by Jerry
It’s going to be my last day, he thought. My eyes are going fuzzy, and I can’t breathe right, and the throbbing’s hurting my head. Whether he lived through the night wouldn’t matter, because delirium was coming over him, and then there would be the coma, and the symbolic fight to keep him pumping and panting. I’d rather die tonight and get it over with, he thought, but they probably won’t let me go.
He heard their voices coming up the stairs . . .
“Nora tried to get them to stop it, Father, but she couldn’t get in to see anybody but the butler. He told her he’d tell Mrs. Keith, but nothing happened. It’s just as loud as before.”
“Well, as long as Donny doesn’t mind—”
“He just says that. You know how he is.”
“What’re they celebrating, Martha?”
“Young Ronald’s leaving—for pre-space training. It’s a going-away affair.” They paused in the doorway. The small priest smiled in at Donegal and nodded. He set his black bag on the floor inside, winked solemnly at the patient.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Martha. She closed the door and her footsteps wandered off down the hall.
Donegal and the young priest eyed each other warily.
“You look like hell. Donegal,” the padre offered jovially. “Feeling nasty?”
“Skip the small talk. Let’s get this routine over with.”
The priest humphed thoughtfully, sauntered across to the bed, gazed down at the old man disinterestedly. “What’s the matter? Don’t want the ‘routine’ ? Rather play it tough?”
“What’s the difference?” he growled. “Hurry up and get out. I want to hear the beast blast off.”
“You won’t be able to,” said the priest, glancing at the window, now closed again. “That’s quite a racket next door.”
“They’d better stop for it. They’d better quiet down for it. They’ll have to turn it off for five minutes or so.”
“Maybe they won’t.”
It was a new idea, and it frightened him. He liked the music, and the party’s gaiety, the nearness of youth and good times—but it hadn’t occurred to him that it wouldn’t stop so he could hear the beast.
“Don’t get upset, Donegal. You know what a blast-off sounds like.”
“But it’s the last one. The last time. I want to hear.”
“How do you know it’s the last time?”
“Hell, don’t I know when I’m kicking off?”
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s hardly your decision.”
“It’s not, eh?” Old Donegal fumed. “Well, bigawd you’d think it wasn’t. You’d think it was Martha’s and yours and that damfool medic’s. You’d think I got no say-so. Who’s doing it anyway?”
“I would guess,” Father Paul grunted sourly, “that Providence might appreciate His fair share of the credit.”
Old Donegal made a surly noise and hunched his head back into the pillow to glower.
“You want me?” the priest asked. “Or is this just a case of wifely conscience?”
“What’s the difference? Give me the business and scram.”
“No soap. Do you want the sacrament, or are you just being kind to your wife? If it’s for Martha, I’ll go now.”
Old Donegal glared at him for a time, then wilted. The priest brought his bag to the bedside.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“Bless you, son.”
“I accuse myself . . .”
Tension, anger, helplessness—they had piled up on him, and now he was feeling the after-effects. Vertigo, nausea, and the black confetti—a bad spell. The whiskey—if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is whatever you’re sorry for, maybe. But Old Donegal, you’re sorry for the wrong things, and this young jesuitical gadget wouldn’t like listening to it. I’m sorry I didn’t get it instead of Oley, and I’m sorry I fought in the war, and I’m sorry 1 can’t get out of this bed and take a belt to my daughter’s backside for making a puny whelp out of Ken, and I’m sorry 1 gave Martha such a rough time all these years—and wound up dying in a cheap flat, instead of giving her things like the Keiths had. I wish I had been a sharpster, contractor, or thief . . . instead of a common laboring spacer, whose species lost its glamor after the war.
Listen, old man, you made your soul yourself, and it’s yours. This young dispenser of oils, Substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he says, so why not let him try? Tell him the rotten messes.
“Are you finished, my son?”
Old Donegal nodded wearily, and said what he was asked to say, and heard the soft mutter of Latin that washed him inside and behind his ghostly ears . . . ego to absolvo in Nomine Patric . . . and he accepted the rest of it lying quietly in the candlelight and the red glow of the sunset through the window, while the priest anointed him and gave him Bread, and read the words of the soul in greeting its Spouse: “I was asleep, but my heart waked; it is the voice of my beloved calling: come to me my love, my dove, my undefiled . . .” and from beyond the closed window came the sarcastic wail of a clarinet painting hot slides against a rhythmic background.
It wasn’t so bad, Old Donegal thought when the priest was done. He felt like a schoolboy in a starched shirt on Sunday morning, and it wasn’t a bad feeling, though it left him weak.
The priest opened the window for him again, and re-packed his bag. “Ten minutes till blast-off,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about the racket next door.”
When he was gone, Martha came back in, and he looked at her face and was glad. She was smiling when she kissed him, and she looked less tired.
“Is it all right for me to die now?” he grunted.
“Donny, don’t start that again.”
“Where’s the boots? You promised to bring them?”
