With an effort, Degnan brought his attention back to that problem. “She’ll have questions to answer, I think—” He stopped short. “Yes, send her along.”
ON THE SHORT trip to Earth, Degnan scarcely noticed the girl or anyone else; he was greedily wrapped up in studying a Los Angeles newspaper, borrowed from the lieutenant in command of the courier vessel.
He was somehow disappointed by his first real glimpse of Earth’s reaction to the interplanetary war that was only nine days old. There were many columns of “war news” but very little news. A feature article on the interceptor barrage which made Earth a fortress, and which was claimed—it seemed to Degnan not very convincingly—to be far superior to that with which Venus had surrounded itself. On the front page in boldface type a noncommittal communique from the new Combined Fleet Headquarters, Somewhere on Earth. Elsewhere, articles that hinted nebulously at the plans for a tremendous offensive being perfected by the world’s best military and scientific brains at that hidden base, whose location was secret lest the enemy concentrate some desperate, all-out thrust on it . . .
Degnan snorted, smelling a rat. He knew that there was no need to figure out an attack strategy now; the plans for offensive action against Venus under all conceivable circumstances had been ready and on file for years as a matter of simple precaution, ready to be put into effect at any moment.
Still scanning the paper, he did not notice that the messenger-boat had landed until a crewman touched his shoulder. As he rose, he saw that the port was already open and the girl had disappeared. It struck him suddenly that he had never learned her name; he scowled and told himself to forget it.
It was a sunny afternoon and the sky of Earth was blue. Outside Los Angeles Spaceport he halted on the sidewalk and blinked, almost overwhelmed by the actuality of swarming human life that went on under the shadow of Venusian war.
Gleaming traffic flowed swiftly by, with Los Angeles traffic’s traditional disregard for life and limb. The people who crowded the streets in the sunlight wore holiday faces, filled with social gaiety or smug relaxation or petty clinging worries. Among them, the frequency of uniforms, soldiers and spacemen, showed that times were something more or less than normal. But not one of them looked toward the sky in either fear or defiance.
Beside the gateway was a poster, displaying a hideous and inaccurate painting of a Venusian, its prehensile paws upraised in an unnatural pouncing pose. The caption was screamingly funny. It said: EXTERMINATORS WANTED. ENLIST TODAY!
Degnan stared at it with a curious sense of distaste. There was such a vast difference between this cartoon bogey and the reality of forty million living monsters on Venus who planned and worked coolly, purposefully with all the power of their alien, total minds, to shatter and end the carefree world of man . . .
A MAN WAS standing at his elbow, thoughtfully watching him. Degnan turned deliberately, a chill question ready in his eyes; but that evaporated as he met a familiar face. “Jay Marlin!”
The other grinned easily. “That’s right. They told me to shepherd the stray lamb back to headquarters. You look like you need an escort, too—sort of lost.”
Degnan nodded slowly, fumbling for words. “I feel like a stranger here, someway. I must have expected . . . oh, hell, I don’t know.”
Jay’s smile grew quizzically sympathetic. “You must have been through the mill, Ralph. But that’s why General Fleming is so anxious to see you. You’re the only man who was on Venus when the war began and who got back to tell us about it.”
A plain maroon sedan was waiting. Degnan sank into its cushions with a sigh of disbelief.
He said lamely, “I’ve not had time to get a report ready.”
“You’re to make it verbally to the General himself. I told you he was anxious.”
Degnan was silent. It came to him like a dash of ice water that he could report exactly nothing on the period of time they would be most interested in. Did he detect, lurking behind Jay Marlin’s unchanged friendliness, just the faintest note of watchful distrust? They would be justified in holding him in suspicion. He was forced to suspect himself, so long as that torturing twelve-day blank defied him, held its secrets though his hands clenched involuntarily and the blood pounded in his ears with the effort to remember . . .
“Sorry,” he said absently. “What’d you say?”
“I said,” repeated Jay, “we’re there.”
