The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “And now you say they’re locked in a power conflict. But why? I should think Wendel Atomics would purchase all the fuel it needs directly from Endicott. And Endicott would—”

  I paused, troubled.

  “What would Endicott do, Ralph? It has no use for atomic generators. It isn’t geared to install them, even if it could somehow absorb the terrific expense of transporting them. And that, of course, would be impossible. No combine is wealthy enough to undertake that kind of two-pronged enterprise.”

  “But it wouldn’t have to be a two-way exchange of commodities,” I said. “Not if Wendel continued to buy all of its fuel from Endicott. It would, of course, have a tendency to dwarf Endicott, make it the lesser of the two monopolies.”

  “It would do more than that, Ralph. It could bankrupt Endicott. You see, Wendel Atomics suddenly decided it was paying Endicott too much for the fuel it used, and cut the price it was paying in half. And Endicott could barely meet expenses.”

  “Good Lord,” I said.

  “Naturally Wendel Atomics couldn’t get along without fuel,” Trilling said. “And it couldn’t transport fuel for its own exclusive use from Earth. The two-pronged enterprise factor again. So Endicott struck back by refusing to sell its fuel to Wendel.”

  “A complete stalemate, you mean?”

  “Not quite, Ralph. If it were, one side or the other would have to give in eventually. Endicott seized on the bright idea of selling atomic and liquid fuel directly to the Colonists. A wildcat kind of madness. The colonists buy the fuel on margin and wait for the price to skyrocket. And every so often it does, because Wendel has to keep its generators operating. It won’t buy from Endicott, but it has no choice but to buy from the colonists.

  “Do you realize what such wild and dangerous wildcat speculation can do to a new, rough-and-tumble, frontier kind of society, Ralph? The colonists don’t know whether they’re rich or poor from one day to the next. And with all their desperate needs, their frustrations, their scrambling after scarce goods and services, their fierce competitiveness, they are at each other’s throats half of the time.”

  “I’m beginning to get the picture,” I said.

  “It’s a very ugly picture, Ralph. Wendel Atomics buys its fuel sporadically, cheats, steals, connives, beating the price down artificially and then sending it skyrocketing again. It has its own private police force. Translate—brutal roughnecks who know exactly how to keep the colonists in line and frighten them into selling when the fuel market sags and spending every cent they possess to buy more fuel on speculation when the price soars.

  “Endicott doesn’t care what happens to the colonists. It’s out to make Wendel Atomics come to terms and has methods of its own to keep the colonists inflamed and reckless. The whole situation has even taken on a political cast. There are pro-Wendel colonists, who work hand in glove with the Wendel police and colonists who would willingly lay down their lives in defense of noble, altruistic Endicott. It’s the right of everyone to buy fuel on speculation, isn’t it?”

  “I see,” I said. “And my job will be to step right into the middle of all that, and try to bring order out of chaos.”

  Trilling didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me, but his gaze was not unsympathetic.

  “There’s something I’d like to have you hear, Ralph,” he said, when the silence had lengthened between us and become almost minute-long. “We have a new, round-the-clock recording to replace the one we’ve been transmitting at intervals, night and day, for five years. I won’t even ask you how many times you’ve heard it, because you travel around a lot and must have memorized it word for word. But this one is better, I think. At least, it appeals to me more. A hundred million people will hear it, starting tomorrow. It will be on every tele-screen.”

  He bent over his desk and removed a miniature tape-recorder from the upper right hand drawer. He set it down on the desk and clicked it on.

  “Just one passage I’d like you to listen to, Ralph. Not the whole recording. This is it—”

  The voice that came from the tape was a very good reading voice, one of the best I’d ever heard. The man was probably a poet. But the words themselves interested me more.

  “…so bright with promise has Man’s future become that all of the old animosities, the old hates, will soon seem alien to us and strange. A new world is in the making. Who can deny it? The colonization of Mars has fulfilled the deepest instincts of Man’s nature, and provided scope for a growth that is as natural to him as breathing.

  “The desire to know more, to explore the unknown, to reach out toward constantly expanding horizons can only be satisfied by boldly accepting what the advance of modern science has brought within our grasp. The colonization of Mars is a tribute to Man’s stubborn refusal to be easily discouraged or to let mechanical difficulties, no matter how formidable, stand in his way. A tribute as well to his constructive genius, his daring and breadth of vision.”

