“Guns?”
“Yes, of course. One 6-inch gun to a side. With two rods at each of the other ports.”
“But, Josef!” Franz climbed down from his stool and limped toward his brother. “Armament is forbidden! The government would never accept our ship if it were designed for war!”
Dr. Linkman lighted a cigar. He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke at Franz. His lips curled in a sardonic grin.
“My little Franz,” he murmured. “My little, innocent brother.” He stared hard at the younger man until Franz’s eyes dropped guiltily.
“Did you think,” Linkman went on with extreme gentleness, “that I was really developing this ship for the government? That I was going to give the greatest thing in history to this government that has killed our Leader and destroyed his teaching?”
“But I … I thought—”
“Yes?” Linkman took a step forward. “You thought what?” “That you … you had changed. That you believed in the new government—”
“Ah.” Linkman threw back his head. “I am a success, indeed, for I have deluded my own brother.”
He stepped forward again, until he was very close to Franz. He reached down and tilted the other’s chin up.
“My boy,” he said softly, “this government will never know of your ship—until it and thousands like it come back from the stars to destroy them. We leave in a few days. For Venus or Mars—there to set up the Leader’s government! In your ship … in our ship, for although you are weak and feeble, you are still one of us!”
There was a discreet tap at the door. Linkman turned. A grimy workman stood at rigid attention.
“Your pardon, my general,” he said, “but the prisoner demands to see you.
“I’ll come along shortly,” Linkman answered.
Franz stared wide-eyed as the workman saluted, then withdrew. “Yes,” grinned his brother. “An old soldier of mine. As all of them are. They follow me to a new world.”
He reached out and grasped the boy’s shoulders, dug his fingers in deep.
“You may come, too, if you like,” he said softly. “Otherwise—well, the invaders must not be able to follow me.” He gave the boy a push. “Get busy on those gun mounts. I must visit that prisoner—our great director, Mr. Oliver!”
Franz slumped there against the table, dazed and sick. His first reaction was one of fear for his brother. His brother kidnapped Mr. Oliver—they would execute him for that. No—his brother was going to the Moon—or was it Mars—and there would be war again.
He moved weakly toward the door.
They would take him with them. Take him to the New World. He shook his head. No. Long ago, before his people had lost their war, he had known. Known with the wisdom of childhood that only his brother’s eminence had kept him, crippled Franz, alive. There was no place for cripples in a state of supermen.
He peered out of the door. He did not know Oliver. But Oliver’s government had allowed him to go to school and study the mathematics that he loved. He saw his brother go to the door of an abandoned tool closet and open it.
Mark Oliver looked up and focused his eyes on Linkman. “I wish a drink of water,” he said slowly and clearly.
“Sorry, I haven’t time.” Linkman laughed at his own humor.
“Give me a drink. Then let me out of here.”
Linkman’s laugh reverberated throughout the tiny room.
Oliver forced himself to concentrate. He licked his bruised lips with a swollen tongue. It was hard to talk.
“You are really going through with this madness?”
“Certainly.”
Oliver closed his eyes, then forced them open.
“I have made a mistake in you,” he said thickly. “A great mistake.” “You are all such fools,” Linkman said casually.
“Not … not such as you. You … will always fail.”
“Even now?” Chuckled Linkman.
“You will do something … make some mistake … your kind doesn’t know—” Oliver fainted. He did not feel it as Linkman kicked him before he went out.
“I wish, general,” Blake, Director of Police, said irritably, “you would stop that confounded pacing!”
General McClernand took two steps to the facsimile receiver, then three to the electrofile, then two back to the director’s desk. He bent over Blake’s desk and thrust out his lower lip.
“Then do something!” he bellowed.
Blake ran a hand through his gray hair.
“General,” he said patiently, “will you either shut up or give me some evidence?”
He gestured toward Hastings, who was manipulating a file separator. “His report on the discharged workmen is the only concrete, factual bit of knowledge anybody has given me in the whole affair! Anything new, son?”
Hastings shrugged.
“Not yet, sir.”
The director beat his palm with a hard fist.
“That’s it, General Mac. I have nothing to go on!” McClernand shoved a pipe in his mouth and bit hard. The bowl came loose in his hand. He hurled the wreckage to the floor. “You … you’re just like the rest—soft! You can’t do anything!” Blake cursed.
“I put a secret operative on Linkman. Against the law, of course, but you asked me to. The man disappeared before turning in a single report. Hastings has dug up enough information to bring before Mr. Oliver. But Mr. Oliver disappears. So—again on your say-so—I sent two Civil Guards to search Linkman’s factory. They couldn’t find a thing!”
He leaned back in his chair and scowled at McClernand.
“The whole thing rests upon your personal dislike of Dr. Linkman. A dislike completely unsupported by factual evidence!”
“Humph! Do you like him?”
“No. I served on your staff—remember?” He grinned wryly. “But damn it, General Mac, we made these laws and we’ve got to obey them!”
