: that Woollies don’t run wild, they don’t kill unless they’re ordered to, and they won’t be ordered to kill anybody who stays in line and does as he’s told. There’ll be a general sigh of relief, and nobody will worry about the change of administrations.”

  Leila sat very still, assimilating the picture his words built up. It wasn’t impossible; it was the ancient pattern of successful revolution: first bring in chaos, then out of the chaos a new order of brutal force. There was only one flaw . . . She laughed.

  “It ought to work very nicely, Paul. Until the Earth Government hears about it and send a couple of battleships to blast you out of the Universe.”

  Gedner grinned confidently. “But Earth is in opposition, beyond the Sun. It’ll take over two weeks for a ship to get there, if any escapes before we seize the ports. And by the time they can get any Fleet units here, we’ll be ready for them, with men recruited—there will be plenty willing to join us—and the defenses of the major moons could stand off half a dozen battleships. They won’t dare bomb the cities because of the civilian populations—”

  “War with Earth?” cried Leila unbelievingly. That was preposterous, unheard-of.

  “Why not? In a year, two years, I’ll be stronger than Earth!”

  LEILA stared at him again. “The population of the moons is about twenty million. Earth has over three billion,” she recited as if in a classroom. “ ‘Stronger than Earth’ ?”

  “Your thinking in terms of population figures,” said Gedner, “is very crude. Don’t you know what the real strength of Earth has been for the past three hundred years? Not a mass of three billion people—but ten or a dozen battleships, the backbone of the fleet. Do you know what a star-class battleship is? A thousand feet of hull, tungsten-alloy armor ten feet thick, twenty-six-gravity mercury engines, fifteen to twenty-one atomic blast guns, a thousand tons or so of atomic explosives. Those are the surface features—but what matters is that they’re the biggest carriers and di
stributors of pure energy that have ever operated in the Solar System. And they remain effective as long as there’s atomic energy to power their weapons.”

  “I know all that,” said the girl impatiently.

  “All right. What you evidently don’t know is that right now, in the year of civilization 745, Earth is almost at the end of its supply of power metals. They’ve been importing Martian power—solar power—for the last two decades, hoarding their own dwindling stores of the heavy elements, in case of war, and at the same time trying to build up the domestice heliodynamic plants. But it’s plain that Earth hasn’t the power to fight a major war at present.”

  “A major war?” said Leila helplessly. “What makes you think it would take a major war to smash your scheme?”

  “Evidently,” said Gedner, “Doc Chaikoski didn’t tell you all he knows.”

  Leila remembered, with a queer chill, the sentence that had been interrupted by Gedner’s return. She opened her mouth and closed it without saying anything. Gedner, who had been pacing up and down paused and gave her a long, intent look.

  “I intended you to know, in any case. You’ll go with me to Kroniopolis, as soon as the Zodiac comes back . . . Leila, my love, this moon is lousy with uranium.”

  “That can’t be true!” cried Leila, but her voice shook. “The scientists—the whole theory of planetary origins—”

  “You’ve been reading your own Science and Progress supplements. Certainly, the theory says there can’t be any heavy metals on the surfaces of the major planets or their moons. But Phoebe isn’t a moon of Saturn. Look at its retrograde revolution! It wandered in a long time ago from somewhere nearer the Sun, and wherever it came from there was plenty of uranium. That’s the way Chaikoski explained it, at least. He happened onto a deposit the last time he went prospecting for jade, and once he knew what to look for, he found three more. And that’s just a sample of what there must be. With that, and the Woollies—Do you see now?”

  “Yes . . . I see,” answered Leila slowly. She raised her blond head and met Gedner’s look steadfastly. “Paul . . . did you ever read any history? About six hundred years ago, there was a man called Hitler, who had ideas a lot like yours. He got pretty far with them too, because he had the same advantages you count on: better weapons than anybody else in the world, and a whole nation of people that were almost like the Woollies, trained to obey and not to think. But what happened to him—”

  “Isn’t going to happen to me,” interrupted Gedner, unimpressed. “I’ve got enough imagination to see where history is heading now—not six hundred years ago—and the brains to make a good thing of it. Earth is done for; Saturn and Mars are going to be the next centers of the Solar System. And inside the next couple of weeks I’m going to be the boss of Saturn.” He was smiling triumphantly down at the girl as she sat in the armchair. For the moment, staggered by Gedner’s dream of conquest, Leila had forgotten her own present situation; now, with a tremor, she realized that he was very dose.

  “How are you going to like being Queen of Saturn, Leila?” he asked softly.

  “I . . . don’t know,” faltered the girl, rising stiffly, mechanically to her feet as she spoke. Gedner laid a hand on her arm, but she jerked away and retreated from him. “You’d better let me think that over.”

  Gedner’s smile twisted down at one corner; his intense gaze followed her slim figure in the scanty white costume, and his eyes narrowed. “I didn’t ask you whether you wanted to be Queen of Saturn. I asked you how you were going to like it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like my kind of a job,” said Leila. As she spoke, she was still moving cautiously away, keeping her eyes on him. But at the last moment, Gedner saw where she was going, and swore in fury as he flung himself forward.

  “The job’s yours,” he muttered, “and you start now!” She fought, but his arms were about her with a strength that seemed to equal that of the giant Woolly. When he tried to kiss her panting mouth, she bit his cheek until the blood ran, but he only laughed and swung her clear of the floor. He twisted a hand in her blond hair, pulled her head back and bent to plant a savage kiss on her throat instead.

