“I come over as soon as your runner got to me,” he said. “What’s the pitch, Andy?”
“Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard, Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton. I’ll be quick because we need speed now. A Polish ship has dropped something out in the harbor. We don’t know what it is. It may be a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody’s old laundry. Obviously we’ve got to find out which—and we want you to tell us.”
Braun’s aristocratic eyebrows went up. “Me? Hell, Andy, I don’t know nothing about things like that. I’m surprised with you. I thought CIA had all the brains it needed—ain’t you got machines to tell you answers like that?”
I pointed silently to Joan, who had gone back to work the moment the introductions were over. She was still on the mike to the divers. She was saying: “What does it look like?”
“It’s just a lump of something, Dr. Hadamard. Can’t even tell its shape—it’s buried too deeply in the mud.” Cloonk ... Oing, oing ...
“Try the Geiger.”
“We did. Nothing but background.”
“Scintillation counter?”
“Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could be it’s shielded.”
“Let us do the guessing, Monig. All right, maybe it’s got a clockwork fuse that didn’t break with the impact. Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it and see if you pick up a ticking or anything that sounds like a motor running.”
* * *
There was a lag and I turned back to Braun. “As you can see, we’re stymied. This is a long shot, Mr. Braun. One throw of the dice—one show-down hand. We’ve got to have an expert call it for us—somebody with a record of hits on long shots. That’s why I called you.”
“It’s no good,” he said. He took off the Homburg, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped the hatband. “I can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“It ain’t my kind of thing,” he said. “Look, I never in my life run odds on anything that made any difference. But this makes a difference. If I guess wrong—”
“Then we’re all dead ducks. But why should you guess wrong? Your hunches have been working for sixty years now.”
Braun wiped his face. “No. You don’t get it. I wish you’d listen to me. Look, my wife and my kids are in the city. It ain’t only my life, it’s theirs, too. That’s what I care about. That’s why it’s no good. On things that matter to me, my hunches don’t work.”
I was stunned, and so, I could see, were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I should have guessed it, but it had never occurred to me.
“Ten minutes,” Cheyney said.
I looked up at Braun. He was frightened, and again I was surprised without having any right to be. I tried to keep at least my voice calm.
“Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as a favor. It’s already too late to do it any other way. And if you guess wrong, the outcome won’t be any worse than if you don’t try at all.”
“My kids,” he whispered. I don’t think he knew that he was speaking aloud. I waited.
Then his eyes seemed to come back to the present. “All right,” he said. “I told you the truth, Andy. Remember that. So—is it a bomb or ain’t it? That’s what’s up for grabs, right?”
I nodded. He closed his eyes. An unexpected stab of pure fright went down my back. Without the eyes, Braun’s face was a death mask.
The water sounds and the irregular ticking of a Geiger counter seemed to spring out from the audio speaker, four times as loud as before. I could even hear the pen of the seismograph scribbling away, until I looked at the instrument and saw that Clark had stopped it, probably long ago.
Droplets of sweat began to form along Braun’s forehead and his upper lip. The handkerchief remained crushed in his hand.
Anderton said, “Of all the fool—”
“Hush!” Joan said quietly.
Slowly, Braun opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “You guys wanted it this way. I say it’s a bomb.” He stared at us for a moment more—and then, all at once, the Timkin bearing burst. Words poured out of it. “Now you guys do something, do your job like I did mine—get my wife and kids out of there—empty the city—do something, do something!”
Anderton was already grabbing for the phone. “You’re right, Mr. Braun. If it isn’t already too late—”
Cheyney shot out a hand and caught Anderton’s telephone arm by the wrist. “Wait a minute,” he said.
“What d’you mean, ‘wait a minute’? Haven’t you already shot enough time?”
Cheyney did not let go; instead, he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, “One minute, Joan. You might as well go ahead.”
She nodded and spoke into the mike. “Monig, unscrew the cap.”
“Unscrew the cap?” the audio squawked. “But Dr. Hadamard, if that sets it off—”
“It won’t go off. That’s the one thing you can be sure it won’t do.”
“What is this?” Anderton demanded. “And what’s this deadline stuff, anyhow?”
“The cap’s off,” Monig reported. “We’re getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it’s a bomb, all right. But it hasn’t got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool mistake like that?”
“In other words, it’s a dud,” Joan said.
“That’s right, a dud.”
Now, at last, Braun wiped his face, which was quite gray. “I told you the truth,” he said grimly. “My hunches don’t work on stuff like this.”
“But they do,” I said. “I’m sorry we put you through the wringer—and you too, colonel—but we couldn’t let an opportunity like this slip. It was too good a chance for us to test how our facilities would stand up in a real bomb-drop.”
“A real drop?” Anderton said. “Are you trying to say that CIA staged this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of you!”
