The 35th Golden Age of Science Fiction: Keith Laumer

by Keith Laumer

  “It should take about fifteen minutes for the fire to burn through the rope,” Brett said. “Then the wagon will fall and dump the hot coals in the gasoline. By then it will have spread all over the surface and flowed down side tunnels into other parts of the cavern system.”

  “But it may not get them all.”

  “It will get some of them. It’s the best we can do right now. You get the fire going in the wagon; I’ll start this one up.”

  Dhuva sniffed the air. “That fluid,” he said. “We know it in Wavly as phlogistoneum. The wealthy use it for cooking.”

  “We’ll use it to cook Gels.” Brett struck a match. The fire leaped up, smoking. Dhuva watched, struck his match awkwardly, started his blaze. They stood for a moment watching. The nylon curled and blackened, melting in the heat.

  “We’d better get moving,” Brett said. “It doesn’t look as though it will last fifteen minutes.”

  They stepped out into the street. Behind them wisps of smoke curled from the door. Dhuva seized Brett’s arm. “Look!”

  Half a block away the fat man in the panama hat strode toward them at the head of a group of men in grey flannel. “That’s him!” the fat man shouted, “the one I told you about. I knew the scoundrel would be back!” He slowed, eyeing Brett and Dhuva warily.

  “You’d better get away from here, fast!” Brett called. “There’ll be an explosion in a few minutes—”

  “Smoke!” the fat man yelped. “Fire! They’ve set fire to the city! There it is! pouring out of the window…and the door!” He started forward. Brett yanked the pistol from the holster, thumbed back the hammer.

  “Stop right there!” he barked. “For your own good I’m telling you to run. I don’t care about that crowd of golems you’ve collected, but I’d hate to see a real human get hurt—even a cowardly one like you.”

  “These are honest citizens,” the fat man gasped, standing, staring at the gun. “You won’t get away with this. We all know you. You’ll be dealt with …”

  “We’re going now. And you’re going too.”

  “You can’t kill us all,” the fat man said. He licked his lips. “We won’t let you destroy our city.”

  * * * *

  As the fat man turned to exhort his followers Brett fired, once twice, three times. Three golems fell on their faces. The fat man whirled.

  “Devil!” he shrieked. “A killer is abroad!” He charged, mouth open. Brett ducked aside, tripped the fat man. He fell heavily, slamming his face against the pavement. The golems surged forward. Brett and Dhuva slammed punches to the sternum, took clumsy blows on the shoulder, back, chest. Golems fell. Brett ducked a wild swing, toppled his attacker, turned to see Dhuva deal with the last of the dummies. The fat man sat in the street, dabbing at his bleeding nose, the panama still in place.

  “Get up,” Brett commanded. “There’s no time left.”

  “You’ve killed them. Killed them all …” The fat man got to his feet, then turned suddenly and plunged for the door from which a cloud of smoke poured. Brett hauled him back. He and Dhuva started off, dragging the struggling man between them. They had gone a block when their prisoner, with a sudden frantic jerk, freed himself, set off at a run for the fire.

  “Let him go!” Dhuva cried. “It’s too late to go back!”

  The fat man leaped fallen golems, wrestled with the door, disappeared into the smoke. Brett and Dhuva sprinted for the corner. As they rounded it a tremendous blast shook the street. The pavement before them quivered, opened in a wide crack. A ten-foot section dropped from view. They skirted the gaping hole, dashed for safety as the facades along the street cracked, fell in clouds of dust. The street trembled under a second explosion. Cracks opened, dust rising in puffs from the long wavering lines. Masonry collapsed around them. They put their heads down and ran.

  * * * *

  Winded, Brett and Dhuva walked through the empty streets of the city. Behind them, smoke blackened the sky. Embers floated down around them. The odor of burning Gel was carried on the wind. The late sun shone on the blank pavement. A lone golem in a tasseled fez, left over from the morning’s parade, leaned stiffly against a lamp post, eyes blank. Empty cars sat in driveways. TV antennae stood forlornly against the sunset.

