The Best of Clifford D. Simak

by Clifford D. Simak

  Throughout Mars it was the same.

  In a dozen places in Sandebar the voice spoke. It spoke in a dozen places, out of empty air, in Malacon and Alexon and Adebron.

  Tom Brown, vanishing into the air after his speech was done, reappeared a few minutes later in Adebron and there the police, warned of what had happened in Sandebar, opened fire upon him when he stood on a park bench to address the people. But the flames passed through and did not touch him. Tom Brown, his long white beard covering his chest, his mad eyes flashing, stood in the fiery blast that bellowed from the muzzles of the flame rifles and calmly talked.

  * * *

  The chief of police at New Chicago, Venus, called the police commissioner. "There's a guy out here in the park, just across the street. He's preaching treason. He's telling the people to overthrow the government."

  In the ground glass the police commissioner's face grew purple.

  "Arrest him," he ordered the chief. "Clap him in the jug. Do you have to call me up every time one of those fiery-eyed boys climbs a soap box? Run him in."

  "I can't," said the chief.

  The police commissioner seemed ready to explode. "You can't? Why the hell not?"

  "Well, you know that hill in the center of the park? Memorial Hill?"

  "What has a hill got to do with it?" the commissioner roared.

  "He's sitting on top of that hill. He's a thousand feet tall. His head is way up in the sky and his voice is like thunder. How can you arrest anybody like that?"

  * * *

  Everywhere in the System, revolt was flaming. New marching songs rolled out between the worlds, wild marching songs that had the note of anger in them. Weapons were brought out of hiding and polished. New standards were raised in an ever-rising tide against oppression.

  Freedom was on the march again. The right of a man to rule himself the way he chose to rule. A new declaration of independence. A Solar Magna Carta.

  There were new leaders, led by the old leaders. Led by spirits that marched across the sky. Led by voices that spoke out of the air. Led by signs and symbols and a new-born courage and a great and a deep conviction that right in the end would triumph.

  * * *

  Spencer Chambers glared at Ludwig Stutsman. "This is one time you went too far."

  "If you'd given me a free hand before, this wouldn't have been necessary," Stutsman said. "But you were soft. You made me go easy when I should have ground them down. You left the way open for all sorts of plots and schemes and leaders to develop."

  The two men faced one another, one the smooth, tawny lion, the other the snarling wolf.

  "You've built up hatred, Stutsman," Chambers said. "You are the most hated man in the Solar System. And because of you, they hate me. That wasn't my idea. I needed you because I needed an iron fist, but I needed it to use judiciously. And you have been ruthless. You've used force when conciliation was necessary."

  Stutsman sneered openly. "Still that old dream of a benevolent dictatorship. Still figuring yourself a little bronze god to be set up in every household. A dictatorship can't be run that way. You have to let them know you're boss."

  Chambers was calm again. "Argument won't do us any good now. The damage is done. Revolt is flaming through all the worlds. We have to do something."

  He looked at Craven, who was slouched in a chair beside the desk across which he and Stutsman faced each other.

  "Can you help us, doctor?" he asked.

  Craven shrugged. "Perhaps," he said acidly. "If I could only be left to my work undisturbed, instead of being dragged into these stupid conferences, I might be able to do something."

  "You already have, haven't you?" asked Chambers.

  "Very little. I've been able to blank out the televisor that Manning and Page are using, but that is all."

  "Do you have any idea where Manning and Page are?"

  "How could I know?" Craven asked. "Somewhere in space."

  "They're at the bottom of this," snarled Stutsman. "Their damned tricks and propaganda."

  "We know they're at the bottom of it," said Craven. "That's no news to us. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have this trouble now, despite your bungling. But that doesn't help us any. With this new discovery of mine I have shielded this building from their observation. They can't spy on us any more. But that's as far as I've got."

