by Andre Norton
Inside the paratime-transposition dome, Verkan Vail turned from the body of the nighthound, which he had just dragged in, and considered the inert form of another animal—a stump-tailed, tuft-eared, tawny Canada lynx. That particular animal had already made two paratime transpositions; captured in the vast wilderness of Fifth Level North America, it had been taken to the First Level and placed in the Dhergabar Zoological Gardens, and then, requisitioned on the authority of Tortha Karf, it had been brought to the Fourth Level by Verkan Vail. It was almost at the end of all its travels.
Verkan Vail prodded the supine animal with the toe of his boot; it twitched slightly. Its feet were cross-bound with straps, but when he saw that the narcotic was wearing off, Verkan Vail snatched a syringe, parted the fur at the base of its neck, and gave it an injection. After a moment, he picked it up in his arms and carried it out to the jeep.
“All right, pussy cat,” he said, placing it under the rear seat, “this is the one-way ride. The way you’re doped up, it won’t hurt a bit.”
He went back and rummaged in the debris of the long-deserted barn. He picked up a hoe, and discarded it as too light. An old plowshare was too unhandy. He considered a grate-bar from a heating furnace, and then he found the poleax lying among a pile of worm-eaten boards. Its handle had been shortened, at some time, to about twelve inches, converting it into a heavy hatchet. He weighed it, and tried it on a block of wood, and then, making sure that the secret door was closed, he went out again and drove off.
An hour later, he returned. Opening the secret door, he carried the ruined shoulder-holster, and the straps that had bound the bobcat’s feet, and the ax, now splotched with blood and tawny cat-hairs, into the dome. Then he closed the secret room, and took a long drink from the bottle on his hip.
The job was done. He would take a hot bath, and sleep in the farmhouse till noon, and then he would return to the First Level. Maybe Tortha Karf would want him to come back here for a while. The situation on this time-line was far from satisfactory, even if the crisis threatened by Gavran Sarn’s renegade pet had been averted. The presence of a chief’s assistant might be desirable.
At least, he had a right to expect a short vacation. The claw-wounds were still smarting vexatiously. A hot bath, and a night’s sleep—He took another drink, lit his pipe, picked up his rifle and started across the yard to the house.
Private Zinkowski cradled the telephone and got up from the desk, stretching. He left the orderly room and walked across the hall to the recreation room, where the rest of the boys were loafing. Sergeant Haines, in a languid gin-rummy game with Corporal Conner, a sheriff’s deputy, and a mechanic from the service station down the road, looked up.
“Well, Sarge, I think we can write off those stock-killings,” the private said.
“Yeah?” The sergeant’s interest quickened.
“Yeah. I think the whatzit’s had it. I just got a buzz from the railroad cops at Logansport. It seems a track-walker found a dead bobcat on the Logan River branch, about a mile or so below MMY signal tower. Looks like it tangled with that night freight up-river, and came off second best. It was near chopped to hamburger.”
“MMY signal tower; that’s right below Yoder’s Crossing,” the sergeant considered. “The Strawmyer farm night-before-last, the Amrine farm last night—Yeah, that would be about right.”
“That’ll suit Steve Parker; bobcats aren’t protected, so it’s not his trouble. And they’re not a violation of State law, so it’s none of our worry,” Conner said. “Your deal, isn’t it, Sarge?” ised Sam Kane, the AP man at Logansport, that I’d let him in “Yeah. Wait a minute.” The sergeant got to his feet. “I prom-on anything new.” He got up and started for the phone. “Phantom Killer!” He blew an impolite noise.
“Well, it was a lot of excitement while it lasted,” the deputy sheriff said. “Just like that Flying Saucer thing.”
6. Galactic Security decided that this upstart planet Terra must be taught a lesson—for its own good, of course. Only the results proved to be highly surprising to both Terra and Galactic Security. Consult either Colonel Albert Baker or the Galactic Task Commander on that point.
RALPH WILLIAMS
Pax Galactica
IN NORTH AMERICA, it was a bright, cool April night when Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with.
Early Warning, as was its function, made first contact as the ships flashed up over the northwestern horizon. The first report was disbelieved, it was off the grid and too high and too fast—but it was followed almost instantly by contact from three other sites. The controller made a rough mental plot from those first few tracks and did not like it at all. He gnawed his thumbnail for about thirty seconds, and by that time the tracks were going up in plot. The sight decided him. There was no time to be wrong about this, the strangers were closing too fast, better to take a chance on looking silly than to be caught short.
He scrambled everything he had and transmitted a full alert—On the control deck of the lead ship of the second element, the captain and the task commander of the GS patrol stood watching Earth roll by them fifty miles below.
“We’re being tracked,” the watch officer said. He did not speak 124 in English, of course, nor in any Earthly tongue. As a matter of fact, he did not speak at all, as we use the term.
The task commander nodded. “Let ‘em track. This is task, not reconnaissance. They’ll have plenty of reason to know we’re here in a few minutes, anyway.”