  “That place looks lived-in,” said Brett, indicating an open apartment window with a curtain billowing above a potted geranium. “I’ll take a look.”

  He came back shaking his head. “They were all in the TV room. They looked so natural at first; I mean, they didn’t look up or anything when I walked in. I turned the set off. The electricity is still working anyway. Wonder how long it will last?”

  They turned down a residential street. Underfoot the pavement trembled at a distant blast. They skirted a crack, kept going. Occasional golems stood in awkward poses or lay across sidewalks. One, clad in black, tilted awkwardly in a gothic entry of fretted stone work. “I guess there won’t be any church this Sunday,” said Brett.

  He halted before a brown brick apartment house. An untended hose welled on a patch of sickly lawn. Brett went to the door, stood listening, then went in. Across the room the still figure of a woman sat in a rocker. A curl stirred on her smooth forehead. A flicker of expression seemed to cross the lined face. Brett started forward. “Don’t be afraid. You can come with us—”

  He stopped. A flapping window-shade cast restless shadows on the still golem features on which dust was already settling. Brett turned away, shaking his head.

  “All of them,” he said. “It’s as though they were snipped out of paper. When the Gels died their dummies died with them.”

  “Why?” said Dhuva. “What does it all mean?”

  “Mean?” said Brett. He shook his head, started off again along the street. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the way things are.”

  * * * *

  Brett sat in a deserted Cadillac, tuning the radio.

  “…anybody hear me?” said a plaintive voice from the speaker. “This is Ab Gullorian, at the Twin Spires. Looks like I’m the only one left alive. Can anybody hear me?”

  Brett tuned. “…been asking the wrong questions… looking for the Final Fact. Now these are strange matters, brothers. But if a flower blooms, what man shall ask why? What lore do we seek in a symphony…?”

  He twisted the knob again. “…Kansas City. Not more than half a dozen of us. And the dead! Piled all over the place. But it’s a funny thing: Doc Potter started to do an autopsy—”

  Brett turned the knob. “…CQ, CQ, CQ. This is Hollip Quate, calling CQ, CQ. There’s been a disaster here at Port Wanderlust. We need—”

  “Take Jesus into your hearts,” another station urged.

  “…to base,” the radio said faintly, with much crackling. “Lunar Observatory to base. Come in, Lunar Control. This is Commander McVee of the Lunar Detachment, sole survivor—”

  “…hello, Hollip Quate? Hollip Quate? This is Kansas City calling. Say, where did you say you were calling from…?”

  “It looks as though both of us had a lot of mistaken ideas about the world outside,” said Brett. “Most of these stations sound as though they might as well be coming from Mars.”

  “I don’t understand where the voices come from,” Dhuva said. “But all the places they name are strange to me… except the Twin Spires.”

  “I’ve heard of Kansas City,” Brett said, “but none of the other ones.”

  The ground trembled. A low rumble rolled. “Another one,” Brett said. He switched off the radio, tried the starter. It groaned, turned over. The engine caught, sputtered, then ran smoothly.

  “Get in, Dhuva. We might as well ride. Which way do we go to get out of this place?”

  “The wall lies in that direction,” said Dhuva. “But I don’t know about a gate.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” said Brett. “This whole p
lace is going to collapse before long. We really started something. I suppose other underground storage tanks caught—and gas lines, too.”

  A building ahead cracked, fell in a heap of pulverized plaster. The car bucked as a blast sent a ripple down the street. A manhole cover popped up, clattered a few feet, dropped from sight. Brett swerved, gunned the car. It leaped over rubble, roared along the littered pavement. Brett looked in the rear-view mirror. A block behind them the street ended. Smoke and dust rose from the immense pit.

  “We just missed it that time!” he called. “How far to the wall?”

  “Not far! Turn here …”

  Brett rounded the corner with a shrieking of tires. Ahead the grey wall rose up, blank, featureless.

  “This is a dead end!” Brett shouted.