  Suddenly the girl stopped struggling; her eyes dilated, looking past Gedner’s shoulder. In a smothered whisper she exclaimed, “Paul—look out!”

  THE urgency in her voice made him glance up; in an instant he had released her and spun around. To face Big Bill, who had silently risen half-erect and as silently advanced upon the two. The Woolly’s flat head was sunk between his shoulders; his huge three-fingered hands dangled below his shaggy knees, and almost all his resemblance to a man was lost. His red eyes glinted coldly in the bright light.

  As Gedner wheeled, Big Bill halted his stealthy approach. He reared abruptly to his full seven feet of height, then slowly raised his great mitten-like hands.

  Leila, in a dazed huddle on the floor, saw the first look of utter stupefaction on Gedner’s face replaced by one of scowling mental effort—and then by a dawning horror. Big Bill sank into a tense crouch. Then Gedner threw himself sidewise, and his hand came up with the gun; and in that instant Big Bill went for him in one terrible rolling rush.

  Before the man’s finger could jerk the firing lever, one of those huge threefingered hands closed on his forearm. There was a snapping, and the flame pistol spun away; Gedner screamed out in agony then, and once again as the Woolly lifted him into the air to smash him down against the iron floor.

  That was all. Big Bill stood quietly, a stooping white-furred figure with dangling hands, over a red thing on the floor that squirmed painfully and was still. In the silence the sobbing gasps of Leila’s own breathing rang in her ears.

  Knuckles crashed against the door panels, and Mark Paige’s voice came in, edged with anxiety—“Hey, Paul!” Leila stirred from her stunned apathy and picked herself off the floor; and then she did the bravest action of her life.

  With heart banging against her front teeth, she walked across the room and knelt beside the shattered body. The great red eyes of the Woolly looked dully down at her. Fortunately, the key was in the first and most accessible pocket.

  It took her several tries, with her back to Big Bill, to fit it into the lock. She had picked up the flame pistol and held it in her left hand, pointing away from the door at a wavering angle; that was just as well, for Paige’s headlong entry when the door slid open nearly tripped her taut nerves into pulling the trigger.

  “Hey!” said Paige again in a low voice. His eyes fell on Leila’s shaking hand, and he reached across to take the gun away from her and aim it pointblank at Big Bill. There was a strong odor of liquor on his breath, but his hand holding the pistol was perfectly steady. “Shall I shoot him?” he asked almost casually.

  Leila shook her head numbly. “I—I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  He was silent a moment, regarding the Woolly. “But we’d better get him out of here.” He gestured and frowned at Big Bill, and by sign language and telepathy made the great creature understand. Big Bill retreated to the airlock, fumbled with its controls, and rolled out into the lock. The clang of the outer door brought an involuntary sigh from Leila. One mittenlike hand had left a red smear on the opening lever. . . .

  “What happened?” inquired Paige at last.

  “I don’t know,” said Leila confusedly. Her knees had gone boneless; she sank into a chair. “It was just sitting against the wall there—” she pointed “—and then it got up and killed him.” She hesitated. “Paul seemed to be trying to control it . . . but I guess he couldn’t.”

  Paige laid the gun carefully on the desk, walked deliberately to the couch, unfolded a blanket, and went to spread it over Paul Gedner and his dream of an Empire of Saturn. The blanket could not quite cover everything.

  BIG BILL rolled ponderously through the inky Phoebean night, his huge red eyes picking an aimless path by the starlight. There was a nagging emptiness in his little mind—a vacuum left by the vanishing of Gedner’s dominant will. The vanishing
Big Bill could not explain. But he knew that he had had no thoughts that were not also those of the godlike master, no desires that were not the reflection of Gedner’s . . .

  Dimly he remembered the final scene in the humans’ dwelling. There had been a strange storm of unprecedented emotions, and Big Bill too had felt a moment of overpowering desire for the slight fairheaded human who had come in the rocket . . . And then came an instant of blind, alien fury to which Big Bill could give no name or meaning, and whose deeds he could not remember.

  Nor could he know that, mirroring Gedner’s passions, he had only felt and acted as the man would have if he, instead of the Woolly, had been the onlooker.

  He had gone mad with jealousy.

  1949

  HOSTAGE OF TOMORROW

  Was Earth on the wrong time-track? Ray Manning stared as nation smashed nation and humans ran in yelping, slavering packs under a sky pulsing with evil energy—and knew the answer lay a hundred years back. Could he return?

  IT WAS THE END OF MARCH, and the wreck of the Dritten Reich lay in colossal ruin across Europe, where people were only beginning to crawl out of their burrows to face the job of rebuilding a world for better or worse. In Germany itself, the Allied Armies, driving forward behind the iron spearheads of their aircraft and their armor, were closing in to smash the still-defiant nucleus of the old world that had been for worse.

  One column consisted of two jeeps and a canvas-backed truck, bounding and swerving at reckless speed over a rutted road that wound upward and deeper into the fir-shadowed Schwarzwald.

  “Reconnaissance,” grunted Ray Manning, between lurches of the transport truck. “They might have called it treasure hunting.”

  “Huh?” said Eddie Dugan, planted solidly and insensitively beside Manning on the jolting wooden seat. He took his eyes off the knees of the soldier opposite and searched his buddy’s face. “What’s the treasure?”