  "They televised the secret meeting of the emergency council when it met in Satellite City on Ganymede the other day," said Chambers. "The whole Jovian confederacy watched and listened to that meeting, heard our secret war plans, for fully ten minutes before the trick was discovered. Couldn't we use your shield to prevent such a situation again?"

  "Better still," suggested Stutsman, "let's shield the whole satellite. Without Manning's ghostly leaders, this revolt would collapse of its own weight."

  Craven shook his head. "It takes fifty tons of accumulators to build up that field, and a ton of fuel a day to maintain it. Just for this building alone. It would be impossible to shield a whole planet, an entire moon."

  "ANY progress on your collector field?" asked Chambers.

  "Some," Craven admitted. "I'll know in a day or two."

  "That would give us something with which to fight Manning and Page, wouldn't it?"

  "Yes," agreed Craven, "It would be something to fight them with. If I can develop that collector field, we would be able to utilize every radiation in space, from the heat wave down through the cosmics. Within the Solar System, our power would be absolutely limitless. Your accumulators depend for their power storage upon just one radiation... heat. But with this idea I have you'd use all types of radiations."

  "You say you could even put the cosmics to work?" asked Chambers. Craven nodded. "If I can do anything at all with the field, I can."

  "How?" demanded Stutsman.

  "By breaking them up, you fool. Smash the short, high-powered waves into a lot of longer, lower-powered waves." Craven swung back to face Chambers. "But don't count on it," he warned. "I haven't done it yet."

  "You have to do it," Chambers insisted.

  Craven rose from his chair, his blue eyes blazing angrily behind the heavy lenses. "How often must I tell you that you cannot hurry scientific investigation? You have to try and try... follow one tiny clue to another tiny clue. You have to be patient. You have to hope. But you cannot force the work."

  He strode from the room, slammed the door behind him.

  Chambers turned slowly in his chair to face Stutsman. His gray eyes bored into the wolfish face.

  "And now," he suggested, "suppose you tell me just why you did it."

  Stutsman's lips curled. "I suppose you would rather I had allowed those troublemakers to go ahead, consolidate their plans. There was only one thing to do--root them out, liquidate them. I did it."

  "You chose a poor time," said Chambers softly. "You would have to do something like this, just at the time when Manning is lurking around the Solar System somewhere, carrying enough power to wipe us off the face of the Earth if he wanted to."

  "That's why I did it," protested Stutsman. "I knew Manning was around. I was afraid he'd start something, so I beat him to it. I thought it would throw a scare into the people, make them afraid to follow Manning when he acted."

  "YOU have a low opinion of the human race, don't you?" Chambers said. "You think you can beat them into a mire of helplessness and fear."

  Chambers rose from his chair, pounded his desk for emphasis.

  "But you can't do it, Stutsman. Men have tried it before you, from the very dawn of history. You can destroy their homes and kill their children. You can burn them at the stake or in the electric chair, hang them or space-walk them or herd them into gas chambers. You can drive them like cattle into concentration camps, you can keep the torture racks bloody, but you can't break them.

  "Because the people always survive. Their courage is greater than the courage of any one man or group of men. They always reach the man who has oppressed them, they always tear him d
own from the place he sits, and they do not deal gently with him when they do. In the end the people always win."

  Chambers reached across the desk and caught Stutsman by the slack of the shirt. A twist of his hand tightened the fabric around Stutsman's neck. The financier thrust his face close to the wolfish scowl. "That is what is going to happen to you and me. We'll go down in history as just a couple of damn fools who tried to rule and couldn't make the grade. Thanks to you and your damned stupidity. You and your blood purges!"

  Patches of anger burned on Stutsman's cheeks. His eyes glittered and his lips were white. But his whisper was bitter mockery. "Maybe we should have coddled and humored them. Made them just so awful happy that big bad old Interplanetary had them. So they could have set up little bronze images of you in their homes. So you could have been sort of a solar god!"

  "I still think it would have been the better way." Chambers flung Stutsman from him with a straight-armed push. The man reeled and staggered across the carpeted floor. "Get out of my sight!"