THE LEATHER=BROWN face of General Fleming, district chief of NAMI, was covered by a crossing, branching and interlacing system of deep wrinkles, which, as the shrewd mind behind them chose, could be amiable, stern, persuasive, ferocious or impenetrable. The General wore his impenetrable look as he listened to Ralph Degnan’s tale.
At last he said, “Is that all?”
“All I can remember,” said Degnan steadily. “As I indicated—it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten something important.”
“Um, yes.” The General switched off the recording machine that had been humming quietly on his desk, thus making the rest of the conversation private. “We’ll come back to that.” He leaned back with half-shut eyes that still watched Degnan narrowly. “The first part of your report, on the Venusian primitives, may come in handy eventually, but hardly now. Your findings are negative; we’d accomplish nothing by trying to stir up the Under Race against its masters, since it’s too backward technologically to count at all in a modern war.”
“Still,” said Degnan, “they’re people, in spite of their looks. The Over Race aren’t.”
The General gazed at him soberly. “To be perfectly frank, Colonel—in your expressed judgment of the Over Race I seem to hear a note of hysteria.”
Degnan choked back quick resentment. He said in a carefully controlled voice, “I think we’re underestimating them. I’m not a defeatist. But their conviction of their own superiority—”
The General snorted, his wrinkles ferocious. “That’s what I mean. You’ve let them get your goat. Convince you they can defeat us with occult mental powers, or some such rot!”
“Remember,” said Degnan stonily, “they have total mentality. They think consciously, logically, with their entire brains, while we use only a small part of ours for that, and the rest is unconscious mind—emotional, rather than logical.”
“That’s why I think the fact that the Venusians deliberately began this war is—well, ominous. They’re constitutionally incapable of fighting just because they’re mad. They don’t get mad. They’ve begun it because they think they can win. We outclass them in all ways of making war that we know about. So—they must be ready to make war in ways that we’ve never heard of.” Degnan drew a deep breath, curiously relieved at having brought his own buried fears into the open in plain language.
“They haven’t shown much sign of it so far. No Venusians ships, except the tub you were on, have come near our patrols for several days now. They’ve sent across a good many bombardment rockets—cheap imitations of ours, like their ships—but not a one has got through. Now, where’s their terrible secret weapon?”
“I don’t know. I do have an idea, though, about one thing they must be banking on. Our fleets were prepared long ago; why haven’t they already blasted Venus?” The General was silent, and Degnan knew he had touched a live spot. “Maybe it’s because our fleets are national, and each of our sovereign ‘United Nations’ is holding back, for fear of losing its one or two or three battleships and being at the mercy of its Earthly neighbors when Venus is licked.”
THE GENERAL squinted at him, observed in a dangerously soft tone, “You’re talking now, Colonel Degnan, about things that are out of your province and mine as well. Strategy is made by Combined Fleet Headquarters.”
“I’m on the outside, but I can still think.”
“Maybe,” said the General with an odd grimness. He made his wrinkled visage stern. “Now I’ll tell you about the Venusians’ secret weapon. Though I shouldn’t have to; you seem to be a casualty already.”
Degnan mer
ely stared at him. A moment before he had been hot with conviction; now he was cold, feeling fear contract about his heart again.
“We know what they’ve been trying to do,” rasped Fleming, “and we’re putting a stop to it. During the last twenty years, a lot of Terrestrials have been on Venus for shorter or longer periods. And off and on, especially in the last few years, we’ve been considerably irritated by their kidnaping our citizens—as you were kidnaped. Always the same pattern—grab one of our people, then release him after a while, with apologies but no explanations. And they must have got to a lot of humans without our ever knowing it.
“Now we know their aim was to work on the minds of as many Terrestrials as they could, which was probably several hundred. They’re good at psychology and that sort of thing, including hypnosis; I’ll grant they know more about that than we do. And they were using hypnosis to turn those people into traitors—so many Venusian agents—back here on Earth.”
