“Keep on scanning!” snapped Relez, but his face was ashen as he saw his dreams crumbling.
Dunu was incredulously checking the anti-ionization generator. “There’s nothing wrong here,” he reported. But the screen showed scene after scene of a carnival of destruction. The night sky was full of buzzards, flying low, playing their searchlights on the desert and raining gas and explosives on everything that lived. It was the buzzards’ moment to strike for dominance and they were making the most of it.
Dunu said frozenly, “They must have been warned by their kin on the coast, and have managed to develop an engine with a hotpoint ignition system.”
Relez muttered, looking suddenly old and weary, “It’s too bad. The people with the highest technical ingenuity—but their motivation seems to be insane hate of everything unlike them.”
“I told you so,” Ladna said bitterly. Torcred had no ears for philosophy; he had seen enough of the murder going on out there. He bounded to his feet and his knife flashed in his hand.
“One side!” he snarled at the recoiling Duru. “I’m going to smash that machine and give the rest of us a chance!”
BUT Relez had stepped between him and the generator. The color returned to his bearded features as he faced the threatening blade.
“Wait!” he cried. “Don’t wreck all your chances for peace—”
“I’ll give you peace,” said Torcred, “if you don’t get out of the way.”
Ladna was behind him, he knew, knife drawn, holding the thunderstruck assistants at bay.
Relez did not move. “I told you we possess some of the ancients’ weapons. The decision to use them belongs properly to the High Command of the Fleet—but in this case I will take it on myself.”
“You have such weapons here?”
“Yes. A bomb, which in case we were discovered here could have exploded to wipe out this place and protect our secrets. You and the girl can take one of the grounded aeros outside and carry the bomb over Buzzard Base. I’ll switch off the antiionization field for half an hour, long enough for you to go an return . . .”
“One bomb?” exclaimed Ladna scornfully. “They have thousands!”
“No more will be needed.”
Torcred’s black gaze searched Relez’ face for long moments. He read utter sincerity there, and lowered the knife.
X
THE AERO ROARED ACROSS A short stretch of sand and was airborne. It swerved, evading a buzzard squadron that was droning over, and climbed swiftly into the north.
Torcred huddled in the cramped space behind the pilot’s seat, over the little dull metal box that Relez claimed was a bomb.
He glimpsed Ladna’s face, over the dimly glowing controls; it was as if transfigured. She was tasting the joy she had thought lost to her forever, the glory of flight through the high thin air at a thousand miles an hour.
“This isn’t like crawling, is it?” she asked lightly. “Four or five minutes now, and we’ll be there.”
Torcred braced himself more firmly. “Give me thirty seconds warning.”
Presently the girl cut off the power. The machine slowed and began to swerve and buck a little as its speed approached that of sound. “Thirty seconds.”
Relez had told him how to arm the bomb. Torcred pushed the levers he had indicated, and looked doubtfully at the harmless-looking gray box. “We’re over it,” said Ladna. “The place is lit up; they’re not expecting anything else in the air. I can see buzzards taking off . . .”
Torcred, of course, could see nothing. He shoved open the emergency escape door in the floor and tipped the lead box out into the shrieking rush of air.
The engine’s sighing roar began again. He slammed the door shut and squirmed forward, into the seat beside Ladna. The little ship ran away, faster than sound or an air shock wave could follow . . .
But they saw the glare that turned desert and mountains and sky ahead white with a reflected radiance brighter than the noonday sun. For moments it lasted, then the light died and the night was dead black to their dazzled eyes.
“The ancients’ weapons were pretty potent,” said Torcred, and the girl shivered.
She made a wide circle and flew back, but they could see nothing in the valley where Buzzard Base had been. Only an immense cloud of darkness still faintly luminous at its heart, roiling slowly upward. The air was turbulent. Ladna gave the cloud a wide berth, for Relez had warned them of that.
The girl looked questioningly at Torcred. He said, “A line due south from the Salt Sea should find us the terrapins’ camp.”
