Painfully but steadily they made their way across the graveyard in that fashion, Buck having to replenish his handheld torch every few dozen yards, while he watched the mutants dancing in impotent hatred on the other side of the row of flames that he raised. At the rusted iron gateway of the cemetery, Buck made a final flying leap, rolled onto the roadway outside, carefully dislodging Twiki as he did so. In a matter of seconds they were standing side by side, turning back for a quick glimpse of the cemetery as the enraged mutant raiders poured from its mouth, setting off in hot pursuit of their escaping prey.
“They haven’t quit,” Buck shouted. “Come on!”
With Twiki at his side, Theopolis riding the drone as usual, Buck set off as fast as he could sprint, down the center of the cracked pavement. Here, outside the graveyard, the night was not quite as completely murk-shrouded as it was beneath the giant trees and overgrown shrubbery within the cemetery.
Over his shoulder Buck could see the leader of the mutant band run to an old lamp post and seize a broken metal pipe from the gutter. He hefted the iron implement and began smashing it against the metal lamp post, sending up a resounding series of almost deafening clangs. The horrid man-thing kept up the deafening clanging for a time. Then Buck could hear a similar clamor resounding from across the city.
For an instant Buck thought it was an actual echo of the pipe being wielded against the lamp post. Then he detected a difference in tone. Soon a third clamor joined the two, and another, and another, until the chill night air was filled with a deafening arrhythmic cacophony that set Buck’s teeth on edge and made the hairs at the back of his neck rise in shuddering sympathy.
He ran, Twiki and Theopolis at his side, for block after ancient city block, but no matter how he dodged or turned or sped across the cracked pavement, the cacophonous clanging stayed with him and Theopolis and Twiki. Finally, he stopped, his breath rasping in and out of his aching lungs in great, desperate gasps.
“What—” he tried to ask.
“What—is it?” he managed to get the question out.
Theopolis had no problem with breath, of course. “It’s a rather primitive communication system amongst the mutants,” he explained in a calm, professorial tone.
“The poor devils,” his lights glowed sympathetically, “they stick together when they think they’ve found valuable prey. Rather than lose important salvage and loot, they are willing to share all with one another.”
“Who’re you worried about?” Buck asked, his breathing now back nearly to normal, “the mutants—or us?”
Twiki squealed and Buck glanced around.
At the nearest intersection a band of mutants were moving into the roadway to block the path that Buck and Twiki and Dr. Theopolis would normally have taken. Buck and Twiki turned around, ready to make their way out of the other end of the city block.
But this too was closed off by a band of ragged raiders!
Buck and Twiki turned back the way they had been facing. This was their original group of foes, the mutant raiders who had almost succeeded in capturing and “salvaging” them in the weed-choked cemetery. The mob had been advancing rapidly behind the backs of their intended victims; in the full sight of their faces they slowed their pace to a walk, to little more than a creep.
Still, slowly they advanced, step by step reducing the distance between themselves and the astronaut and his mechanical companions.
It was as if they were savoring the tension and the anticipation of the kill, like a sadistic hunter hovering over a trapped wolf in the Alaskan wild, eager to make his kill, yet hesitant to end the pleasure of leading up to it.
“Thanks, Buck,” the astronaut heard Theopolis’ voice. “Thanks for making a good try of it. You gave your best.”
“It isn’t over yet, Theopolis!” Buck exclaimed. “Twiki, this is going to be a one-shot. We’ll make it on the first try, or we’re done for.”
The quad squealed.
“For once you don’t have to translate, Theopolis,” Buck said. “On my back again, Twiki!”
The little robot jumped, clasped Buck just as Buck ran for the sidewalk, charged across it to the nearest building and leaped into the air. His fingertips barely scraped the bottom rung of a rusted, ancient fire-escape ladder.
Buck would never know how he did it, but somehow he managed to cling to that old iron rung for the few precious seconds that he had to. As the man hung there, panting with effort, the little robot clinging to his shoulders and the computer brain wedged precariously between them, the fire-escape ladder slowly slid downward, its hinges screaming with the accumulated rust of five hundred years of weather and disuse.