Degnan said, fighting against a wild sinking feeling, “You can’t hypnotize a man into betraying what he believes.”
“So the psychologists tell me,” admitted the General heavily. “I’m not saying your loyalty’s been subverted, Degnan. But they did get to a lot of people who weren’t very well-balanced to begin with. We’ve been rounding them up—everybody who’s ever been on Venus gets checked and double checked. And we’ve uncovered a lot of bad eggs already. They’ve even got an organization of sorts, centering right here in Los Angeles, since most of the ships went out to Venus from here. That’s one reason you were given an escort from the field.
“In your case—you can see we’ll have to suspend you from active duty. You’ll be given an association-test before you leave this building; if its results are negative, you’ll be at liberty, but you’ll have to come back for detailed psychiatric examination and treatment if indicated.” Degnan was pale under the swarthy complexion that not even sunless Venus had been able to blanch. He moistened his lips, said numbly, “I see.”
The General rose and extended his hand. “I’m glad you understand that we can’t take any chances. No hard feelings, then?”
“No, sir,” muttered Degnan, not knowing whether he lied or not.
HE WASN’T surprised when they let him leave after the association-test; he knew enough about such things to be sure that his unhesitating responses had been the right ones. Loyalty to one’s nation is evinced by the right automatic responses to certain key words, such as “liberty”, “king”, “fatherland”, “the proletariat”; and loyalty to the species, though a deeper, truer, more instinctive thing, can be measured in the same manner.
Whatever the Venusians had done to his mind—and they had obviously done something—hadn’t affected his inmost self. They might have blanked out some of his memories and left him with post-hypnotic suggestions to remember things that had never happened, but they couldn’t have indoctrinated him.
As he paused urdecidedly in front of the NAMI building, a girl’s cool voice called, “Ralph!”
He looked up, and saw a vision of splendor—a smooth new sky-blue car, plastic top pushed back, parked by the curb in front of him, and Athalie Norton gazing at him from behind the wheel, a shadow of annoyance on her flower-pretty face that was framed by spun-gold hair.
“What’s the matter, Ralph?” she asked crisply. “Did General Fleming deafen you? Get in—you can explain on the way out to the house.”
He slid in mechanically beside her, without answering, which didn’t seem to bother her. She fed power to the gravity-thrust motor and shot the car expertly out into the traffic stream with a surge that would have spun the wheels of anything whose power was transmitted through the wheels. Degnan watched her, reflecting that Athalie did everything like that—surely, with a sort of determined violence. Her fragile blonde beauty was deceptive; behind that mask she always knew what she wanted and got it. Once upon a time she had decided she wanted Ralph Degnan.
“How,” he asked, “did you know where I was?”
Athalie smiled secretly. “I have ways—or Father has.”
Naturally, thought Degnan. Athalie’s father was a big man, with the bigness of the corporation he controlled. North American Steel. One way or another, he had made an astronomical amount of money. And Athalie was her father’s money’s child.
He wasn’t sure he was pleased to see her so soon. There were things be needed to work out alone.
“What did they want you for in such a hurry?”
“They wanted,” said Degnan grimly, “to tell me I was canned.”
She gave him a flashing sidelong glance. “How come?”
“As a psycho, practically. Since the Venusians picked me up, my memory has holes and kinks in it—so NAMI can’t trust me any more.”
The girl sighed lightly. “Well . . . that’s good. You need a vacation after all those ghastly experiences. Poor Ralph! You can stay at our place and take a good long rest.”
DEGNAN was startled by her reaction; then he remembered that his job had never meant anything to her but a minor irritation once the illusion of glamor it had had for her had. worn thin. She would gladly have made a kept husband of him; he had sworn fiercely, privately, that she never would.
“Actually,” he said carefully, “I’m suspended, indefinitely. That means until the war’s over. But . . . I’ve got a nasty feeling there may not be any world after this war, Athalie.”