Hastings stopped feeding cards into the separator.
“Ah, gentlemen,” he ventured, “speaking outside the law, now, I think we are right in suspecting Dr. Linkman. My investigations have convinced me that his behavior mold is too set, his basic inclinations too well directed, to ever admit the possibility of fundamental change in his character.”
“Which means, Mac,” came a tired voice from the doorway, “that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Just as you said.”
The three turned as though on a single axis.
Oliver leaned against the door jamb. His battered lips tried to grin as they rushed to him. McClernand reached him first. “Where you hurt?” he growled.
Hastings pushed a chair forward.
“I’m all right,” Oliver said. “Some brandy, Blake, if you please. Round up all the men you can. Mac, call out the whole Civil Guard. We’re going over to Zellercraft—in a hurry!”
“So it was Linkman!” cried the general.
“Yes.” Oliver stood up. His eyes were clear again. “Prepare for a shock, gentlemen. Linkman’s crippled brother has designed a rocketship for interplanetary travel. Linkman has built the ship in his factory!”
They stared.
“Yes, it’s true.” Oliver rubbed his aching head. “Linkman plans to conquer another planet.”
Hastings nodded.
“Part of his proper pattern,” he said.
Blake clicked off the phone he’d been using.
“Car’s ready for us.” He smiled vaguely. “I don’t believe this, chief, but I’m at your orders.”
“I don’t believe it, either,” said McClernand.
“It’s true. I’ve seen it. I called at Linkman’s office—just after he’d finished killing a man—”
“My man.” Blake’s voice was quiet. “Let’s go.”
“Not Oliver,” grunted McClemand.
Oliver took a shaky step toward the door.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I’m going. This is partly my fault�
�—and wholly our fault. I imagine our engineers laughed at the crippled boy when he submitted his designs.”
He took another, firmer step.
“I can make it. No arguments, Mac. Remember, I rank you.” Their car spiraled up to a traffic-tree span and shot along toward me factory.
“Just what did happen to you?” asked Blake.
“They held me prisoner in an abandoned lower level of the plant,” Oliver answered. “The ship’s there. I think, somehow, it will work.”
“To think they should have invented it,” murmured Hastings.
“No.” Oliver leaned out of the car window and took a deep breath of the night air. “The boy is one of us. He thought he was building it for us—to prove it could be done, you know. Today, his brother told him the truth. Tonight, he helped me get away.”
“Here we are,” said Blake. “There’s a car of Guards!” McClernand peered over the side.
“Take the main ramp off the span,” he said. “I see some people out on their testing field.”
“They can’t be starting already!” cried Oliver. “Hurry, Blake!” They piled out of the car before it was fully stopped. Blake gave a low whistle and the Guards came running up. The great gate was locked, but a flamer blasted it. They surged through and rushed toward the building.
“Wait!” called Blake. “What’s that on the ground?”
“No lights, now,” ordered McClernand.
“I can see,” grunted Oliver. “It’s young Linkman.”
Despite the pain in his ribs he knelt by the prone figure. The cripple lifted his head a little.
“Director!” he cried weakly. “Josef forced me to tell … I helped you … then he shot me. They are taking my ship … auxiliary motor only until they … they—”
The twisted body collapsed. Oliver reached forward and touched the big head. Then he rose to his feet.
“Come on,” he said.
There was a throbbing roar from the other side of the building The gleaming snout of the rocketship raised itself slowly above the roofline. They ran around the side of the building to the testing field. But they were too late.
“Fire, damn it!” bellowed McClemand.
The Guards gave a ragged volley. ‘They could not miss, but the small shells exploded harmlessly against the sides of the ship.
“After all, they built it to ward off meteors,” said Oliver.
“Some of you phone Aerial Defense,” barked McClernand. “Blake, have a man get through to Grauheim Field and have every ship go up.”
“Go ahead,” Oliver said, “but we’ll never catch them. Once they get high enough for rockets—”
“Then to the devil with them!” snarled McClernand.
Oliver watched the ship lunge skyward, auxiliary props making a furious drone.
“No,” he said. “Don’t you see, Mac, they’ll be back!”
“Bah, they’ll never make it!”
“Yes, they will. Look what Linkman himself has done. They’ll make it—unless we stop them again.”
They stared at each other, each with eyes that saw something other than the man before him. A sky filled with wheeling, diving planes, mining bombs on this white, immaculate city they had helped build. This, and all other cities, smashed by tanks, scarred with bombs beyond the recognition of peaceful eyes.
Oliver turned away slowly and his eye caught the row of new planes. Linkman had not bothered to cover them against the dew. He stared at them. Mail planes, standing sleek and trim, lined up for an initial test. Something clicked in his mind. He looked over his shoulder at the giant rocketship, then ran toward the planes.
“Hey!” yelled McClemand.
He took a step, then broke into a run. But he was old. Oliver reached a plane, slid open a port and jumped in. The elevator motor roared and the plane shot up.
