by Ted White
With Suolan allowing Earth to aim for eventual full partnership, the Suolanians had a vested interest in seeing that whatever replaced them would be capable of dealing with the challenges of the next few years—and the next few centuries.
Well, this didn’t have much to do with me; I’d been called before the Council a couple of time in the weeks after their decision, but what the hell did I know? The United Nations? Could I tell them how the UN was set up, functionally? All I knew about the UN was that it wasn’t much of a success because it didn’t really have much power. Yeah, I read the newspapers, and how much do they tell you about how to establish a world government?
It came down to one thing—I was still what I’d been before, a battered private detective who knew more than he really wanted to about divorce angles and process
serving and, once in a while, getting a chance to take on a client with the kind of problem that in the long run kept me at it as a marginal operative.
I’d about shot my wad. I wasn’t a political scientist. I wasn’t an expert in anything that could help Sudan or Earth.
But Sharna was . . .
And presently we were on board a ship that was the twin of the Pamorr. But the trip on the Nonorr was a little different.
For one thing, by now I’d gotten pretty used to juggling the 75 encyclopedias stuffed into my brain.
For another, Sharna had more spare time. On the trip to Suolan she’d been busy exchanging messages with the Home Worlds, worrying, making plans.
Now she was simply returning to Earth. With me.
It wasn’t that she’d been put in charge of the changeover, or anything like that; she didn’t have that kind of rank, nor enough of the skills. But she had lived on Earth for years, and her party had swung her a position with the interim administrators while they tried to untangle things.
It was an Indian Summer sort of a trip. Shama and I made love many times, and in between took advantage of the pleasures available on the Nonorr—or as many of them as suited our common tastes.
“It’s time for a pickup,” Sharna said at one point, early in the trip.
I looked at her blankly.
“We have reached Karshan, a planet from which we will pick up passengers.”
“How do you know?” I demanded, somehow vaguely initiated by coming upon another one of a seemingly endless parade of new mysteries that had to be carefully explained to me.
She smiled. “The information is always available to anyone on board, but you have to signal for it. I’m afraid that I did not realize that you would not know. There is a view screen over there, you see? As we. came in I noticed someone else triggering it, and I caught the information as it was flashed.”
I cranked up my Suolanian memory and the signal-word came forward. “God damn it,” I said, “I thought I was getting the hang of things. When am I going to finish finding out what I already know?”
“How old were you when you started speaking English?” “Huh? I always—umm, I mean, I suppose I was two or three. Why?”
“You probably knew most of what you had to know about your language and culture by the time you were twenty or so. But you are rather ungracious about the ease with which you were equipped to cope with Suolan and Suolinat.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” It looked to me like it was going to take me another twenty years to get everything straight, though. “Say, how many stops are we going to make on this trip? I’m sort of anxious to get back home, you know.” “Oh, about the same as always; these ships usually stop at most of the inhabited planets in their path, either for passengers or freight, or both.”
“But—isn’t that going to make this trip a lot longer than the one we came on?”
She laughed, puzzledly. “But we had two dozen planet-falls at least, on the Pamorrr
“Um.” The things I didn’t know ... “I guess nobody told me because I . . .”
I smiled at her and we said, together, “. . . didn’t ask!” A dozen times after that, we sat in a viewing dome (I hadn’t known about them before either, of course) and watched planets jump at us from being tiny specks in the glittering distance, indicated by a pointer-light on the surface of the dome, to three times the size of the moon as seen from Earth.
I’ve been told I’ve got a lot of guts. Well, the first time I saw that, it looked like someone was throwing the planet straight at me like a basketball, and before I realized it I’d thrown my hands up in front of my eyes in an instinctive gesture.
Sharna smiled but didn’t laugh. “It makes me feel that way every time,” she said. “But isn’t it worth it?”
And it was. It was worth it most of all the last time* when the starry midnight threw a basketball and a baseball at us at the same time—Earth, with the Moon almost between us on the inward course.
Then for a week it was a pretty heady life for a broken-down ex-process-server who didn’t know enough to fall down when he was hit.
Though Shama was not in charge of the changeover in the Western Hemisphere, she had a position of considerable power due to her own abilities and to her membership in the party whose program had finally won out, with freedom for Earth.
And unlike the trip to the Home Worlds, she did not shut me out of her activities—in which she wanted my help, or at least my reactions.
So I sat in on all the conferences, listened to the many different plans for the changeover, heard a thousand reasons why power should be given back only to this group or that group or the other, with this political system or that or the other. It didn’t help that Kordamon was in on the conferences too, holding on to what remained of his power in the Angels’ security department.
Kordamon had a lot to say, most of it nonsense—with his attitude toward Earthmen, it wasn’t surprising that he felt the^ best thing in the United States/Canada sector would be for the Nazis to be given power.
Me, I mostly didn’t say anything. For one thing there didn’t seem to be much point in arguing with most of them, especially Kordamon; and the way / figured things should be done was simple enough. But the conferees— and Sharna—seemed to want to hear all the plans and theories. I suppose they thought they were finding out what the “people” wanted. Suolanian culture was reasonably democratic, but not at all in ways which, say, Americans in my world would have found so.
