by Jerry
He took the yellow paper out of his pocket and glanced at the pasted letters again. When he was finished he knew what he had to do. He had no choice.
Lowary handed the paper to Meyers. “I’ll take care of things down the road. Perhaps you might like to read this while I’m gone,” he said. The Lieutenant looked puzzled when Lowary drove away.
The traffic was jammed just as Meyers said it was. The Sergeant in command of the squad had set up a small road block. A machine-gunner, Morgan, was sitting behind a .50 Cal. looking down the barrel. Lowary drove past them, up to the lead car.
As he threw his legs out over the side of the jeep he looked up quickly. The single multi-engine bomber was overhead, still heading South. In the distance he could see new vapor streams, much smaller, much faster. The Interceptor Command was giving chase. Lowary could see that they would be too late to save the City.
“Please let us through, Captain!” a woman near him asked. She was slender, she had been crying.
Lowary felt so helpless. He said, “There is nothing I can do. This bridge must be kept open for relief purposes. It is out of my hands.”
“You’re a murderer. You’re keeping us here to be killed.”
“There were other routes open. You should have taken—” The woman flung herself at him, beating at his chest with her thin hands. “I want to go home,” she screamed.
Lowary took her by the wrists and held her off gently. God give me strength, he prayed. It would be so easy to let her through, along with the others. They would be safe, perhaps. But he would be running the risk of losing the bridge. Everyone in the City wouldn’t die, some would survive the hell blast. They would need medical attention, supplies, food and water. They deserved that chance.
A man’s heavy voice carried above the shouts. “We can get through if we all try it at the same time. He can’t shoot us . . . he’s in the line of fire.”
Lowary hadn’t realized it, but it was true. The machine-gunners were sighting down his back. He shouted above the rising din, “It makes no difference, they’ll shoot if they have to.”
“It’s a lie,” a woman shouted. Lowary heard the whine of a powerful motor start up. “Well, I’m for giving it a try,” he heard someone far back say.
Lowary turned and faced the gunners. He could see Morgan’s strained face. The kid looked so young, yet he was the only one Lowary felt he could depend on. “If anything moves down here I want you to open fire,” he called to Morgan. “Understand?”
Morgan’s helmet nodded slowly.
Lowary turned around. The woman seemed undecided. Lowary spoke softly. “Why don’t you get down off the road, into that gully? You’ll be safe there.”
The woman’s mouth worked up and down but no words came out. Her face was white and haggard.
The radio in Lowary’s jeep began a familiar crackling sound as someone on the same frequency pressed a button on a handset.
Lowary was afraid to move. He could easily start a stampede if the civilians thought he was making the move just to get out of the line of sight of the machine gunners. Slowly, he raised his hand until it was near the .45 resting in the holster clipped to his web belt.
He waited.
“LARGO ONE—THIS IS LARGO NINE—OVER.”
Lowary edged backwards, still facing the crowd. The woman was crying now. Down the line of cars he could hear the high powered motor being gunned as it was being maneuvered out of the line. Soon it would make the attempt of running down Morgan and the others. It wouldn’t stand a chance, but the others might succeed in the confusion that would follow.
He made the decision then. Deliberately, he turned his back on the crowd and walked to the jeep.
“Don’t let him turn on that radio,” a man’s voice called. “He will warn the rest of the troops to be waiting for us.”
Lowary picked up the hand-mike. “This is Largo One,” he said. “THIS IS LARGO NINE,” the voice on the radio said. “ALL CLEAR. REPEAT. ALL CLEAR. BOOGIES CLAIM THEY WERE ON A PEACEFUL TRAINING MANEUVER AND GOT OFF COURSE,” the sender’s low laugh contained no humor. “RESUME TRAFFIC ON THE BRIDGE.”
Lowary’s hand trembled as he laid the ’mike’ on the seat. He looked up at the sky. The jet bomber had veered left, was heading out to sea, heavily escorted. Lowary took off his helmet and signaled Morgan to let the civilians through. He knew Meyers and the others had heard on their own sets.
The enemy had been testing the defenses, he knew. Another calcu-fated move in the cold war. They were probing, hitting hard with psychology. While everyone was relaxing, enjoying the reprieve, they could very well come back. That would be their way.
Lowary was lighting another cigarette when the soldier came up to him, saluted. “Lieutenant Meyers said to give this to you, sir, and to say that he was sorry if he didn’t understand before.” He handed Lowary the yellow sheet of paper.
Lowary opened the wrinkled telegram and read it again for the tenth time since that morning. CHILDREN AND I ARRIVED CITY THIS MORNING—WILL SPEND DAY SHOPPING—SEE YOU TONIGHT DARLING-LOVE—DOT.
Lowary put the telegram in his pocket carefully. “Hop in, son. I’ll give you a lift,” he said to the soldier. He looked over his shoulder, down the river. Then his eyes settled on the bridge. Finally, he said softly, “We’re going home.” His heart quickened when he said it.
END
ALIEN NIGHT
Thomas N. Scortia
Huber had a slight and bitter choice: death in five years or death at once. Then the three alien spaceships gave death an entirely new meaning!
CHAPTER I
“GET AWAY from that window!”
