Futilely he wished that they had not been at the council which had decided it, that knowledge of it had not been necessary for them to do a complete scout of the situation for General Balantine. If no word of this came to the Saturnians, then this planet might be wholly cleared of the enemy with one lightning blow by space and land.
Suddenly De Wolf discovered that he had been wondering for a long time about his daughter, who had been reported by his wife as having a case of measles. Angrily he yanked his mind from such a fatal course. He could not allow himself to be human, to know that people would sorrow if he went. He was part of an army and as part of that army, he had no right to personality or self. He was here, he could not fail, he could not let Morrison fail!
If only that drop would stop falling!
It was both relief and agony when the light went on once more. The captain had no conception of the amount of time which had passed, was only conscious of the misery of his body and the determination not to fail.
The door swung open and a dark-hooded Saturnian infantryman stood there. An officer beyond him beckoned and said, “We want a word with Morrison, the flight officer, if you please.”
Not until Morrison had been gone an hour or more did Captain de Wolf begin to crumble within. The irregular, loud drop, the continued shocks of a body sweating in the hot air and then touching the icy metal, the fact that Morrison . . .
The man was not a regular; he was a civilian less than a year in the service. Unlike Captain de Wolf, he was not a personality molded into a military machine, and a civilian, having earned a personality of his own through the necessity to seek for self, could not be drawn too far down the road of agony without breaking.
Captain de Wolf, sick with physical and nervous discomfort, was ground down further by his fear that Morrison would crack. And as time went by and Morrison was not returned, De Wolf became convinced.
Surging up at last, he battered at the door. No answer came to him; the lock was steadfast. Wildly he turned and beat at the plates of the cell, and not until pain reached his consciousness from his bloodied fists did he realize the danger in which he stood. He himself was cracking. He stilled the will to scream at the dropping water. He carefully took himself in hand and felt the light die in his eyes.
He had no hope of escape. The Saturnians would be too clever for that. But he could no longer trust himself to wait, and he used his time by examining the whole of this cell. The walls were huge, unyielding plates and there was no window; but, passing back and forth, he repeatedly felt the roughness of a grate underfoot. This he finally investigated, a gesture more than a hope. For this served as the room’s only plumbing and was foul and odorous and could lead nowhere save into a sewage pipe.
For the space of several loud and shattering drops, De Wolf stood crouched, loose grate in hand, filled with disbelief. For there was a faint ray of light reflected from somewhere below, and in that light it could be seen that there was room enough to pass through!
Suddenly crafty, he listened at the door. Then, with quick, sure motions, he slid into the foul hole and pulled the grate into place over his head. The light, not yet seen, was beckoning to him at the end of a tunnel in which he could just crouch.
He crawled in the muck for two hundred feet before he came to the light, and here he stopped, staring upward. The hope in him flickered, waned and nearly vanished in a tidal wave of despair. For the light came from an upper grate fourteen feet above the floor of the tunnel, far out of reach upon a slimy, unflawed wall. He tried to leap for it and fell back, slipping and cruelly banging his head as he dropped.
Again he took solid hold of himself. He forced his trained mind to think, forced his trained body to obey. He stood a long way back from himself and critically observed his actions and impulses as though he was something besides a man and the man was on parade.
He looked farther along the tunnel and fumbled his way away from the light. He was sure he would have another outlet presented to him by fate. He could not be led this far without some recompense. And he felt in the top of the tunnel for a grate which might lead out through an empty cell. The tunnel curved and then a new sound made him fumble before he took another step. There was a drop there, an emptiness which might extend ten feet or a hundred. He had to return or chance it.
The water which sluggishly gurgled about his ankles spilled over the soft lip of the hole and dropped soundlessly. Suddenly he was filled with sickness and panic and premonition. This foul trap into which he had ventured hemmed him close, imprisoned him, would embrace him for some awesome purpose and never give him up.
He forced himself into line. He froze his terror. He dropped blindly over the lip of the hole.
He was not shaken, for he had dropped less than six feet and the bottom was soft. He crouched, his emotions clashing, disgust and relief. And then when he looked about him again he felt the mad surge of hope, for there was light ahead!
Floundering and splashing and steadying himself against the walls, he gained the bend and saw the blinding force of daylight. For some little while he could not look directly at it nor could his wits embrace the whole of the promise that light offered. But at last, when his pupils were contracted to normal and his realization distilled into reason, he went forward and looked down. Once more his hope died. Here was a sheer drop of nearly a hundred feet, a cliff face which offered no slightest hold, greased by the sewage and worn smooth by the water.
Clinging forlornly to the edge, he scanned the great dome of the military base a mile overhead, scanned the cluster of metal huts on the plain before him, watched far-off dots which were soldiers. There was a roar overhead and he drew back lest he be seen by the small scout plane which cruised beneath the dome. When its sound had faded he again ventured a glance out, looking up to make sure he was not seen from above. And once more hope flared.
For the wall above this opening offered grips in the form of projecting stones, and the climb was less than twenty feet!