Below, off the starboard bow, a smudge of light marking an airfield suddenly winked out. “Rather effective security they have, at that,” he added grudgingly, “considering their technical limitations.”
“Coming on first target,” the watch officer said.
The task commander glanced at the position plot and stepped over to his station. “Polka Dot Leader, Task Leader,” he said, “coming on your target. Advise on execution.”
“Polka Dot Leader, Roger,” the speaker said, “coming on target.” Thirty miles ahead, the first gleaming shape showed gaping holes along its belly as its bays slid open.
“On target,” the speaker said.
An orderly array of stubby-winged projectiles drifted leisurely out of her belly.
“All clear, 1319 and a quarter,” the speaker said.
“Roger,” the task commander said. “Rendezvous.”
The empty bays of the big silver ship blinked shut and she stuck her nose up and began to climb. Below her, her progeny dipped and swung faster and faster toward Earth, while the remainder of the formation swept past above.
The task commander studied the position plot again. “Polka Dot Two,” he said, “coming on your target.”
The radar did not at first catch the drop, but when the lead ship left formation and began to climb, the controller smelled death on its way. Without thinking twice, he ordered Bomb Warning A. He had no way of knowing what was coming, but those ships up there were certainly nuclear powered, no chemical engine could drive that high and fast, and whatever they laid would be potent. For himself, and the personnel of plot, there was nothing he could do. They had to stay and keep trying. He did not, he thought somewhat gloomily, even have time to worry about it; at that moment the first tracks on the projectiles began to come through, as they separated from the formation, and he began to be very busy.
There was no use trying for the ships themselves, they went over at five times his interceptors’ ceiling and six times their speed, he vectored everything he had in on the extrapolated drop course. Even this was useless, he soon found. As they closed with his fighters, the projectiles suddenly put on power and took evasive action. He had guessed they would, a free drop would hardly be made from that altitude and distance, but confirmation did not make him happy. The first projectile sizzled past the fighters at fifteen hundred miles an hour and streaked for the base—
Strategic Air Command alerted on the firs
t flash, and by the time the GS patrol had made its second drop the heavies were rumbling out onto the runways. They were armed and their eggs snuggled lethally in their bellies, but their pilots did not yet know their targets. Their mission was retaliatory, to get air-borne before the first strike hit them, and to see there were no bases for the enemy to return to. They would get their targets when the enemy was identified.
They never did get them. The first bomber was fifty miles out climbing on course when they got the bad news from their controller. A moment later their own radar picked up the bandit, closing fast from above. The turrets began to swivel, but they were not fast enough, they could not even track the enemy; as he flashed by at two thousand yards something flickered out to touch the big bomber, and it crumpled in on itself and lost speed and began to fall through the night just beginning to be touched by dawn.
The commanding general of SAC himself had observed the action by radar.
“Those weren’t bomb-drops,” he said. “They were fighter-drops, Fighter-bombers, probably. They’ll be here next.”
His words were prophetic. They were—
The GS patrol had flown into day, through it, and back into night again, on a course that roughly quartered the globe, by the time the last drop was made. Task Leader and Red Stripe Three pulled up to orbital altitude together and cut power. Polka Dot Leader had already made her pickup and the others were dropping down to do the same, but it would be some time before Red Stripe’s parasites completed their missions.
Reports were coming in regularly, it was already obvious that the strike would be completely successful, and the task commander was in a jovial mood. There were losses, of course, even with a ten-to-one superiority in speed and an astronomical edge in armament a planet-wide action against an alert and savagely resistant foe cannot be fought without losses, but they were well within the calculated margin the commander had sent back to base in his preliminary estimate. He had done a good, workmanlike job, and he knew it. Adequate recognition would come at base, but in the meantime he wanted to explain just how good a job it was, and he could not very well do this to military personnel; they were all below him in rank so he sought out the civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward Peoples.
“How do you like it?” he asked. “Good, fast, clean job, don’t you think? All we have to do now is pick up our chicks, seed the inhibitor, and get out.”
The Department man was somewhat dazed, he had never seen anything quite like this before. “Well, yes, I suppose so,” he said. “How many casualties do you think there will be?”
The task commander pulled at his lip, mentally extrapolating the reported losses. “Not more than twenty,” he said confidently, “just over one per cent. Very cheap, really, for a planetary action of this scope.”
“No, no,” the Department man said impatiently. “I know our own losses are light. The others, I mean, the Terrestrials, how many of those do you think we’re killing?”
“Well, I hadn’t really tried to guess,” the task commander said uneasily. He had not thought of the natives before as people, he was familiar with them, of course, from the years of observation and his briefing; but he had been thinking only in terms of installations to be destroyed.
“I suppose they’ll run rather high,” he said. “We’ve tried to avoid nonstrategic targets, but you can’t rip the heart out of a heavily militarized planet without killing people. Yes, I suppose their casualties will be heavy.”