  Stutsman straightened his shirt, turned and left.

  Chambers slumped into his chair, his hands grasping the arms on either side of his great body, his eyes staring out through the window from which flooded the last rays of the afternoon Sun.

  * * *

  Drums pounded in his brain... the drums of rebellion out in space, of rebellion on those other worlds... drums that were drowning out and shattering forever the dream that he had woven. He had wanted economic dictatorship... not the cold, passionless, terrible dictatorship that Stutsman typified... but one that would bring peace and prosperity and happiness to the Solar System.

  He closed his eyes and thought. Snatches of ambition, snatches of hopes... but it was useless to think, for the drums and the imagined shouting drowned out his thoughts.

  Mankind didn't give a damn for good business administration, nor a hoot for prosperity or peace or happiness. Liberty and the right to rule, the right to go risk one's neck... to climb a mountain or cross a desert or explore a swamp, the right to aim one's sights at distant stars, to fling a taunting challenge into the teeth of space, to probe with clumsy fingers and force nature to lay bare her secrets... that was what mankind wanted. That was what those men out on Mars and Venus and in the Jovian worlds were fighting for. Not against Spencer Chambers or Ludwig Stutsman or Interplanetary Power, but for the thing that drove man on and made of him a flame that others might follow. Fighting for a heritage that was first expressed when the first man growled at the entrance to his cave and dared the world to take it from him.

  Spencer Chambers closed his eyes and rocked back and forth in the tilting office chair.

  It had been a good fight, a hard fight He had had a lot of fun out of it. But he was licked, after all these years. He had held the biggest dream of any man who ever lived. Alexander and Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and those other fellows had been pikers alongside of Spencer Chambers. They had only aimed at Earthly conquest while he had reached out to grab at all the worlds. But by heaven, he'd almost made it!

  A door grated open.

  "Chambers!" said a voice.

  His feet hit the floor with a thud and he sat stiff and staring at the figure in the door.

  It was Craven and the man was excited. His glasses were slid far down on his nose, his hair was standing on end, his tie was all awry.

  "I have it!" Craven whooped, "I have it at last!"

  Hope clutched at Chambers, but he was almost afraid to speak.

  "Have what?" he whispered tensely.

  "The collector field! It was under my nose all the time, but I didn't see it!"

  Chambers was out of his chair and striding across the room. A tumult buzzed within his skull.

  Licked? Hell, he hadn't even started! He'd win yet. He'd teach the people to revolt! He'd run Manning and Page out to the end of space and push them through! It was a weird revolution. There were few battles, little blood shed. There seemed to be no secret plots. There were no skulking leaders, no passwords, nothing that in former years had marked rebellion against tyranny.

  It was a revolution carried out with utter boldness. Secret police were helpless, for it was not a secret revolution. The regular police and the troopers were helpless because the men they wanted to arrest were shadows that flitter here and there... large and substantial shadows, but impossible to seize and imprison.

  Every scheme that was hatched within the government circles was known almost at once to the ghostly leaders who stalked the land. Police detachments, armed with warrants for the arrests of men who had participated in some action which would stamp them as active rebels, found the suspects absent when they broke down the doors. Someone had warned them. Troops, hurried to points where riots had broken out, arrived to find peaceful scenes, but with evidence of recent battle. The rioters had been warned, had made their getaway.

  When the rebels struck it was always at the most opportune time, when the government was off balance or off guard.

  In the first day of the revolt, Ranthoor fell when the maddened populace, urged on by the words of a shadowy John Moore Mallory, charged the federation buildings. The government fled, leaving all records behind, to Satellite City on Ganymede.

  In the first week three Martian cities fell, but Sandebar, the capital, still held out. On Venus, Radium City was taken by the rebels within twenty-four hours after the first call to revolt had rung across the worlds, but New Chicago, the seat of government, still was in the government's hands, facing a siege.