Obediently Ladna made a few degrees’ turn to the west. “You still believe—”
“That Relez was right? I don’t know. But I know this—whether the men of the floating cities have their way of the world or not, they’ve started a change that must lead to more change, a new civilization . . . And I still want to help the terrapins make a place in it—first of all by teaching them that they are men.”
THE great salt lake unrolled in the moonlight and slipped away beneath the ship. They raced on over the southern reaches of the valley where they had wandered three strange days. Then in midflight the motor choked and died. The anti-ionization field had closed down again.
“Relez is in a hurry for his peace,” remarked Torcred, and they laughed a little hysterically. The ship lost altitude and the shadowy desert came up to meet them, but not before they saw, a couple of miles away, a spot of light that Torcred’s keen eyes identified as the camp of the terrapins. He breathed a sigh of relief at finding it undamaged by the buzzard raids.
“You can start educating them in the morning,” said Ladna. “Isn’t the moon lovely tonight?”
“Eh?” Torcred was jarred by the disconnectedness of her remarks. “Why wait till morning?”
She started to answer, then exclaimed and wrenched at the controls. The aero wobbled on one wing as the top of a dune slid by scant feet below; then it plowed through the next crest and pancaked into the valley beyond.
The two scrambled, shaken up but undamaged, out of the battered craft, and Torcred caught the disheveled girl in his arms.
“You’re a hopelessly bad bird,” he growled in mock rage. “Two ships you’ve smashed up inside a week!”
And he would have touched noses with her, but Ladna evaded the gesture adroitly.
“Don’t be a terrapin!” she chided. “You’ve got to learn civilized ways . . . like this . . .”
He learned.
1950
THE ULTIMATE PERIL
In this vicious war between worlds. Earth’s enemy put to use the strangest weapon of all: an involuntary traitor!
THE Sheneb was five thousand tons, built in Venusian yards as a copy, line for line, of an Earth cargo carrier. As such she had served her first few years, driving crewless between Venus and its colonies on the outer worlds.
Now she was converted. Lusterless black, absorbent not only to light but also to far longer wave lengths, hid her magnesium skin, and an atomic blast gun peered threateningly from an airless swivel turret built clumsily into her once clean-cut nose. That was for war.
For her present purpose there were other changes. The cargo decks had been stripped of all equipment and sealed off by partitions from the engine and control rooms forward. That was to protect the Venusian crew from the poisonous oxygen breathed by the prisoners in the hold.
After thirty hours in space, twenty-six under zero acceleration, the cargo decks were uninhabitable. But men, women and children still clung to life there, a tangle of bodies helplessly adrift in the fetid air. The Venusians had provided little ventilation, no light, and no waste disposal mechanism, which last was a peculiar horror in the weightlessness.
But perhaps worst of all was the darkness. It denied them the little comfort of seeing other human faces in their hell. And in the darkness no one could count the living and the dead. And if, floating in that black pit, you bumped against a rigid body, it was not worth the effort to find out whether t
he stiffness was that of death or the cramped rigidity of space sickness—not the nausea that had wrenched most of the prisoners in the first hours, but the other space sickness that was worse—zero neurosis, free-fall hysteria, any names there are for the primitive terror of falling, falling endlessly into blackness for more than an Earth day now. Very few knew how to take that sensation; many gasped and fought for a support that was not there and lapsed at last into a paralysis of fear.
Not long after acceleration had ceased, the word was passed round that Favreau, Ambassador of All the Nations, was dead. That might mean something in interplanetary politics—but here he was only one of many dead.
A woman’s voice, a girl’s by the sound of it, was sobbing and talking through sobs, trying to rouse someone named Jim—and failing.