“They’re in the hall. Donny, you don’t want them.”
“I want them, and I want a drink of whiskey, and I want to hear them fire the beast.” He said it slow and hard, and he left no room for argument.
When she had got the huge boots over his shrunken feet, the magnasoles clanged against the iron bedframe and clung there, and she rolled him up so that he could look at them, and Old Donegal chuckled inside. He felt warm and clean and pleasantly dizzy.
“The whiskey, Martha, and for God’s sake, make them stop the noise till after the firing. Please!”
She went to the window and looked out for a long time. Then she came back and poured him an insignificant drink. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw Father Paul on the terrace, talking to somebody.”
“Is it time?”
She glanced at the clock, looked at him doubtfully, and nodded. “Nearly time.”
The orchestra finished a number, but the babble of laughing voices continued. Old Donegal sagged. “They won’t do it. They’re the Keiths, Martha. Why should I ruin their party?”
She turned to stare at him, slowly shook her head. He heard someone shouting, but then a trumpet started softly, introducing a new number. Martha sucked in a hurt breath, pressed her hands together, and hurried from the room.
“It’s too late,” he said after her.
Her footsteps stopped on the stairs. The trumpet was alone. Donegal listened; and there was no babble of voices, and the rest of the orchestra was silent. Only the trumpet sang—and it puzzled him, hearing the same slow bugle-notes of the call played at the lowering of the colors.
The trumpet stopped suddenly. Then he knew it had been for him.
A brief hush—then thunder came from the blast-station two miles to the west. First the low reverberation, rattling the windows, then the rising growl as
the sleek beast knifed skyward on a column of blue-white hell. It grew and grew until it drowned the distant traffic sounds and dominated the silence outside.
Quit crying, you old fool, you maudlin ass . . .
“My boots,” he whispered, “my boots . . . please . . .”
“You’ve got them on, Donny.”
He sank quietly then. He closed his eyes and let his heart go up with the beast, and he sank into the gravity padding of the blastroom, and Caid was with him, and Oley. And when Ronald Keith, III, instructed the orchestra to play Blastroom Man, after the beast’s rumble had waned, Old Donegal was on his last moon-run, and he was grinning. He’d had a good day.
Martha went to the window to stare out at the thin black trail that curled starward above the blast station through the twilight sky. Guests on the terrace were watching it too.
The doorbell rang. That would be Ken, too late. She closed the window against the chill breeze, and went back to the bed. The boots, the heavy, clumsy boots—they clung to the bedframe, with his feet half out of them. She took them off gently and set them out of company’s sight. Then she went to answer the door.
UNDERDOG
William L. Blade
Somehow, somewhere. Earth had to find the chink in the Hyadic Empire’s armor
IT WAS noon at midnight.
Beneath an actinic blue-white glare, blaring, clashing autos choked the highways. Aircars fled screaming across the skies like debris in a hurricane. Sweating, panting, dry-throated men and women-stumbled through the standing grain in the fields to escape the deadly proximity of the tall white buildings behind them.
High in the southern sky, where a glance meant blindness, there stood a tiny fierce false sun. It was a blue-hat crater blazing in the surface of the Moon, a tremendous pit of boiling rock and metal—the grave of Earth’s chief symbol of security against attack.
Ten-thirty. . . .
It was Wilbur Featherday’s deal. When he picked up his own hand he had aces and eights, with a stray deuce. Prince and Loujack knocked, and Andersen opened for two red chips. Featherday called; so did Loujack. Featherday threw away the deuce and gave Loujack three cards.
Andersen wasn’t having any. “Pat,” he announced.
Featherday dealt himself a card and put the deck down. It was quiet down here in Central Base, three hundred feet underground. The soft hum of the air conditioning was virtually the only background noise.
Featherday picked up his hand and found that he now had a full house, aces over eights. Andersen placidly dropped a stack of five blue chips into the pot. Featherday smiled and raised five blue. Loujack dropped. Andersen re-raised ten blue. Featherday started to count out chips to call. . . .
For perhaps a second after the noise started, his mind refused to interpret it. One instant there was silence, except for the clicking of his chips as he stacked them. The next, a deafening klaxon blare was battering at his brain, like the trumpet of doom.
Which it was. . . .
The cards fell from his limp fingers to the table. He stared at the three other young officers, who were suddenly so pale.
The alarm!
He stood up with what seemed stolid deliberation, and was vaguely surprised to notice that somehow his chair had got tipped over. The alarm ceased as abruptly as it had begun. His ears were ringing. Two men ran full tilt past the door of the recreation room. Somewhere distant in the bright subterranean passages there were shouts and the frenetic wailing of a siren.
“Let’s go,” Featherday said hoarsely.
The corridor was rapidly filling with men who were in a hurry—jittery non-coms and grim staff officers. A loudspeaker roared overhead: “All base personnel to attack stations! All fleet personnel report to ships!” It repeated the message behind them as they moved on, and another speaker was shouting it somewhere ahead.
