The Science Fiction Megapack

by Bova, Ben; Brown, Frederic

  “Please—” Erick began in a quavering voice, but the Leiter cut him off.

  “I’ll do the talking. Who are you three? What are you doing here? Speak up.”

  “We—we are going back to our village,” Erick muttered, staring down, his hands folded. “We were in the City, and now we are going home.”

  One of the soldiers spoke into a mouthpiece. He clicked it off and put it away.

  “Come with me,” the Leiter said. “We’re taking you in. Hurry along.”

  “In? Back to the City?”

  One of the soldiers laughed. “The City is gone,” he said. “All that’s left of it you can put in the palm of your hand.”

  “But what happened?” Mara said.

  “No one knows. Come on, hurry it up!”

  There was a sound. A soldier came quickly out of the darkness. “A Senior Leiter,” he said. “Coming this way.” He disappeared again.

  * * *

  “A Senior Leiter.” The soldiers stood waiting, standing at a respectful attention. A moment later the Senior Leiter stepped into the light, a black-clad old man, his ancient face thin and hard, like a bird’s, eyes bright and alert. He looked from Erick to Jan.

  “Who are these people?” he demanded.

  “Villagers going back home.”

  “No, they’re not. They don’t stand like villagers. Villagers slump—diet, poor food. These people are not villagers. I myself came from the hills, and I know.”

  He stepped close to Erick, looking keenly into his face. “Who are you? Look at his chin—he never shaved with a sharpened stone! Something is wrong here.”

  In his hand a rod of pale fire flashed. “The City is gone, and with it at least half the Leiter Council. It is very strange, a flash, then heat, and a wind. But it was not fission. I am puzzled. All at once the City has vanished. Nothing is left but a depression in the sand.”

  “We’ll take them in,” the other Leiter said. “Soldiers, surround them. Make certain that—”

  “Run!” Erick cried. He struck out, knocking the rod from the Senior Leiter’s hand. They were all running, soldiers shouting, flashing their lights, stumbling against each other in the darkness. Erick dropped to his knees, groping frantically in the bushes. His fingers closed over the handle of the case and he leaped up. In Terran he shouted to Mara and Jan.

  “Hurry! To the car! Run!” He set off, down the slope, stumbling through the darkness. He could hear soldiers behind him, soldiers running and falling. A body collided against him and he struck out. Someplace behind him there was a hiss, and a section of the slope went up in flames. The Leiter’s rod—

  “Erick,” Mara cried from the darkness. He ran toward her. Suddenly he slipped, falling on a stone. Confusion and firing. The sound of excited voices.

  “Erick, is that you?” Jan caught hold of him, helping him up. “The car. It’s over here. Where’s Mara?”

  “I’m here,” Mara’s voice came. “Over here, by the car.”

  A light flashed. A tree went up in a puff of fire, and Erick felt the singe of the heat against his face. He and Jan made their way toward the girl. Mara’s hand caught his in the darkness.

  “Now the car,” Erick said. “If they haven’t got to it.” He slid down the slope into the ravine, fumbling in the darkness, reaching and holding onto the handle of the case. Reaching, reaching—

  He touched something cold and smooth. Metal, a metal door handle. Relief flooded through him. “I’ve found it! Jan, get inside. Mara, come on.” He pushed Jan past him, into the car. Mara slipped in after Jan, her small agile body crowding in beside him.

  “Stop!” a voice shouted from above. “There’s no use hiding in that ravine. We’ll get you! Come up and—”

  The sound of voices was drowned out by the roar of the car’s motor. A moment later they shot into the darkness, the car rising into the air. Treetops broke and cracked under them as Erick turned the car from side to side, avoiding the groping shafts of pale light from below, the last furious thrusts from the two Leiters and their soldiers.

  Then they were away, above the trees, high in the air, gaining speed each moment, leaving the knot of Martians far behind.

  “Toward Marsport,” Jan said to Erick. “Right?”

  Erick nodded. “Yes. We’ll land outside the field, in the hills. We can change back to our regular clothing there, our commercial clothing. Damn it—we’ll be lucky if we can get there in time for the ship.”

  “The last ship,” Mara whispered, her chest rising and falling. “What if we don’t get there in time?”

  Erick looked down at the leather case in his lap. “We’ll have to get there,” he murmured. “We must!”

  * * *

  For a long time there was silence. Thacher stared at Erickson. The older man was leaning back in his chair, sipping a little of his drink. Mara and Jan were silent.

  “So you didn’t destroy the City,” Thacher said. “You didn’t destroy it at all. You shrank it down and put it in a glass globe, in a paperweight. And now you’re salesmen again, with a sample case of office supplies!”

  Erickson smiled. He opened the briefcase and reaching into it he brought out the glass globe paperweight. He held it up, looking into it. “Yes, we stole the City from the Martians. That’s how we got by the lie detector. It was true that we knew nothing about a destroyed City.”

  “But why?” Thacher said. “Why steal a City? Why not merely bomb it?”