Another voice interrupted her, speaking almost in Ralph Degnan’s ear: “Better let him be. If it’s zero neurosis, he may be luckier than we are.” Degnan recognized the voice as that of the doctor who had tried to calm and help during those first hours of darkness and crushing acceleration and terror. The doctor went on, explaining quietly, as if he were in the clinic, “In that condition blood is drawn away from the brain. It helps combat the derangement of blood pressure in free fall, that may bring on cerebral hemorrhage. Zero neurosis may be a survival mechanism.”
“Survival?” The girl-voice caught up the word, and laughed with a surprising, bitter energy. “I’ve been praying for the deflectors to fail when a meteor comes in our path.” The conversation, so close and yet invisible, irritated Ralph Degnan’s raw nerves in ways he didn’t stop to analyze. He said savagely, “If you’ve got to pray, who don’t you make it for an Earth warship? And dammit, doc—you don’t have to be scared, to live in free fall.”
IN THE silence, Degnan could hear unhurried breathing close beside him. He sensed that the doctor was trying to see him, studying the tones of his voice.
Finally, the steady voice said, “Perhaps you’re not afraid, my friend. I’m sure I am, both of now and when I try to imagine life in a prison on Neptune . . . But I think you’re upheld by another emotion that has much the same physiological effects as fear. Anger, or hate.”
“I’m waiting,” said Degnan flatly. “The Venusians never make a mistake—they think. They and their ‘total mentality’. I’m waiting.”
“There’s no chance here.”
“Maybe on Neptune, if that is where they’re taking us.”
The girl’s voice came out of the blackness, sounding frightened, uncertain. “Who are you? I don’t think you’re one of us.”
“Who’s ‘us’ ?”
“Most of the people here,” explained the doctor, “are from the colony at Ghrup Shiyap. Attached to the embassy there, as I was. Even when we heard—we hoped we’d have some diplomatic immunity. Maybe we do—they haven’t killed us outright.”
“I was a clerk in the embassy. I got the job to be with Jim—my brother.” The girl’s voice shivered. “There wasn’t any warning. Only a radio flash—and then they came for us—”
“I believe,” said the doctor soberly, “that all the Earth people on Venus were rounded up within an hour of the first news of fighting. The Over Race is efficient.”
“They were even more efficient in my case.” The others couldn’t see Degnan’s twisted grin. “They put the finger on me two weeks ago. I didn’t know the war had begun until they shoved me on board this ship.”
“We don’t know much more. It was reported that a Venusian cruiser fired at installations on the Moon, that Callisto was bombarded by Earth ships. No major engagements.”
“There will be,” said Degnan with grim confidence. “After what they’ve done, Venus is at war with every country on Earth. That makes the odds in first-class battleships alone better than thirty to their one—and in manpower, if you can call theirs that, still better. We’ll smash them.”
“I hope you’re right,” said the doctor, a queer doubtful note in his voice.
The girl asked hesitantly, “Where were you? Before they arrested you, I mean.”
“In the Gray Barrens near Ghrup Unur,” said Degnan. “Trading with the Under Race. Those are Venusians a man can deal with. Their minds work like ours.”
The doctor remarked unemotionally, “Our captors would say that’s because we’re savages, too.”
DEGNAN said nothing. His hatred of the Venusian Over Race was too deep and too precious to waste in words. But the stifled sound that did escape him must have been expressive, for the girl spoke in a new voice, rich with pity: “They must have hurt you terribly. I don’t see how anybody could live through two weeks of being their prisoner.”
It was like running into something sharp and hard in the enfolding blackness. It jarred the fierce intent anger out of him and left him feeling hollow and weak.
He said shakily, “I don’t know. I don’t remember what they did to me.” His eyes stared into the darkness until he saw points and darts of light that weren’t there.
“What’s the matter?” inquired the doctor’s even voice.
“Twelve days,” muttered Degnan hoarsely. “I’m sure of that, anyway. That long between the time they grabbed me and when they put me aboard. But I don’t know what happened in those twelve days.”
“That’s not unusual, you know. Frequently the mind rejects a memory that’s too painful.”