  Government propagandists spread the word that the material energy engines were not safe. Reports were broadcast that on at least two occasions the engines had blown up, killing the men who operated them.

  But this propaganda failed to gain credence, for in the cities that were in the rebel hands, technicians were at work manufacturing and setting up the material engines. Demonstrations were given. The people saw them, saw what enormous power they developed.

  * * *

  Russ Page stared incredulously at the television screen. It seemed to be shifting back and forth. One second it held the distorted view of Satellite City on Ganymede, and the next second the view of jumbled, icy desert somewhere outside the city.

  "Look here, Greg," he said, "Something's wrong."

  Greg Manning turned away from the calculator where he had been working and stared at the screen.

  "How long has it been acting that way?" he asked.

  "Just started," said Russ.

  Greg straightened and glanced down the row of television machines. Some of them were dead, their switches closed, but on the screens of many of the others was the same effect as on this machine. Their operators were working frustratedly at the controls, trying to focus the image, bring it into sharp relief.

  "Can't seem to get a thing, sir," said one of the men. "I was working on the fueling station out on Io, and the screen just went haywire."

  "Mine seems to be all right," said another man. "I've had it on Sandebar for the last couple of hours and there's nothing wrong."

  A swift check revealed one fact. The machines, when trained on the Jovian worlds, refused to function. Anywhere else in space, however, they worked perfectly.

  Russ stoked and lit his pipe, snapped off his machine and swung around in the operator's chair.

  "Somebody's playing hell with us out around Jupiter," he stated calmly.

  "I've been expecting something like this," said Greg. "I have been afraid of this ever since Craven blanketed us out of the Interplanetary building."

  "HE really must have something this time," Russ agreed. "He's blanketing out the entire Jovian system. There's a spacefield of low intensity surrounding all of Jupiter, enclosing all the moons. He keeps shifting the intensity so that, even though we can force our way through his field, the irregular variations make it impossible to line up anything. It works, in principle, just as effectively as if we couldn't get through at all."

  Greg whistled soundlessly through suddenly bared t
eeth.

  "That takes power," he said, "and I'm afraid Craven has it. Power to burn."

  "The collector field?" asked Russ.

  Greg nodded. "A field that sucks in radiant energy. Free energy that he just reaches out and grabs. And it doesn't depend on the Sun alone. It probably makes use of every type of radiation in all of space."

  Russ slumped in his chair, smoking, his forehead wrinkled in thought.

  "If that's what he's got," he finally declared, "he's going to be hard to crack. He can suck in any radiant vibration form, any space vibration. He can shift them around, break them down and build them up. He can discharge them, direct them. He's got a vibration plant that's the handiest little war machine that ever existed."

  Greg suddenly wheeled and walked to a wall cabinet. From it he took a box and, opening it, lifted out a tiny mechanism.

  He chuckled deep in his throat. "The mechanical shadow. The little machine that always tells us where Craven is-as long as he's wearing his glasses."

  "He always wears them," said Russ crisply. "He's blind as a bat without them."

  Greg set the machine down on the table. "When we find Craven, we'll find the contraption that's blanketing Jupiter and its moons."

  Dials spun and needles quivered. Rapidly Russ jotted down the readings on a sheet of paper. At the calculator, he tapped keys, depressed the activator. The machine hummed and snarled and chuckled.

  Russ glanced at the result imprinted on the paper roll.

  "Craven is out near Jupiter," he announced. "About 75,000 miles distant from its surface, in a plane normal to the Sun's rays."

  "A spaceship," suggested Greg.

  Russ nodded. "That's the only answer."

  The two men looked at one another.

  "That's something we can get hold of," said Greg.

  He walked to the ship controls and lowered himself into the pilot's chair. A hand came out and hauled back a lever.

  The Invincible moved.

  From the engine rooms came the whine of the gigantic power plant as it built up and maintained the gravity concentration center suddenly created in front of the ship.