It was difficult to swing out of the opening and grab the first rock. It took courage to so expose himself to the sentries who, though two thousand yards away, could pick him easily off the wall if they noticed him.
The rock he grabbed came loose in his hand and he nearly hurtled down the cliff. He crouched, panting, defiled, wearied beyond endurance with the sudden shock of it. And then he stood off from himself again and snarled a command to go on and up.
The next rock he trusted held, and in a moment he was glued to the face of the sheer wall, making weary muscles respond to orders. Why he was tired he did not understand, for he had done no great amount of physical exertion. But rock by rock, as he went up, his energy flooded from him and left him in a hazed realm of semiconsciousness which threatened uncaring surrender. He rested for longer and longer intervals between lifts, and what had been twenty feet seemed to stretch to a tortured infinity.
He could not believe that he had come within two feet of the top; but, staring up, he saw that he should believe it. A savage will took hold of him and he reached out for the next handhold. It did not exist.
He fumbled and groped across the smooth face above him. He stretched to reach the lip so near him. And then he realized that, near as he was, he could not go farther. Already his bleeding hands refused to hold beyond the next few seconds. A foot slipped and in sweating terror he wildly clawed for his hold.
His right hand slipped loose. A red haze of strain covered his vision. One foot came free and the tendons of his right arm were stretched to the snapping point. He knew he was going, knew that he would fall, knew that Morrison would sell an army to the gods of slaughter— His right hand numbed and lost its grip and he started to fall.
There was a wrench which tore muscles and nerves, and something was around his wrist. He was not falling. He was dangling over emptiness and something had him from above!
They pulled him up over the edge and dr
opped him in an exhausted, broken huddle upon the gravel of the small plateau. And at last, when he opened his eyes, it was to see the grinning face of the intelligence officer and the stolid guards.
“Usually,” said the intelligence officer, in an offhand voice, “they make it up and over by tearing a grip out of the cliff with their fingernails. You, however, are of a much more delicate nervous structure, it seems. I rather thought you’d fail where you did. One gets to know these things after some practice.”
Captain de Wolf lay where they had dropped him. A dull haze of beaten anger clouded his sight and then dropped away from him and left him naked, filthy and alone among his country’s enemies.
Diffidently the guards picked him up and lugged him toward the small buildings. They took him down a corridor and into a large, strange room. Glad to be quit of this, they put him in a chair and strapped his wrists down. Captain de Wolf made no resistance. He did not look up.
The intelligence officer walked gracefully back and forth, slowly touring the room. He stopped and lighted a cigarette. “It was really quite useless, that escape of yours,” he said. “Your friend Morrison talked to the limit of his knowledge. He gave us troops, divisions to be used, state of equipment, general battle plan, in fact everything but two small facts which he did not know.” He came nearer to De Wolf. “He was not able to recall the time of the attack or the assembly point after it had succeeded—if it did succeed. You are to give us that data, for, as a staff officer, you of course know. Brauls! Make ready with No. 4!”
Captain de Wolf tried to rally. He tried to feel rage against Morrison. He tried to realize that an army would perish because of this day’s work. He could not think, could not feel. They were rolling some kind of machine toward him, and the wriggly thing called Brauls was adjusting something on it. “I won’t tell you anything,” said De Wolf leadenly.
A dog was pulled out of a cage and placed on a table where it was strapped down. It whimpered and tried to lick at the hand of the soldier who did the work. Brauls, face hidden in a hood, worked expertly with a little track. On this was a small car having two high sides and neither back nor front; it ran on a little track which had been widened to accommodate the width of the dog.
Brauls touched a button and from jets on either side of the car small streams shot forth with sudden ferocity. These jets sprayed water under tremendous hydraulic pressure, jets which would cut wood faster than any saw and which hissed hungrily as they began to roll toward the dog.
Captain de Wolf tried to drop his eyes. He could not. The little car crept up on the dog and then the jets began to carve away, a fraction of an inch at a time— De Wolf managed to look away. The shrieks of agony which came from the dog carved through De Wolf.
“I won’t tell you anything,” he said.
They stretched out his arm and fixed the track on either side of it. They started the car toward his outstretched hand. Fixedly he watched it coming.
To the persuasive drawl of the intelligence officer he said, “I won’t tell you anything.”
A few hours later the intelligence officer was making out his report. He stopped after he had written the caption and the date and gazed at his long, sharp fingernails stained with nicotine. Then he sighed and resumed his writing.
INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Base 34d Mercury
Adsama 452
Today interrogated two officers captured from Earth reconnaissance plane, Captain Forrester de Wolf and Flight Officer Morrison.
Captain de Wolf, under procedure twenty-three escape tactic, revealed nothing. Later he was given procedures forty-five, ninety-seven, twenty-one and six. He died without talking.