As soon as the ladder was down Buck released his grip on the bottom rung, scampered up the ladder, leaped onto the first storey platform of the old tenement house and tugged with all his strength to pull the ladder back up, just as the bravest of the attacking mutants reached the ladder and reached for the iron, hoping to duplicate Buck’s astonishing feat.
The mutant missed by fractions where Buck had succeeded by a similarly narrow margin.
Frustrated again as they had been by Buck’s clever maneuver in the cemetery, the mutants and their newly arrived allies set up a dancing and a keening wail of fury and grief.
“What can we do now?” Theopolis quavered. “You’ve saved us twice, Buck, but each time only temporarily. I don’t want you to think I’m unappreciative of your efforts, but aren’t we still as good as doomed? If they can’t get this ladder down and climb up after us, and if they can’t just wait to starve us out . . . won’t they somehow make their way through this old building and come at us through the windows?”
“I don’t know,” Buck conceded.
“Then we’re finished,” the computer mourned.
“I didn’t say that,” Buck disagreed. “I don’t know the solution yet, but we can work on one! And I’ll tell you one thing, you old box of transistors.”
“What’s that?” Theopolis asked.
“If we have to sit tight and figure out a solution, I’d sure as hell rather sit up here and do it,” Buck pointed at the fire escape where they huddled, “than be down there in the middle of that mob trying to find a way to escape!”
“You’re right, of course,” Theopolis said. “I’ve got to learn that you never give up, Captain Rogers, and that as long as you keep searching for a solution, there’s always a chance that you may just find one!”
Buck grunted and tried to concentrate on the situation, but the dancing, screeching mob beneath them suddenly changed its behavior. From a great distance Buck could hear a clanging again, the sound of iron pipes being pounded on derelict lamp posts, but there was a subtle difference to the rhythm and the pattern of the strokes. It was like the famous jungle telegraph of Africa back in the days of the nineteenth century. Long before Europeans arrived and set up their so-called modern communications systems, the old civilizations had evolved their own methods of sending messages for hundreds or even thousands of miles by setting up series of repeater-stations of drummers, like the booster circuits on long-distance telephone lines.
And these mutants, pitiful, half-human wretches though they were, had reinvented the jungle telegraph, sending messages from end to end of the great wrecked city of Anarchia by pounding out different rhythms with iron pipes on rusting, ancient lamp posts!
Buck looked down into the street where the mutant mob had gathered, and saw its members scampering off in all directions, obviously bent on some mission far more urgent than trying to coax one ancient astronaut and two modern mechanical creatures down from the rusted fire escape of a ruined building!
Suddenly Twiki showed that he understood the situation’s newest twist, even more rapidly than either Buck Rogers or Dr. Theopolis had. The little drone began to leap up and down on the rusted platform, squeaking joyously and hugging Buck with both metallic arms.
Theopolis’ lights burst into an astonishing semblance of a grand happy grin. “I agree with Twiki,�
�� he said in his again-mellow voice. “Very good, Buck. Bravo, bravo! How in the world did you manage that?”
“Manage what?” Buck asked in puzzlement.
Before the computer could answer the air was split by the sound of a siren, a new and utterly unique sound here in the ruined city of Anarchia. Realization dawned in Buck’s brain. “Oh, ho!” he said. “I see! We can give credit for the sudden dispersement of the mutants to whoever is sounding that siren.”
“That’s right,” Theopolis added. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, Buck. They surely wouldn’t do that for a couple of machines, eh, Twiki? You must be one important fellow, Captain, for the Inner City to react as they have.”
“But how have they reacted?” Buck demanded. “I’m new in town, remember? What does that siren mean?”
“It means they’ve sent a force into Anarchia,” Theopolis said. “That siren is the Inner City force approaching, and they just don’t do that. As far as Inner City is concern, Anarchia is quarantined. They exile their criminals here, but they never let them back in, and nobody from Inner City ever comes here voluntarily!”