The words axed through Kenneth Huber’s thoughts, scattering them in jagged fragments. His muscles knotted in abrupt panic. For an instant he felt cold air on his face. His body swayed toward the deep abyss outside the open window of the Universal Building.
Far below the squat pastel buildings of Universal City sprawled in achingly sharp regularity along the broad avenues that arrowed toward the Mississippi. Then everything blurred as an invisible something seemed to push him forward.
In a black and red blanket of smothering nausea he clutched frantically for support. His fingers closed on slick insulglas, slipped—found metal, held . . .
He sank to his knees, retching, fighting for consciousness.
After an eternity, he felt Dykeman’s fingers digging savagely into his shoulders. Then there was someone on his other side, supporting him as they helped him into a chair.
“You damned fool,” Thomas Dykeman snapped, “you think we want to spend the next hour nursing you out of a ‘het’ field coma?”
Huber tried to focus on the medical executive’s green-clad figure and the vaguer mass of green behind him. After a moment he could make them out. The other man was tall and thin, almost skeletal, with thin cheekbones pressing through taut waxy skin. Max Besser, Dykeman’s assistant—whose fatal analysis had been the basis of Huber’s death sentence.
“No,” Huber said, “I wasn’t . . . I couldn’t have . . .”
“You’re damned right you couldn’t have. You sure as hell tried, though.”
Dykeman whistled two low notes and the open window panels slid swiftly shut with a thin hiss. The exec nodded silently at Besser, and the man turned to go.
“He doesn’t have to leave on my account,” Huber said.
“Max has work to do.”
As soon as Besser’s form faded through the static field that closed the room to light and noise from the neighboring ante-room, Dykeman whirled angrily.
“You should know you can’t kill yourself in Universal City! Even if the heterodyne field hadn’t stopped you, there’s an automatic net outside the window.”
What happened? Huber asked himself dully. He hadn’t meant to jump; he couldn’t have. The shock of what Dykeman had told him might have made him consider it, of course, but—No, something had seized his body, had pulled him toward that drop even as he fought it.
“Not by their own hands, particularly,” Dykeman said.
He slapped a bulky folder on his desk.
“The next damned thing, you’ll be trying to join a hunt club.”
“Maybe that’s better than living through five years of a lingering death,” Huber said.
HE FLEXED his fingers and rubbed them along his leg. The orthoion of the harlequin costume he wore felt hot and slick to the touch. His hand reached out and closed absently on the grotesque mask he had deposited earlier on the chair-side table. The tiny bells on the hood tinkled faintly.
“My God, Dyke,” he said fiercely, “outside that window there are fifty thousand people who come to Universal City every twenty-five years so that Universal Insurance can pump some more of its patent juice into their veins and assure them of another quarter century of life. If one of them smashes himself up in an accident anywhere on the continent, your android emergency squads are on hand in minutes to patch him up. Every city is so peppered with safety devices like your window net that a man can’t scratch his finger. You’ve ended suicides with the heterodyne field you broadcast from this building and a thousand others in other cities. The moment the abnormal brain pattern preceding suicide forms, the field knocks a man out. The only way a man can die in this world of yours is through an accident in some out-of-the-way place or if someone deliberately kills him in a hunt.”
“The Company does everything it can to preserve life,” Dykeman said tiredly. “As for the hunt clubs . . .”
“Sure,” Huber said, “eventually you’ll work down that little list on your desk and eliminate one of the last two sources of death in this world of yours.”
Dykeman looked at the folder, opened it and fanned the three papers inside over the desk.
“Don’t you think that’s desirable?” he asked. “Why did you agree to collect the names for us if you didn’t?” Huber shrugged sullenly. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a lot of things now.
“Damn it, Ken, you know I’d give anything to help.”
“That’s small comfort.”
“We just don’t know a thing about Touzinsky’s syndrome. We know it has something to do with the body’s retention of iron, that there’s a breakdown in the ability of the body’s storage protein, apoferritin, to bind the iron as ferritin, but that’s all.”
“What’s the matter with the Company’s research program?”
The medic snorted, rose and paced to the window. “With ten research men on the continent? You’re a fine example of what we’re up against. What are you? What’s your field?”
“You know that. Thermonuclear engineering.”
“Ever work at it?”
“Well . . .”
“Skip it. I know the answer already. And the same thing is true with the other drones in the world outside. Why waste the years studying when the android technicians carry out the world’s work just as well?”
“Whoever said work was a virtue?”
“Bah. That’s the guiding principle of this back-to-the-womb age. You were content to risk your life, spying on the hunt clubs, even before you knew you’ll die in five years anyway. But you’re not willing to invest any of your life in breaking this strait jacket we’ve crammed the world into.”
“You’re the guy who asked me to help with the hunt clubs,” Huber said ironically. “Remember the big speech about stamping out this last brutality, this hunting of men by men for the mere stupidity of excitement?”
Dykeman stood silently for a moment, staring out the window. Over his shoulder Huber could see the first pale luminescence playing over the pastel walls of the city below as night approached. He saw a lone ram-jet helio-copter beat its sluggish way across the city and he knew that the first scattering of costumed people must already be filling the streets for the night-long carnival that marked the end of the five-day examination period.