She frowned daintily. “You talk like Father. Since the war started he’s gone crazy—acts like he thought he was twenty years younger, only he isn’t. They requisitioned the Azor a week ago; so he offered to remodel it with his own money. And every time I go by our landing field, I have to see what they’re doing to it—as if they couldn’t fight the Venusians without spoiling that beautiful ship! I’m sick of hearing about the war. If you can’t talk about anything else, Ralph darling, please shut up.”
“Okay,” said Degnan.
She looked at him longer this time, arching a delicate brow, and almost sideswiped a slower vehicle. “Have I offended you? I don’t want to . . .” She had taken the roadway through Elysian Park, and now she turned the power switch to “Braking” and let the car roll to a stop on a small branching driveway behind a shielding screen of trees. Then she leaned back against the cushions, and her brisk wilful self-confidence seemed gone, she was suddenly younger, softer. She breathed, “It’s been so long . . .”
Degnan wouldn’t have been human if he could have disregarded that unveiled invitation.
But when she murmured dreamily, close to his ear, “This is real, Ralph. The real thing, and all the rest, all your silly worrying and fretting—cobwebs—” the soft words stabbed him like poisoned knives, and he drew away from her, with eyes grown suddenly cold and remote.
“I don’t know, Athalie. I don’t know whether you’re as real as some of the things I’ve seen.”
“What are you talking about?”
He tried to tell her, then, about the prison ship Sheneb, the triumphant monsters and the humans whose black nightmare there had ended mercifully in a burst of atomic flame. She listened, uncomprehending, her nose wrinkling at last in disgust.
“That’s all over. You’re safe on Earth. Why not forget it?”
“I’ve forgotten too much already, I think. And I’ve got a feeling that remembering is important not just to me but to a lot of other people as well.”
The scarlet pout of her lips was childish, but her eyes were a scornful woman’s. “You think Earth won’t defeat Venus without your help? I thought they told you your help wasn’t wanted.”
That stung; he snapped, “Nothing matters to you but your own selfishness, does it?”
He’d forgotten Athalie had a temper too. “You’re the selfish one! You’d sacrifice me to some crackpot idea! Go on, spout about your patriotism or whatever it is you love more than you do me!” Once started, she didn’t give him time for breath, let alone interruption, and her rage was self-fueling. “I hate you! Get out!
Out of my car and out of my sight!”
Degnan had grown cooler as she grew furious. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’m going.”
BEFORE he was out the door, Athalie started the car with a jerk that all but sent him sprawling in the grass. He recovered his balance and watched the sky-blue machine whip out of sight beyond a tree-masked curve, as if racing to a date with a smash up:
Degnan shook his head ruefully and turned away, back toward the main road and the border of the park.
This wasn’t their first quarrel, but he had a strong feeling that it might be the last. It was too bad about Athalie, because it really wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t changed; but Degnan knew objectively that he had, since thirty hours aboard the Sheneb and since twelve days of—what?—on Venus.
The blank was still there. It must be that out of it crept the uncanny sense of urgency that was stronger and stronger upon him. Of catastrophe, vast and formless, impending unless—or if?—he, and no one else, did something he couldn’t quite remember.
As he plodded along the roadside, the scene with Athalie retreated to the back of his mind. Nevertheless, when the car eased to a stop beside him, he thought for a moment it was she, come back.
Then he saw that this car was different. An older model, black, ill-kept, its top almost opaque with dirt and scratches. It had the distinctive personality that old cars acquire, and it was somehow familiar.
But its driver was nobody Degnan had seen before. An oldish man, face marked by hard living like his machine’s finish, he leaned toward Degnan, thumb still on the button that had opened the door. “Going downtown? Climb in and save your feet.”
DEGNAN got in, muttering thanks.
As the car rolled leisurely ahead down the curving parkway, his brain clicked with sudden, belated recognition. This same battered machine had been behind them all the way out here, following with a closeness and tenacity that could hardly have been accidental—t hat obviously hadn’t been.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 33