Twiki began to jump up and down, squealing shrilly with excitement. Buck and Theopolis both stared down into the now-deserted thoroughfare. The bulk of the fleeing mutants had all left by one end of the street, and from the other there now came first the sound, then the sight of a heavily armored vehicle, equipped with weapons as well as shielding against both radiation and missile attack.
Six armed troopers leaped from the vehicle and set up an immediate defense perimeter around its metallic bulk. A seventh uniformed officer climbed from the vehicle, studied the situation and advanced to take command of the party. One of the six heavily armed troopers addressed the commanding officer.
“Colonel!”
The single word was used to attract the commander’s attention. The trooper pointed up toward the fire-escape balcony where Buck still watched along with Theopolis and Twiki.
The commander followed the trooper’s pointed finger. From the escape balcony Buck could make out clearly the face of the military leader.
It was Colonel Wilma Deering of the Intercept Squadron!
“Good evening, Captain,” Wilma called up from the street. “I wonder if I could interest you in a proposition.”
Buck smiled down from the balcony with gratitude and a sense of admiration that bordered on something far warmer and more personal. Without saying a word, he and Theopolis and Twiki started to climb down from the fire escape.
S I X
The squadron of Starfighters streaked away from their launching pads and lanced into the deep blue heavens above the Inner City. At the astonishing power and rate-of-climb ratings of these ultramodern combat craft, they quickly rose above the earth’s atmosphere and the blue refracted sunlight was replaced by the black of cislunar space, a velvety black sprinkled with glittering stars like shimmering diamond chips even in bright daylight hours.
Each Starfighter was a sleek object that might well have stood, in classical times, as a work of some genius sculptor. Their curves were graceful yet strong, their skins showed a smooth sheen that could have been designed as much for its ability to please the observer’s eye as it was to protect their internal components and their pilots from the radiation of space, the heat of atmospheric resistance on launching and reentry, or the impact of enemy lasers or missile blasts.
The entire Intercept Squadron had left its launching pads. This was no combat mission—it was a routine training and shakedown cruise for all the pilots save one, but even the most veteran of Starfighter pilots was expected to fly regular training missions in order to stay at the razor’s edge of keen skill and combat readiness.
If ever Earth faced invasion from the starlanes, the Intercept Squadron was not only her first line of defense, but in a sense her last as well. For an alien starship force, smashing down the barriers of Earth’s extended defense line, would be free to blast away at surface installations until the planet lay prostrate and helpless before the hobnailed boots of an army of invasion and occupation.
It was up to the Intercept Squadron to prevent that from ever happening.
And today a new pilot was training with the squadron. He was by far the oldest aviator ever to take a ship up from the surface of the planet Earth. He was more than five hundred years old: Captain Buck Rogers.
Inside Buck’s sleek Starfighter the intercom hummed softly with a carrier wave, and the voice of the squadron commander, Colonel Wilma Deering, spoke into Buck’s ear. “Stay close on my wing, Captain. We’ll keep the maneuvers nice and simple.” This was not the warm, feminine Wilma Deering whom Buck had crushed in his arms for one swift embrace in the middle of Anarchia’s rubble-strewn street. This was Colonel Deering, all military prowess and cold efficiency.
“Stay on AutoFlight,” Colonel Deering continued. “You won’t be expected to run anything but the throttle on this mission.”
Buck felt a rush of hot, angry blood to his cheeks. He had been a top Air Force fighter-jockey in the earliest years of his aerial career. Then, with the advent of the last, uneasy peace that preceded the final holocaust he had become a crack test pilot and astronaut.
And now this wisecracking, overconfident woman, this hotshot colonel who hadn’t been born when he was a fully rated space exploration pilot, was telling him not to touch anything on his own ship except for the throttle! “Thanks a lot, colonel,” he gritted resentfully, “is it all right if I look out the window once in a while, or am I supposed to sit here and study the operator’s manual while I fly?”