“What I do officially,” Dykeman said at last, “and what I happen to believe are not always the same.”
“About that there’s no argument,” Huber said tiredly as he secured the harlequin mask from the table. He paused and eyed the reports on Dykeman’s desk. Now he no longer had even that to distract him from the nagging fear of lingering death . . .
It wasn’t fair. Why him?
“Look,” Dykeman said. “There’s nothing we can do. We can’t plan everything in the world.”
“You try hard enough.”
“Nobody said the Company was God,” Dykeman said angrily.
“No one states the obvious,” Huber snapped, and passed through the static field as the medic’s answer passed his lips. The static field cut off anything he might have said.
BESER was lounging in a low chair near the door, but Huber brushed past him with only a nod. He passed through the hall and threw himself into the induction shaft. As he fell slowly down the length of the shaft toward the ground floor, a thought struck him about Besser. How had he known to come into the office when he did, if no noise penetrated the static screen? Probably some hidden eavesdropping gadget of Dykeman’s, installed for just such an emergency.
For seconds he wondered dispiritedly what the chances were of the induction field failing, to hurl him the last seventy floors to sudden death at the bottom of the shaft, or of sudden increase in heat from the induced fields, searing his body, turning it into a crisped blackened thing. He had heard of such accidents in the early days of the fields, before the frequency of the magneto-gravitic spectrum could be so rigidly controlled.
He was halfway across the broad plaza before Universal Building when he stopped. He stood eying the great statue of Meintrup, standing heroically holding in his hand a symbolic representation of the double peptide molecule of the longevity serum he had given the world. Huber felt a sudden overwhelming hate for the massive titanium image. He stood silently cursing the cold heroic face far above him.
The smothering depression settled on him again. There was only one way out, he realized, one end to this choking blackness that enveloped him.
He moved quickly to one of the bordering beltways, pushing through the small knot of people gossiping near the entrance accelerator. He moved quickly to a faster belt and changed direction once as he approached downtown. He didn’t get off until he reached the Cafe Duval.
In the aluminum-canopied restaurant, he found a table and ordered a scotch and water from the blue-skinned android waiter. Blank eyes stared blindly ahead as blue lips told him where he could find the vidox booth.
After he had pressed the dial setting, he waited until the screen blurred and colors swirled across its face. No image appeared, but a voice said:
“Vital statistics.”
“I want the birth date of Leroy G. Sanger,” he said.
After a moment the voice said, “July 24, 1846.”
He checked the small notebook in his pocket to make sure that the countersign was the correct one for the date. Then he said, “Kenneth Huber.”
The colors on the screen formed into an image of a blond young man with blue eyes and outstanding ears. “Hunt, Ken?”
“That’s right, Vic,” Huber said. Vic Wortman was the secretary of the local hunt club he’d joined a month before in order to spy on their activities for Dykeman. By day, Wortman was a responsible Company executive; the hunt club was a secret vice for him.
“Well,” he said, consulting what apparently was a file below Huber’s vision, “we have a couple in your test group in Universal City tonight.”
He looked up.
“You’re quarry this time.”
“I know.”
“Okay. You’ll wait one hour for your contact before moving away. The weapons choice is yours.”
“No restrictions,” Huber said.
“No restrictions?” Wortman’s voice sounded surprised. “Any choice is agreeable?”
“That’s right.”
“But this throws the advantage all toward your opponent, Ken. Knowledge of identity, choice of weapons. That’s equivalent to signing your own death warrant.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Yes, but—”
“Damn it, Vic,” he said. “You’ve got to abide by the rules. Tell your man I’ll be in the Cafe Duval for an hour. Let him come and kill me if he can.”
CHAPTER II
GOD, how he hated them all!
Huber sat watching the crowd eddy in and out among the tables of the cafe. Looking out past the aluminum canopy he could see the silver needle of the Universal Building, knifing the night sky, surrounded by a brilliant glow. A sudden loathing for the structure and what it meant to these vacant people filled him.
Almost three-quarters of an hour had passed, he saw from his watch; more than enough time for contact. Furtively he scanned the adjacent tables, looking for his hunter.
The gray-haired man in the woolen tunic? The thin aquiline-nosed clown in the domino mask? No, he was too interested in the black-haired girl across from him. The lantern-jawed soldier with the bright purple sash across his chest and the highly rouged cheeks?
Huber paused. The gray-haired man was eying him from the comer of his eye. Maybe . . . There was no doubt of it. Huber turned abruptly and caught the man looking full at him. The contact of eyes brought a twist to his stomach. They were killer eyes.
His killer.
He rose unsteadily to his feet and started for the sidewalk in front of the cafe. The man rose slowly and followed.
A ragged undulating line of masquers blocked the street, twisting like a many-segmented snake. Hot bodies pressed against him, and there was the heavy scent of perfume and perspiration in the air. He heard the shrill laughter of women and the heavy bull laughter of a man near at hand.
Huber felt panic, then, at what was happening to him. A sudden eddy of the crowd caught him up as he saw the man’s head bobbing above the crowd. He lost him for a moment and then he found him again.