From rooms which they passed along their way there came the insane chatter of teletype machines, the babble of many voices, the scuffing of innumerable hurrying feet. At the end of the corridor, high-ranking staff officers were flooding into a tremendous room—Command Central.
The four men stopped before a door displaying a recently painted cardboard sign:
Briefing Room
OPERATION VENDETTA
No Admittance
to Unauthorized Personnel
Featherday fished a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. They went inside.
FIVE minutes later, all thirty-two members of the team were there. Featherday moved over to a silver-grey rectangle and flicked a switch. Cascading colors blurred on the screen, resolved themselves into a view of grey eyes set in a stern face and broad shoulders decorated with silver stars—General Stehle, the staff officer in charge of Vendetta. The General signalled a curt “stand by” in the direction of another screen, then turned to face Featherday and briefly return his salute.
“Featherday reporting, sir. Vendetta team all present.”
“Good, Major. The tech men are servicing your ships and checking your weapons. Just stand by for orders . . .”
Stehle began to turn away, but swiveled back as Featherday failed to break off telescreen contact.
“Well?”
“Sir, could you tell us what’s up?”
“Hyadic fleet, of course,” the General snapped. “Hundred forty-four ships. About a million miles out. They’re just starting to move in.”
The screen went dead.
It was ten-forty.
Featherday pictured in his mind the precise lattice of huge spherical ships moving relentlessly towards Earth. Fortress Lunar would probably hold its fire until the range was down to a couple of hundred thousand miles. . . .
Ten-fifty. The minutes dragged on. There was no conversation in the briefing room. Each man sat or stood brooding on his private thoughts. Featherday caught himself biting a fingernail. He lit a cigarette. Despite the air conditioning, the air in the room already had a bluish tinge from tobacco smoke.
Eleven o’clock. Lunar would be opening fire any minute now, if it had not done so already. Featherday envisaged clouds of missiles cascading upward from launching ports in the surface of the Moon, spreading out, and rushing with fantastic acceleration towards the enemy fleet. Many—most of them—would flash bright and vanish in space as intercepting fire from the Hyadic ships found them. But one might—had to—get through. It would veer as its radar eye saw one of the huge metal spheres looming ahead. Its suicidal little robot brain would guide it as it flung itself straight into the steel wall of that ship’s hull. And at that instant, the matter fuse in its warhead would fire—and all the hundreds of thousands of tons of metal which made that huge vessel would convert to energy! Like a mammoth atomic bomb in the very midst of the Hyadic battle lattice, the ship would detonate, volatilizing nearby vessels and damaging the entire fleet. . . .
Surely at least one of the missiles could penetrate the defensive fire to score a hit! And yet—Featherday frowned uneasily—the armament of the Hyadic warships was a deadly unknown. . . .
How was Lunar doing?
Featherday considered calling General Stehle on the telescreen, but decided against it. The General must be very busy right now, and he was short-tempered even under normal circumstances.
AFTER a while, he opened the door to the corridor and looked out. There was some kind of commotion audible from the end of the passage, where the door to Command Central was. An impulse came to go down there and look in, but he extinguished it; he had to be here when orders arrived, which could be any second. . . .
The door of Command Central flew open and a young officer—a lieutenant—came sprinting out into the corridor. He collided obliquely with one of the walls, stumbled, and clawed blindly for support. His eyes seemed to be staring, not at the corridor, but at some terrible sight in the distance.
“What happened?” Featherday called as the man came towards him at a hurried walk.
The young officer’s face and forehead were gleaming with pe
rspiration. He seemed not to have heard the question. Featherday repeated it, louder this time: “What’s happened? Has Lunar fired yet?”
The young lieutenant turned his head slightly, as though he were noticing Featherday for the first time.
“Lunar’s gone,” he said. “Burned clean out of the Moon.” He hurried past, then looked back to scream:
“It shines like the sun!”
Featherday stood there, fury and despair slowly tightening his hands into fists. Technological inferiority, he thought. Spears against machine guns, rifles against atomic bombs. . . . Earth had just got started too late, by a few hundred years. That wasn’t long, as time went in the history of stars and planets. But it was long enough to mean the difference between a fight and a massaftre, between a free Earth and a slave-planet of the Hyadic Empire. . . .
His stomach congealed into an icy lump of fear. This was a job for Vendetta now. He and his thirty-one teammates would make their own oblique attack in the face of that superior Alanian armament. And if they failed—Earth would pay the penalty with billions of lives. . . .
“Featherday! Stehle wants you!” It was Andersen’s voice. He strode back into the briefing room and over to the telescreen. The image on the screen was not that of Stehle, however, but that of an older man. Featherday recognized him and snapped to attention.
The Chief of Staff.
General Walter W. Moore looked at Featherday through the telescreen. “Major,” he said quietly, “Fortress Lunar has been completely destroyed. None of its missiles scored a hit. Operation Vendetta is Earth’s last hope. Good luck!”