I did ask her about it at one point during the week, though.
“Look,” I said, “all this has been very impressive and all, but why bother with all this stuff? Why don’t you just trust to a simple old-fashioned home remedy?”
Sharna wasn’t following me too closely, I realized; she answered abstractedly, “What is that?”
She was writing something in Suolinat that I couldn’t read. The think-tank course didn’t seem to have taken too well as far as their handwriting was concerned, though I could read Suolinat well enough in print.
“Well, why don’t you just let them—us—hold free elections? We used to do pretty well with them. . .
“Free . . .” She started to repeat what I’d said, absently, then blinked, realizing what I’d said.
“So you think that’s the answer, Ronald? Old-fashioned elections—they haven’t had free ones here since we came, you know. We did allow the leaders, most of them anyway, to retain their titles, and allowed others to fill their places as retirements occurred. But it was all at our appointment and by our sufferance. And I don’t recall that they had proved that effective before. . .
“We must be talking about two different planets,” I said rather irritatedly.
“No, but we are talking about a number of different continents, you know. We hope by these conferences and by the others being held in the other Sectors to arrive at a system you all can live rather decently with. Preferably something like those ‘United Nations’ you mentioned, but one that can work. And then there’s the fact that even in the former United States the majority of your people are probably going to be pretty suspicious and resentful of us—and of all gal
actic civilization. For a while, at least. After all, we did own them for the last three decades—humans of all races don’t forget easily.”
“And you’ve got to be sure they don’t turn away from the Home Worlds and the galaxy once they get the bit in their teeth?”
“It would defeat our whole purpose if they did, yes. They are, after all, isolationists at heart, you know. And that’s just the United States.
“When we took over in 1938, most of the countries of South America were run by dictators, by army juntas, or by a small oligarchic group of the few rich people who between them owned most of each country. Most of the dictators and juntas were pretty inefficient, so we threw most of them out and installed Suolanians to administer economic affairs. The oligarchies were more efficient at gathering and centralizing wealth, extracting it from their people and their land, so we left most of them intact, and skimmed our colonial profits off the top.
“I am hardly very proud of this, but it’s what we did in all of the relatively backward areas on Earth. And what do you think would happen if we just gave the votes back
to the people? You’d be back in 1938, but almost certainly worse off.
“And if you think we have problems here, Barshonnor is in charge of straightening things up in Africa. What’s he going to do, give it all back to England and France and Portugal?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next morning the argument became beside the point, for me at least. Shama and I were awakened by an unearthly whining screech in the air.
It was a sound I’d heard before—a sound I’d heard when the Nazis had destroyed the force-fields of the yellowjackets that were taking me to Welfare Island.
“God damn it,” I said to Sharna, “there’s been too much talk. Now the Nazis are taking it into their own hands. What happened to that great intelligence network of yours?”
“Kordamon,” she answered. “He’s been neglecting Intelligence and Security matters to hear his own voice at the conferences.”
“He might even . .
Sharna looked at me strangely. “Kordamon is a Suolanian, Ronald. He would not be disloyal.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Forget it. It seemed like a suspicious coincidence.”
Presently we were downstairs at the front entrance; I never had gotten out of the habit of thinking of it as the Time-Life Building, in spite of the extra block, the bright orange, the quadruple size. The conferences were being held here, and Sharna and I were living in her apartment forty flights up.
The high-pitched whine had been interrupted several times by explosions. By the time we got downstairs the whining had stopped.
A squad of yellowjackets stood by the entrance. They looked very dubious. Perhaps they’d seen what had happened to the squad that had once escorted me.
Kordamon was there, dressed completely in black, shouting at one of the yellowjackets.
“Kordamon,” Sharna called, “what has happened?”
He turned, his face pale and worried. “I—I do not understand. The fools have—”
“The Nazis?” I put in.
His face got a nasty look on it. “Yes, the Nazis. Animals, as the rest of you. Couldn’t wait for power on their own. I could have helped them a great deal. They were afraid, it seems, to trust me.” He smiled tightly. “Now of course they will have to be utterly destroyed. Too bad we can’t clean off the whole planet while we’re at it. . . .”
Too bad he didn’t have his personal forcescreen on when the whining started, I thought.
A blacksleeved yellowjacket came in through the front door, now a gaping hole where apparently a mortar had hit. He reported to the two Angels. “They tried out their neutralizer first, and, damn them, it worked. Every screen generator in the building is knocked out. Then they lobbed in shells, mortars I suppose, and damn good shots too. Wrecked the sleeping quarters on the second and third stories, and just about wiped out the opening session of the conference this morning—”
“They’ll be attacking again soon,” I put in. “Wonder why they didn’t just come right on inside?”
The entrance to our building was across from 52nd Street. Across Sixth Avenue we could see east along 52nd. Three tanklike objects were slowly moving towards us. Behind them were some fifty armed men in Nazi uniforms.