He scratched thoughtfully at his nose. “Um-m-m . . . military crews . . . civilian personnel . . . we’re pinpointing our strikes, you understand, but population is so dense in some areas, we can’t confine fission products, vapors, dusts, and I don’t suppose they are at all well protected . . . let’s say three or four million, in all.” The Department man stared at him. “Three or four million? Do you suppose the Council knew that when they authorized this raid?”
“Of course they did,” the task commander said impatiently. “You have to remember this planet is already heavily overpopulated, well over two billion, it’s really bursting at the seams, these people breed like flies. Actually, four million is only two tenths of a per cent, or less, of the total population. A minor famine or epidemic could take that many, the next atomic war could have taken ten or twenty per cent, if we hadn’t pulled their teeth.
“It’s bad, I’ll grant you that,” he added hastily, seeing the look on the Department man’s face. “Even tragic. But you have to look at things like this rationally, from the long view. These people have to be controlled for their own good, we can’t let them just run loose to slaughter each other and perhaps even destroy the planet.
“With the advanced weapons they had, they were like idiot children playing with machine guns.”
The Pentagon was not, in the raiders’ operations, a military target. In the midst of disaster and confusion, Intelligence and Communications still functioned, if not smoothly, at least adequately. The basic picture of the raid and its effect began to shape up almost before the last raider had slid up through the atmosphere to join the formation orbiting effortlessly above.
First, there was no longer in any part of the world, so far as careful reconnaissance could determine, any store of fissionable material nor any plant for processing such material. Where these had been were now boiling pits of liquid magma, with the air above and about lethally charged with radioactive debris. Either the raiders had perfect intelligence, or they had instruments able to sniff out the stuff with uncanny precision, in either event they had got them all.
Second, most of the nuclear technicians—and this included the best technical and scientific brains in the world—had gone with their works.
Third, the raiders were extraterrestrial. They had not spared any major nation, and they were too well-armed and well-organized, they did not fit in any Earthly technology.
Whence they had come, and whither gone, no one could say with assurance, but their purpose was clear—to see that men did not again use nuclear energy for either war or peace.
Forty-eight hours later, as the inhibitor settled down from the stratosphere, a secondary interdict became manifest. Men would also no longer use chemical explosives. Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns fizzled damply and high-compression engines stalled. A ceiling had been put on the compact power available to man.
Attempts were made at censorship, the enormity of the raid’s implications were so obvious that the most stringent measures were indicated. Presses and editions were impounded, reporters locked up and even shot, a straight embargo on all nonmilitary long-distance communications was clamped down, security officers sprouted new ulcers and went sleepless. But it was too big, too sudden and unexpected, too spectacular. Even after years of indoctrination and screening and stringent regulation, there were too many poor security risks in the services, too many leaks, too many people who simply refused to understand the necessity for keeping their mouths and minds and eyes and ears closed in matters of military significance. And in every community there were the loud-mouths and wiseacres who could draw and spread conclusions from the fact that Oak Ridge and Brookhaven and Hanford and Los Alamos were hit, that their automobiles no longer ran, that guns would not shoot.
The news got out.
Men of good will had been talking disarmament for years. Now they had it, a free gift from heaven, somewhat roughly delivered but none the less effective.
After the first shock, thoughtful men everywhere began to consider what it might mean—
“It means,” Paul Bonner said, “rescue at the eleventh hour, the Marines have landed, the courier has ridden up with the reprieve.” He sipped appreciatively at his second preprandial martini. “These are very good, dear.”
His wife, curled at his feet before the fireplace, nodded complacently.
“It means,”
he continued, “men can relax and live again. Here we were, sitting on a powder magazine, the few sane ones among us at the mercy of the brainless yuts giving each other hotfeet, and now suddenly some watchful intelligence, like a careful parent, has snatched the matches away.”
“I’m going to miss our car,” his wife sighed.
“I shan’t,” Bonner said positively. “There were too many cars, too many airplanes, too much speed. Man’s machines evolved faster than he. We weren’t built to cover miles in split minutes. Now we can slow down and catch up, consolidate our gains, live at a more natural pace, take time to think and really live. I say, it’s a cheap price to pay.”
And:
“The fact of disarmament itself,” Professor Salton wrote in his diary, “is of secondary significance, and must have been adjudged so by the raiders themselves. Had they been chiefly intent on demilitarizing the planet, they would not logically have confined themselves to the targets they chose. The logic of complete demilitarization would have included the dispersal of armies in the field, and the destruction of all heavy industry which might contribute to the manufacture of munitions other than chemical and nuclear explosives. It is significant that stores of poison gas and biological warfare centers were not attacked.
“The inference can therefore be drawn that the raiders were socially sophisticated enough, and sufficiently well informed, to recognize the deep imbalance in our culture between the physical and social sciences.
“Their primary concern was to right this imbalance.”
The professor turned a page and sat for a moment with poised pen, seeing not the blank sheet before him, but the panorama of western history, developing in tracings of ever more complex scope from the first few crabbed scribblings of the Sumerians.