Flight Officer Morrison was taken from the cell to the chamber. He was very combative. Procedures forty-five, ninety-seven and six were employed. Despite state of subject he was able to get at the automatic of the guard in a moment of carelessness and succeeded in retaining it even after he was shot. Rather than risk the divulgence of data, Flight Officer Morrison blew out his brains. The guard is under arrest.
From this attempt and the stubbornness of the enemy, I conclude that there may be some attack in the making but, as our own scouts have discovered nothing, I do not expect it in this quarter for some time.
Drau Shadma
Captain, Saturnian Imperials
Intelligence
At headquarters of the Third Space Army, United States of Earth, General Balantine sat massively at his field desk impatiently going through a sheaf of reports.
“Belts!” he brayed at an aide. “Tell Colonel Strawn that whether he thinks regulation hold-down belts are useless or not his troops will wear them and parade with them!”
“Yessir,” said the aide timidly. He had a report in his hand and was not very anxious to give it.
“Well?” said General Balantine sharply. “What have you there?”
“It’s a report, sir. Captain de Wolf and Flight Officer Morrison are missing on reconnaissance. They are unreported for a day and a half.”
“Morrison? De Wolf? Oh, yes, De Wolf.” General Balantine was perfectly silent for a moment. Then, in an altered tone: “Morrison . . . Morrison. I don’t know the man. I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” He was silent again, so that his abrupt return to activity was the more startling.
“Post an order for a council of officers. And have another aide appointed to me. Dammit, that was a neat plan of attack, too.”
“You’re changing the plan, sir?”
General Balantine snorted. “They’ll wear those hold-down safety belts. I’ll change that plan of attack. I don’t know—can’t know—what the Saturnians found out. I don’t think De Wolf . . . but it makes no difference. I’d have to know and that’s impossible. There’s time to change. Post that notice.”
The Invaders
The Invaders
THE landing prison ship hovered a space above the field as though arrested by the titanic battle in progress below, but in reality only waiting for the assembly of a securing crew.
The Crystal Mines, beyond the mystery of the Black Nebula and in a world unlike anything anywhere in space outside, rippled in the waves of heat and shuddered under the rapid impact of fast-firing arc cannon. A desolate and grim outpost, the last despair of convicts for seventy-five years, the latest hope of a fuel-starved empire of space, racked continually by attack.
The Crystal Mines, where disgraced officers came to battle through their last days against forces which had as yet defied both analysis and weapon. Heartbreak and misery and war beneath a roof of steel and upon strangely quivering ground, amid vapors and gasses which put commas and then periods to the lives of the luckless criminals sent here as a punishment transcending in violence even slow execution.
Gedso Ion Brown stood at the port in awed silence, caught by the unleashed fury in the scene below and forgetting even the danger and mystery of their course into this place. For here below had come to being things more strange than any described in the folklore of any planet in a setting which he realized no man could adequately describe.
Below were metal blocks, the mine barracks and offices, sufficient to house half a million men. They crept up the side of a concave cliff like a stairway until they nearly touched the embedded edge of the mine roof. Curving down into the white stones of the valley was a spun silica wall a hundred meters high, studded at thirty-pace intervals by cannon turrets. The mine, the roof, the wall, all were contained in an immense cavern which was reached through a hundred-and-eighty-kilometer tunnel seven kilometers in diameter. This huge inner chamber was perhaps seventy-five kilometers wide and two hundred long and had its own ceiling fourteen kilometers above the uneven floor.
The light had no apparent source, seeming to exude from cliffs and ceiling and ground, possibly from the perfectly formed sharp boulders the size of ships, strewn everywhere, lodged everywhere, even hanging fr
om the ceiling. These were a translucent white and constituted the product of the mine.
Up and down the wall went the lashing trajectories of the arc cannon, raking over the scorched and smoking ground, reaching in hysterical fury at the lumbering attackers.
Gedso Ion Brown put a pocket glass to his eye and looked wonderingly at the scene. He had heard here and there through space that such things had existed. He had reserved judgment, for one could never tell what tale might next crawl through the vast spaces of the Empire. But the descriptions he had heard, probably because no man ever came back from the Crystal Mines unless he was a high officer, had been gross underestimates.
Gedso Ion Brown closed his pocket glass and put it into his shabby tunic. He was not of delicate constitution and he had been near too many battles to become shaky about anything. Further, nervousness was not part of his temperament. But he did not want to look at those things.
The spaceship was settling down to the charred landing field with its miserable cargo and Gedso Ion Brown turned back to his pinched cabin, one of the only two which had no leg irons included, to pack his slender belongings. A little later he shuffled down a gangway and put his trunk on the ground and looked about for someone to tell him where his quarters were. But there was no one interested in him and so he stood with his baggy uniform blowing about his ungainly body, feeling unwelcome and forlorn.
A mass gangway to his right, like a leg of a rusty beetle, was crowded with the sullen freight brought here each trip. Convicts, emaciated and ragged and chafed by irons, were being herded into trucks by surly and ruthless guards. A regiment of criminal soldiers, branded by their black collars and lack of hand weapons, were forming under the ship’s belly.
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 4