Degnan didn’t answer. He was groping, trying to sound out the frightening abyss that had suddenly opened in his own mind, his own memory.
“Whatever you’ve forgotten is over and done,” the doctor reminded him gently.
Degnan shook his head to clear it, said between his teeth, “Sure. That’s right. What matters now is getting out of this, back to Earth—”
He stopped, jolted by the loudness of his own voice. The darkness of the hold had grown suddenly denser with the death-stillness around. The weary murmur of voices, the fainter rustle of movement, had stopped as if everyone had become stone.
And it seemed to Degnan that he had seen a faint light flicker and vanish, but had thought it a trick of his eyes. The next moment he knew it had been real, as a chilly sibilance, like a snake’s sound, cut through the silence and came nearer.
He caught an eye-stinging whiff of formaldehyde. There were gasps of hard-held human breath, and the sighing hiss of the propulsion tubes attached to the Venusian’s body as it moved purposefully among the helplessly floating, blind Earth people. It could see, no doubt, if only dimly by infra-red in the stifling-hot hold.
DEGNAN knew by the stench that the creature was hanging very near him, motionless, for the hissing had ceased. Perhaps it was watching him and no other, with those great sightless-looking eyes whose glittering reflections under light would seem an empty fire of hell . . .
He almost screamed, and twisted convulsively like a hooked fish—which for all practical purposes he was, for a fang of hot metal had bitten through his shirt and skin at the meeting of shoulder and neck. He felt the barb grate against his collarbone and pain came flooding as he was yanked into motion through the air. Then he was drifting free again—and a hard invisible wall collided violently with him. He scrabbled at it, seeking a hold that would let him launch himself at the enemy he could not see, and the effort thrust him away from the wall to dangle helplessly in the blackness where there was no up, no down, nor any way at all, and he did not know whether the smarting in his eyes was from tears of rage or from the creature’s formaldehyde reek.
Someone whimpered like a trapped animal, and Degnan collided again—this time with something soft and moving, another human. They embraced one another by common consent, with the blind need to grasp at a stay in the spinning void. Then Degnan knew that the other was a woman; he felt her strangled sobbing and heard it in his ear, and by that sound was sure it was the girl he had been talking to a few moments ago.
“Steady,” he muttered foolishly. “Maybe it won’t—”
Something blunt and hard punched him breathtakin
gly between the shoulder-blades, and lights danced before his eyes. Some of the light persisted until he knew it was really there. The Venusian had propelled the two of them, still clinging together, through an opening door into a communication shaft, and there was dim red light in the shaft, enough that Degnan could see and reach out to snatch at the handholds fixed inside it—
He was thrust sickeningly, painfully away. They drifted along the tube toward brighter light, and as their bodies turned slowly in air, Degnan saw the Venusian following. Its hunched leggy form—which, if it had been far, far smaller, scuttling round and round in a kitchen sink, would have been merely disgusting—differed not at all from that of the Under Race, with some of whose members Degnan had talked and traded and almost made friends. But the huge compound eyes, that gave it three hundred and sixty degrees of vision, gleamed with the bale-fires of a dreadful intelligence. Or perhaps you only thought you saw in those eyes what you knew was behind them: the total mentality of the Over Race, which might be called superhuman with as much or as little justice as man’s mind could be called supercanine . . .
It had a long-hafted goad like an elephant man’s hook, with which it prodded them impatiently once more. It must be uncomfortable here. The air in the shaft was muggy-hot and stifling with formaldehyde gas, but it was humanly endurable, which meant that the Venusian, save for its breathing apparatus and the complicated protective garment that sheathed most of it, would have died in it almost equally fast from oxygen poisoning and from freezing.
There was something funny—the Venusians had gone to the trouble of exhausting their own air from this part of the ship and replacing it with something like Earth-normal. They must have some very special motive for fishing two living humans out of the hold. Degnan’s flesh crawled when he tried to guess the reasons they could have.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 31