  “Ransom,” Mara said fervently, gazing into the globe, her dark eyes bright. “Their biggest City, half of their Council—in Erick’s hand!”

  “Mars will have to do what Terra asks,” Erickson said. “Now Terra will be able to make her commercial demands felt. Maybe there won’t even be a war. Perhaps Terra will get her way without fighting.” Still smiling, he put the globe back into the briefcase and locked it.

  “Quite a story,” Thacher said. “What an amazing process, reduction of size— A whole City reduced to microscopic dimensions. Amazing. No wonder you were able to escape. With such daring as that, no one could hope to stop you.”

  He looked down at the briefcase on the floor. Underneath them the jets murmured and vibrated evenly, as the ship moved through space toward distant Terra.

  “We still have quite a way to go,” Jan said. “You’ve heard our story, Thacher. Why not tell us yours? What sort of line are you in? What’s your business?”

  “Yes,” Mara said. “What do you do?”

  “What do I do?” Thacher said. “Well, if you like, I’ll show you.” He reached into his coat and brought out something. Something that flashed and glinted, something slender. A rod of pale fire.

  The three stared at it. Sickened shock settled over them slowly.

  Thacher held the rod loosely, calmly, pointing it at Erickson. “We knew you three were on this ship,” he said. “There was no doubt of that. But we did not know what had become of the City. My theory was that the City had not been destroyed at all, that something else had happened to it. Council instruments measured a sudden loss of mass in that area, a decrease equal to the mass of the City. Somehow the City had been spirited away, not destroyed. But I could not convince the other Council Leiters of it. I had to follow you alone.”

  Thacher turned a little, nodding to the men sitting at the bar. The men rose at once, coming toward the table.

  “A very interesting process you have. Mars will benefit a great deal from it. Perhaps it will even turn the tide in our favor. When we return to Marsport I wish to begin work on it at once. And now, if you will please pass me the briefcase—”

  THE JUPITER WEAPON, by Charles L. Fontenay

  Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick’s head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs.

  Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupi
ter’s View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted.

  A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick’s friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself.

  Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm.

  Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her.

  There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion.

  His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him.

  “Help me!” she cried. “Please help me!”

  He began to back away from her.

  “I can’t,” he muttered in a deep voice. “I can’t help you. I can’t do anything.”

  * * *

  The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted:

  “Kregg!”

  The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face.

  Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer.

  Exactly what happened, Trella wasn’t sure. She had the impression that Kregg’s fist connected squarely with the short man’s chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn’t have been, because the short man wasn’t moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist.

  “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I hit the damn bar!”

  At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg’s head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella’s arm, released her and ran for the door.

  Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly.

  “Get out!” rumbled the bartender. “I’ll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!”

  Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick’s side.

  “That means you, too, lady,” said the bartender beside her. “You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn’t to have come here in the first place.”

  “May I help you, Miss?” asked a deep, resonant voice behind her.

  She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face.

  She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn’t,” he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. “But no one will bother you on the street if I’m with you.”

  “A lot of protection you’d be if they did!” she snapped. “But I’m desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me.”

  * * *

  The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth’s moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn’t like the looks of the men she saw.

  The transparent dome of Jupiter’s View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky.

  “I’m Quest Mansard, Miss,” said her companion. “I’m just in from Jupiter.”

  “I’m Trella Nuspar,” she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. “You mean Io, don’t you—or Moon Five?”

  “No,” he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. “I meant Jupiter.”

  “You’re lying,” she said flatly. “No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again.”

  “My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it,” he said soberly. “I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?”

  “I certainly have,” she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. “He developed the surgiscope, didn’t he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost.”

  “It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully,” said Quest. “He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet.”

  She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down.

  “If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn’t anyone ever hear from him again?” she demanded.

  “Because,” said Quest, “his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship’s drive was.”

  “Jupiter strength,” she murmured, looking him over coolly. “You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn’t bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs.”

  He flushed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s something I couldn’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not that I’m afraid, but there’s something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone.”

  Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn’t help being what he was.

  * * *

  They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn’t far. They walked on.

  Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop.

  “I landed here only a week ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. “I’m heading for Earth on the next spaceship.”

  “We’ll be traveling companions, then,” she said. “I’m going back on that ship, too.”

  For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father’s notebooks and take them back to Earth.

  * * *

  Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest.

  As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him.

  Now t
his did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.

  She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward.

  The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille.

  “Jakdane,” she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in days gone by, “I need a chaperon this trip, and you’re ideal for the job.”

  “I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I’m getting old,” he answered, laughing. “What’s your trouble, Trella?”

  “I’m in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I’m not sure I ought to be,” she confessed. “I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth.”

  “If it’s to keep you out of another fellow’s clutches, I’m your man,” agreed Jakdane heartily. “I always had a mind to save you for myself. I’ll guarantee you won’t have a moment alone with him the whole trip.”

  “You don’t have to be that thorough about it,” she protested hastily. “I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I’ll holler for help.”

  The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship’s tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it.

  She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard’s son knowing about it.