“No, not exactly,” I said. “The enemy’s responsible for the drop, all right. We got word last month from our man in Gdynia that they were going to do it, and that the bomb would be on board the Ludmilla. As I say, it was too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just how long it would take us to figure out the nature of the bomb—which we didn’t know in detail—after it was dropped here. So we had our people in Gdynia defuse the thing after it was put on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone.
“Actually, you see, your hunch was right on the button as far as it went. We didn’t ask you whether or not that object was a live bomb. We asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it was, and you were right.”
The expression on Braun’s face was exactly like the one he had worn while he had been searching for his decision—except that, since his eyes were open, I could see that it was directed at me. “If this was the old days,” he said in an ice-cold voice, “I might of made the colonel’s idea come true. I don’t go for tricks like this, Andy.”
“It was more than a trick,” Clark put in. “You’ll remember we had a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn’t have all the time in the world to figure out what kind of a thing had been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when the deadline ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with all the attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do.”
“So?”
“So we failed the test,” I said. “At one minute short of the deadline, Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a real drop that would have resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real; we’d never risk it. That we did do it in the test was a concession of failure—an admission that our usual methods didn’t come through for us in time.
“And that means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop ever comes, we’re going to have to have you here, as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next time it may save eight million lives.”
There was quite a long silence. All of us, Andert
on included, watched Braun intently, but his impassive face failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running.
When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney too. And perhaps it meant nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in a case history.
“It’s funny,” he said, “I was thinking of running for Congress next year from my district. But maybe this is more important.”
It was, I believe, the sigh of a man at peace with himself.
SHAMBLEAU, by C. L. Moore
“Shambleau! Ha . . . Shambleau!”
The wild hysteria of the mob rocketed from wall to wall of Lakkdarol’s narrow streets and the storming of heavy boots over the slag-red pavement made an ominous undernote to that swelling bay, “Shambleau! Shambleau!”
Northwest Smith heard it coming and stepped into the nearest doorway, laying a wary hand on his heat-gun’s grip, and his colorless eyes narrowed. Strange sounds were common enough in the streets of Earth’s latest colony on Mars — a raw, red little town where anything might happen, and very often did. But Northwest Smith, whose name is known and respected in every dive and wild outpost on a dozen wild planets, was a cautious man, despite his reputation. He set his back against the wall, gripped his pistol, and heard the rising shout come nearer and nearer.
Then into his range of vision flashed a red running figure, dodging like a hunted hare from shelter to shelter in the narrow street. It was a girl — a berry-brown girl in a single tattered garment whose scarlet burnt the eyes with its brilliance. She ran wearily, and he could hear her gasping breath from where he stood. As she came into view, he saw her hesitate and lean one hand against the wall for support and glance wildly around for shelter. She must not have seen him in the depths of the doorway, for as the bay of the mob grew louder and the pounding of feet sounded almost at the corner, she gave a despairing little moan and dodged into the recess at his very side.
When she saw him standing there, tall and leather-brown, hand on his heat-gun, she sobbed once, inarticulately, and collapsed at his feet, a huddle of burning scarlet and bare, brown limbs.
Smith had not seen her face, but she was a girl, and sweetly made and in danger; and though he had not the reputation of a chivalrous man, something in her hopeless huddle at his feet touched that chord of sympathy for the underdog that stirs in every Earthman, and he pushed her gently into the corner behind him and jerked out his gun just as the first of the running mob rounded the corner.
It was a motley crowd, Earthmen and Martians and a sprinkling of Venusian swamp men and strange, nameless denizens of unnamed planets — a typical Lakkdarol mob. When the first of them turned the corner and saw the empty street before them, there was a faltering in the rush, and the foremost spread out and began to search the doorways on both sides of the street.
“Looking for something?” Smith’s sardonic call sounded clear above the clamor of the mob.
They turned. The shouting died for a moment as they took in the scene before them — tall Earthman in the space-explorer’s leathern garb, all one color from the burning of savage suns save for the sinister pallor of his no-colored eyes in a scarred and resolute face, gun in his steady hand and the scarlet girl crouched behind him, panting.
The foremost of the crowd — a burly Earthman in tattered leather from which the Patrol insignia had been ripped away — stared for a moment with a strange expression of incredulity on his face overspreading the savage exultation of the chase. Then he let loose a deep-throated bellow, “Shambleau!” and lunged forward. Behind him the mob took up the cry again, “Shambleau! Shambleau! Shambleau!” and surged after.
Smith, lounging negligently against the wall, arms folded and gun-hand draped over his left forearm, looked incapable of swift motion, but at the leader’s first forward step the pistol swept in a practiced half-circle, and the dazzle of blue-white heat leaping from its muzzle seared an arc in the slag pavement at his feet. It was an old gesture, and not a man in the crowd but understood it. The foremost recoiled swiftly against the surge of those in the rear, and for a moment there was confusion as the two tides met and struggled. Smith’s mouth curled into a grim curve as he watched. The man in the mutilated Patrol uniform lifted a threatening fist and stepped to the very edge of the deadline, while the crowd rocked to and fro behind him.