“This is no time for levity!” Wilma snapped back. Her eyes showed an angry annoyance at the new pilot’s insubordinate attitude.
“We’ve lost nearly a third of our ships in this vector to pirates,” she told him. “When they hit, they hit fast. You can’t outfly a computer. Your reflexes just aren’t as fast as its are. So let the ship take care of any necessary evasive action to avoid those training missiles. If you get in the way of one you’ll cost us an expensive ship, as well as the trouble of training a replacement for yourself. And the Inner City tax rates are high enough now!”
“I appreciate your concern,” Buck told her. “I just wish I’d brought along a copy of Thrilling Wonder Stories to read.”
Wilma Deering started to respond, then halted. Her eyes snapped wide. She opened a channel to the entire squadron. “Commanding officer here. I make a target on vector four zero one.”
Another pilot responded. “Roger, Colonel. I have visual on a target just to starboard.”
“Check range,” Wilma instructed the pilot. “If you have visual at this apparent distance, it must be gigantic!”
Through the window of his own sleek Starfighter, Buck Rogers had sighted in on the flying behemoth. “You’ve never seen anything like this, lady, I’ll bet on that! Not even in the twenty-fifth century!”
From the Draconian flagship, long-range space-telescopes kept the terran Intercept Squadron carefully in view from the moment its gleaming, needle-nosed ships poked their snouts above Earth’s seething atmosphere to the instant they arrived in deep space and commenced to swarm around the Draconian behemoth like a horde of frantic bumblebees swooping and dancing in the air around a grizzly.
The Princess Ardala had received word of the first sighting of the Intercept Squadron’s blastoff. From that moment onward, at her stern command, she was kept informed by the lookout bridge of every move, every significant maneuver, of the tiny, swarming, streamlined interceptors.
Kane had assumed personal command of the lookout bridge, and maintained constant electronic contact with the princess, but now he turned over command of the bridge to a Draconian subordinate of unquestioned competence and loyalty, and trotted anxiously through the corridors and companionways of the ship to the princess’ personal stateroom in order to apprise her, face-to-face, of the startling message received on the bridge from the earth ships.
When she heard the request, Prin
cess Ardala’s face assumed an expression of astonishment.
“Permission to come aboard,” she repeated the Earth ships’ request. “But why, Kane?”
“They claim they’re escorting a special envoy, Ardala. And that’s all they’ll say.”
“But that isn’t according to protocol!” The princess paced uneasily, the lines of a puzzled frown marring her normally flawless physiognomy.
“I don’t like this, Kane,” she grumbled petulantly. “I don’t like this even one little bit. What could they possibly be up to?”
“I don’t know,” Kane replied. “But if we refuse them permission to come aboard we’ll rouse their suspicions.”
“And if we let them come aboard, Kane, then we’ll confirm their suspicions. We’re in a gorgeous double-bind, an absolutely gorgeous double-bind.”
She stopped pacing and glared at him, the superior conferring with a subordinate. “I want your recommendation, Kane. You’re always patting yourself on the back and claiming you’re such a grand strategist. Let’s hear a plan from you!”
“Of course, my princess, of course.” Kane’s previously gruff manner was replaced by an oily confidence, as if Ardala’s demand for a plan from him was exactly what he’d been maneuvering for. “We’re not in a double-bind at all, Ardala. We’ve had plenty of warning. As soon as the bridge sighted the Earth interceptors I ordered preparations aboard the ship. They can come aboard and wander around to their hearts’ delight, and they’ll find nothing whatever to make them suspicious.”
Ardala smiled in relief. “Well, that changes things, Kane. You do have a brain after all. Issue commands for the communications bridge to message the earth squadron that they’ll be most cordially welcomed aboard. Have the flight deck prepare to receive the landing party.” She laughed a low, sinister laugh that raised the hairs on the back of even Kane’s bull-neck. “And send word that I will personally receive the special envoy who’s coming up to see us.”
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