McClernand stopped, panting. Blake and Hastings came alongside him and stared skyward.
“What’s he going to do?” asked Blake, although he knew.
“Ram it, of course.” Hastings’ voice was as expressionless as ever. “Only way to stop it, you know.”
The plane’s drive turned over, then roared into life. It seemed to leap forward in the air. A Guard came out of the plant office, stopped short and looked up. Searchlights went on over the city, picked out the rocketship easily. The plane, tiny now, sped after it.
They saw the plane go high, above the ship, and poise there.
Then it dived.
For one moment they saw it on its way. Then the two met with a faint crash. The rocketship staggered and the smashed plane fell off, toward the earth. The big ship nosed down, seemed to recover, then, with an awful roar, it exploded.
The watchers turned away.
It was the unemotional Hastings who pronounced Oliver’s epitaph. “Now,” he said, “we must build one.”
THE WEAPONS SHOP
A. E. Van Vogt
Twentieth-century man is on the doorstep of wonder. What of that distant day when present dim conceptions have been, resolved into concrete achievements? Questioning thus, Mr. Van Vogt has projected his imagination seven thousand years into the future, conceiving of an earth applying natural forces in ways that seem pure magic to the reader. The conquest of space and time has progressed logically to its ultimate triumph. But, sociologically, man has degenerated. The bare new world is governed by a ruthless dictatorship, opposed only by a gallant few. But the few are themselves masters of science and, with cold practicality, they turn their science to the one path of salvation—the manufacture of weapons that are invincible.
* * *
THE VILLAGE at night made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called—he remembered the phrase vividly— “a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.”
Fara believed that utterly. The street before him with its weedless, automatically tended gardens, its shops set well back among the flowers, its perpetual hard, grassy sidewalks, and its street lamps that glowed from every pore of their structure—this was a restful paradise where time had stood still.
And it was like being a part of life that the great artist’s picture of this quiet, peaceful scene before him was now in the collection of the empress herself. She had praised it, and naturally the thrice-blest artist had immediately and humbly begged her to accept it.
What a joy it must be to be able to offer personal homage to the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Innelda Isher, one thousand one hundred eightieth of her line.
As they walked, Fara half turned to his wife. In the dim light of the nearest street lamp, her kindly, still youthful face was almost lost in shadow. He murmured softly, instinctively muting his voice to harmonize with the pastel shades of night:
“She said—our empress said—that our little village of Clay seemed to her to have in it all the wholesomeness, the gentleness, that constitutes the finest qualities of her people. Wasn’t that a wonderful thought, Creel? She must be a marvelously understanding woman. I—”
He stopped. They had come to a side street, and there was something about a hundred and fifty feet along it that— “Look!” Fara said hoarsely.
He pointed with rigid arm and finger at a sign that glowed in the night, a sign that read:
FINE WEAPONS
THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT
TO BE FREE
Fara had a strange, empty feeling as he stared at the blazing sign. He saw that other villagers were gathering. He said finally, huskily:
“I’ve heard of these shops. They’re places of infamy, against which the government of the empress will act one of these days. They’re built in hidden factories, and then transported whole to towns like ours and set up in gross defiance of property rig
hts. That one wasn’t there an hour ago.”
Fara’s face hardened. His voice had a harsh edge in it, as he said:
“Creel, go home.”
Fara was surprised when Creel did not move off at once. All their married life, she had had a pleasing habit of obedience that had made cohabitation a wonderful thing. He saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed, and that it was a timid alarm that held her there. She said:
“Fara, what do you intend to do? You’re not thinking of—”
“Go home!” Her fear brought out all the grim determination in his nature. “We’re not going to let such a monstrous thing desecrate our village. Think of it”—his voice shivered before the appalling thought— “this fine, old-fashioned community, which we had resolved always to keep exactly as the empress has it in her picture gallery, debauched now, ruined by this … this thing— But we won’t have it; that’s all there is to it.”
Creel’s voice came softly out of the half-darkness of the street corner, the timidity gone from it: “Don’t do anything rash, Fara. Remember it is not the first new building to come into Clay—since the picture was painted.”
Fara was silent. This was a quality of his wife of which he did not approve, this reminding him unnecessarily of unpleasant facts. He knew exactly what she meant. The gigantic, multitentacled corporation, Automatic Atomic Motor Repair Shops, Inc., had come in under the laws of the State with their flashy building, against the wishes of the village council—and had already taken half of Fara’s repair business.
“That’s different!” Fara growled finally. “In the first place people will discover in good time that these new automatic repairers do a poor job. In the second place its fair competition. But this weapon shop is a defiance of all the decencies that make life under the House of Isher such a joy. Look at the hypocritical sign: ‘The right to buy weapons—’ Aaaaahh!”
He broke off with: “Go home, Creel. We’ll see to it that they sell no weapons in this town.”
Adventures in Time and Space Page 95