“That’s their neutralizing device,” Blacksleeves said to us, “that tank thing, at least we think that’s what it is. They’ve got three of them because they expect us to fight back, maybe fix our generators. I don’t think we’ll be able to, though.”
Down Sixth Avenue from Central Park came several armed vehicles, something like halftracks, with armed men behind them, while from the south several hundred other armed men were marching in a straggly formation.
“That’s pretty sloppy attack work they’re using,” I observed.
“How many men have we left in the building?” screamed Kordamon at Blacksleeves. “How many in the rest of the city? And you—” He whirled at Shama and I stepped forward. He calmed down a bit and said, “You and those recommendations to disband the yellowjackets, send our lower echelons back to the Home Planets! We had 30,000 men at our disposal in this area. Now we’re lucky if there’s 5,000. You!” He turned on Blacksleeves again. “Must I ask you twice, Captain? How—”
“There may be 150 of us in the building, armed. Most are stationed on Welfare.” He looked surprisingly unawed by Kordamon’s fit of rage, and added, wryly, “I imagine the boys there are having their troubles right now too—we can’t tell, because the neutralizers took out our communications too.”
“Fools,” Kordamon spat out. “We might have known. . . .”
“In the meantime,” I broke in, “we’ve got 150 men and they’ve got twice that many, it looks. Have you ever commanded troops in battle? Or you, Captain?”
Kordamon scowled a “no” and the captain did the same, reluctantly.
“Well, then, what kind of weapons do you have available, where are they, and is there anyone else capable of taking command overall?”
“I’m in charge of fifty, and I’m senior to the other two captains. WeVe all got standard stingers, and—” “What do they do, and how long do they last?”
The eerie whining noise began again. The three “tanks” had stopped just across Sixth Avenue from us.
“They can be set to knock unconscious or kill. They’re recharged from standard electrical outlets, though they have to use a transformer device carried in the butt of the weapon. They can fire fifty jolts on one charge.” “How about standard rifles? You know, the old-fashioned kind, percussion type? And pistols?”
“A few.”
“I don’t suppose you have any machine guns at all. . . The captain shrugged.
“Of course not,” I said. “Couldn’t expect to use that old-hat junk when all that futuristic stuff’s around. Even if a couple or four BAR’s could just about take care of this whole damn situation.”
Then Kordamon surprised me.
“Captain Thomas, you will follow any suggestions that Mr. Archer may make to you. I am forced to admit that I suspect he understands a great deal more about the battle tactics of Earthian animals than we do.”
I whistled tunelessly while Capt. Thomas cocked his head at me. “Okay,” I said after a moment. “I’m the boss.”
I looked out of the window. “Look at the way they’re all bunched up there,” I said. “If we don’t have force-screen defenses any more, they sure don’t either.”
The whining grew to almost unbearable levels of sheer noise. “Damn fools,” I muttered. “Can’t they tell they’ve already knocked us out?”
“Sir, I don’t think they realize our generators are shot,” said Capt. Thomas. “They’re just making sure.”
“Okay, Captain, deploy as many men as you can at the windows, with token forces at any other entrances. The rest’ll just have to wait till we can knock ’em back a bit and get out the front door.”
The yellowjackets took up barri
caded positions at the windows, and we waited for the attack.
The whining stopped and they came at us; like a mob of citizens storming a nightmarish Bastille they charged the front of the building.
And the yellowjackets cut them down by the score before they could get close.
I grabbed a ktinger myself and stepped into the doorway, aiming and firing as fast as I could operate the strange weapon.
There was no shortage of targets; the Nazis made no attempt to protect themselves. Of course, a place like Sixth Avenue doesn’t afford much shelter beyond the dozen or so cars that had halted where they stood when the initial attack had started.
And there wasn’t much danger for us, either, as they were firing only sporadically. For some idiotic reason they had fixed bayonets and had apparently figured that without our force screen they could get inside the building and into hand-to-hand combat without much difficulty.
Nevertheless bullets spattered around me, like a quick summer shower, and I stepped back behind the protection of the door for a moment.
Then there were shouts of jubilation. The Nazis were retreating! I looked out.
They weren’t retreating; they were merely stepping aside. The tanks rumbled forward a little, and then I saw the snouts of wicked-looking cannons protruding from the noses of the tanks.
“Everybody down,” I yelled, and I can yell pretty loud when I try. I looked around for Sharna. She was at the window next to me at the door, still firing.
I grabbed her and pulled her to the floor just as the three cannons went off at once.
The air filled with dust from the explosions, and I could hear the shattering of glass and the screams of wounded yellowjackets. The cannons fired again deafeningly.
I looked about me. One shot from the tanks had gone through the doorway I had been standing in and had exploded at the far end of the ground floor, causing surprisingly little harm.
But they were using their brains at last. Firepower—the rest had smashed into the wall north of us, and a pair of gaping holes and piles of rubble showed us where.