  “We’d better get out and run for it—”

  “No time! I’m going to ram the wall! Maybe I can knock a hole in it.”

  * * * *

  Dhuva crouched; teeth gritted, Brett held the accelerator to the floor, roared straight toward the wall. The heavy car shot across the last few yards, struck—

  And burst through a curtain of canvas into a field of dry stalks.

  Brett steered the car in a wide curve to halt and look back. A blackened panama hat floated down, settled among the stalks. Smoke poured up in a dense cloud from behind the canvas wall. A fetid stench pervaded the air.

  “That finishes that, I guess,” Brett said.

  “I don’t know. Look there.”

  Brett turned. Far across the dry field columns of smoke rose from the ground.

  “The whole thing’s undermined,” Brett said. “How far does it go?”

  “No telling. But we’d better be off. Perhaps we can get beyond the edge of it. Not that it matters. We’re all that’s left …”

  “You sound like the fat man,” Brett said. “But why should we be so surprised to find out the truth? After all, we never saw it before. All we knew—or thought we knew—was what they told us. The moon, the other side of the world, a distant city… or even the next town. How do we really know what’s there… unless we go and see for ourselves? Does a goldfish in his bowl know what the ocean is like?”

  “Where did they come from, those Gels? How much of the world have they undermined? What about Wavly? Is it a golem country too? The Duke…and all the people I knew?”

  “I don’t know, Dhuva. I’ve been wondering about the people in Casperton. Like Doc Welch. I used to see him in the street with his little black bag. I always thought it was full of pills and scalpels; but maybe it really had zebra’s tails and toad’s eyes in it. Maybe he’s really a magician on his way to cast spells against demons. Maybe the people I used to see hurrying to catch the bus every morning weren’t really going to the office. Maybe they go down into caves and chip away at the foundations of things. Maybe they go up on rooftops and put on rainbow-colored robes and fly away. I used to pass by a bank in Casperton: a big grey stone building with little curtains over the bottom half of the windows. I never go in there. I don’t have anything to do in a bank. I’ve always thought it was full of bankers, banking… Now I don’t know. It could be anything …”

  “That’s why I’m afraid,” Dhuva said. “It could be anything.”

  “Things aren’t really any different than they were,” said Brett, “…except that now we know.” He turned the big car out across the field toward Casperton.

  “I don’t know what we’ll find when we get back. Aunt Haicey, Pretty-Lee… But there’s only one way to find out.”

  The moon rose as the car bumped westward, raising a trail of dust against the luminous sky of evening.

  END AS A HERO

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1963.

  I

  In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.

  I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.

  I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn’t easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst.…

  There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary’s trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again.…

  * * * *

  I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn’t anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn’t amputated. I wasn’t complaining.

  As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool—if I survived.

  I was still a long way from home, and I hadn’t yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.

  I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I shouldn’t have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar’s CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.

  I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the “acknowledge” came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle’s face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.

  “Granthan!” he burst out. “Where are the others? What happened out there?” I turned him down to a mutter.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’ll tell you. Recorders going?” I didn’t wait for an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:

  “Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh—I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.”

  I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle’s reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.

  “—your report. I won’t mince words. They’re wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?”

  “How the hell do I know?” I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle’s voice was droning on:

  “…you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You’ve
told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.

  “This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of—what’s that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I’d be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.

  “I’m sorry, Granthan. I can’t let you land on Earth. I can’t accept the risk.”

  “What do I do now?” I stormed. “Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!”

  Presently Kayle replied. “Yes,” he said. “You’ll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to…ah… restudy the situation.” He didn’t meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He’d spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn’t really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I’d have to go along and pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn’t know I’d been condemned to death.

  II

  I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn’t survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn’t take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.

  I wasn’t, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan’s fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren’t brilliant, but they were mine, all mine.…

  But how could I be sure of that?

  Maybe there was something in Kayle’s suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering—not at a conscious level.

  But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn’t just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.