“Are you crossing that line?” queried Smith in an ominously gentle voice.
“We want that girl!”
“Come and get her!” Recklessly, Smith grinned into the man’s face. He saw danger there, but his defiance was not the foolhardy gesture it seemed. An expert psychologist of mobs from long experience, he sensed no murder here. Not a gun had appeared in any hand in the crowd. They desired the girl with an inexplicable bloodthirstiness he was at a loss to understand, but toward himself he sensed no such fury. A mauling he might expect, but his life was in no danger. Guns would have appeared before now if they were coming out at all. So he grinned in the man’s angry face and leaned lazily against the wall.
Behind their self-appointed leader, the crowd milled impatiently, and threatening voices began to rise again. Smith heard the girl moan at his feet.
“What do you want with her?” he demanded.
“She’s Shambleau! Shambleau, you fool! Kick her out of there — we’ll take care of her!”
“I’m taking care of her,” drawled Smith.
“She’s Shambleau, I tell you! Damn your hide, man, we never let those things live! Kick her out here!”
The repeated name had no meaning to him, but Smith’s innate stubbornness rose defiantly as the crowd surged forward to the very edge of the arc, their clamor growing louder. “Shambleau! Kick her out here! Give us Shambleau! Shambleau!”
Smith dropped his indolent pose like a cloak and swung up his gun. “Keep back!” he yelled. “She’s mine! Keep back!”
He had no intention of using that heat-beam. He knew by now that they would not kill him unless he started the gunplay himself, and he did not mean to give up his life for any girl alive. But a severe mauling he expected, and he braced himself instinctively as the mob heaved within itself. To his astonishment, a thing happened then that he had never known to happen before. At his shouted defiance, the foremost of the mob — those who had heard him clearly — drew back a little, not in alarm but evidently in surprise.
The ex-Patrolman said, “Yours! She’s yours?” in a voice from which puzzlement crowded out the anger.
Smith spread his booted legs wide before the crouching figure and flourished his gun.
“Yes,” he said. “And I’m keeping her! Stand back there!”
The man stared at him wordlessly, and horror and disgust and incredulity mingled on his weather-beaten face, The incredulity triumphed for a moment and he said again, “Yours!”
Smith nodded.
The man stepped back, unutterable contempt in his very pose. He waved an arm to the crowd and said loudly, “It’s — his!” and the press of bodies began to melt away, gone silent, too, the look of contempt spreading from face to face.
The ex-Patrolman spat on the slag-paved street and turned his back. “Keep her, then,” he advised over one shoulder. “But don’t let her out again in this town!”
Smith stared in perplexity, almost open-mouthed, as the suddenly scornful mob began to break up. His mind was in a whirl. That such bloodthirsty animosity should vanish in a breath he could not believe. And the curious mingling of contempt and disgust on the faces he saw baffled him even more. Lakkdarol was anything but a puritan town — it did not enter his head for a moment that his claiming the brown girl as his own had caused that strangely shocked revulsion to spread through the crowd. No, it was something deeper-rooted than that. Instinctive, instant disgust had been in the faces he saw — they would have looked less so if he had admitted cannibalism or Pharol-worship.
And they were leaving his vicinity as swiftly as if whatever unknowing sin he had committed were
contagious. The street was emptying as rapidly as it had filled. He saw a sleek Venusian glance back over his shoulder as he turned the corner and sneer, “Shambleau!” and the word awoke a new line of speculation in Smith’s mind. Shambleau! Vaguely of French origin, it must be. And strange enough to hear it from the lips of Venusians and Martian drylanders, but it was their use of it that puzzled him more. “We never let those things live,” the ex-Patrolman had said. It reminded him dimly of something . . . an ancient line from some writing in his own tongue . . . “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” He smiled to himself at the similarity, and simultaneously was aware of the girl at, his elbow.
She has risen soundlessly. He turned to face her, sheathing his gun, and stared at first with curiosity and then in the entirely frank openness with which men regard that which is not wholly human. For she was not. He knew it at a glance, though the brown, sweet body was shaped like a woman’s and she wore the garment of scarlet — he saw it was leather — with an ease that few unhuman beings achieve toward clothing. He knew it from the moment he looked into her eyes, and a shiver of unrest went over him as he met them. They were green as young grass, with slit, feline pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and there was a look of dark, animal wisdom in their depths — that look of the beast which sees more than man.
There was no hair upon her face — neither brows nor lashes — and he would have sworn that the tight scarlet turban bound around her head covered baldness. She had three fingers and a thumb, and her feet had four digits apiece, too, and all sixteen of them were tipped with round claws that sheathed back into the flesh like a cat’s. She ran her tongue over her lips — a thin, pink, flat tongue as feline as her eyes — and spoke with difficulty. He felt that that throat and tongue had never been shaped for human speech.
“Not — afraid now,” she said softly, and her little teeth were white and pointed as a kitten’s.
The Science Fiction Megapack Page 8