  Trilling clicked the tape recorder off, returned it to his desk, and turned to face me again.

  “That, Ralph, is the dream,” he said. “You and I know what the reality is like. But the millions who will listen to that recording do not. They still believe—and hope.”

  I was silent for a moment, not quite sure how he’d take what I was going to say. I went over it in my mind, searching for just the right words. It took me a full minute to find them, but he didn’t grow impatient.

  “I’m not sure the Board is wise in putting out that kind of propaganda. Or any kind of propaganda. After all, we’re not trying to sell Mars to anyone. We’re doing something that has to be done—you might almost say we’re just trying, in a very earnest way, to plug up a gap in the biggest dam that was ever built, to keep the flood waters from carrying us all to destruction.”

  “You’re wrong, Ralph,” he said. “It isn’t just propaganda. A dream always has to go striding on ahead of reality. It may seem strange to you, but the reality does not frighten or discourage me. Mars is a new world and on a new world there has to be—not one, but many beginnings.”

  He paused an instant, then added: “That’s why we’re sending you to Mars, Ralph. There will have to be another beginning. It won’t show too much on the surface. No matter how successful you are, for the colony will remain what it is basically—an experiment in survival. All of a new world’s energy will remain, and the turbulence and the hard-to-endure disappointments. But you can help the Colonists go back, and feel the way they did when the first passenger rocket settled down on the red desert sand forty million miles from Earth and the Space Age took on a new dimension.”

  4

  There was only one small window in Trilling’s office. But I could see that the sky outside was still bright with stars, and the glimmer of the ceiling lamp made the metal surface above us seem to fall away and dissolve into a much wider expanse of star-studded space.

  The ceiling-mirrored image of the lamp itself looked like the Sun, blazing in noonday brightness directly overhead and out beyond were galaxies and super-galaxies strung like beads on a wire across the great curve of the universe.

  It was just an illusion, of course. You could see the same thing in the light-mirroring depths of a glass of wine, if you stared hard enough. But for an instant it seemed to bring bigness, vastness right into the room with us.

  I was conscious of the silence again, lengthening, hanging heavy between us, as if we’d each said too much, or possibly…not quite enough.

  Then Trilling bent and removed something else from his desk. I couldn’t see what it was until he set it down directly in front of me, because it was much smaller than the midget tape recorder and his hand covered it.

  A flat metal box, wafer-thin, doesn’t provide much scope for speculation, and I was pretty sure that the object inside was a tiny metal precision instrument or a watch or a medal even before he said: “This should
make Joan change her mind, Ralph!” and snapped the box open.

  The insignia caught and held the light, a two-inch silver hawk with its wings outspread. The white lining of the box made it stand out, as if it were flying through fleecy clouds high in the sky, and symboling in its flight far more than just the elevation of one man to the highest command post the Martian Colonization Board had the authority to bestow.

  The significance of that finely-wrought, seldom-worn silver bird was not lost on me. In the maze of a hundred legends, a hundred witness-confirmed stories of triumph and disappointment, of heroic progress and tragic back-tracking, it had remained an important link between Earthside expectations and what was actually taking place on Mars.

  Only one man could wear it at any one time, and only four men had worn it since the establishment of the colony. All four were dead now, their gravestones a white gleaming on the red desert sand a few miles north of the colony.

  “Well, Ralph?” Trilling said.

  I tried hard to maintain my composure, to say just the right thing, because I’d lived long enough to know there are depths beyond depths to some emotions that can’t be put into words. Attempt to talk the way you feel, and you’re sure to sound a little ridiculous. I was only certain of one thing. No man could wear that insignia and not feel, resting upon his shoulders, a responsibility so tremendous that whatever pride he might take in it would have to be tempered by humility—if he wanted to go on wearing it for long.

  Trilling seemed aware of what was passing through my mind, for he made it easy for me. He simply smiled, snapped the box shut with a briskness that was almost casual, and handed it to me.

  “You’ve got real massive military prestige now, Ralph,” he said. “Right at the moment the Board would be gravely concerned if you wore that insignia in public. But there’s nothing to prevent you from wearing it in the privacy of your own home. Later on the Board may decide you can accomplish more by coming right out and letting the colonists know there’s a lion in the streets who intends to do more than just roar. A safe, protective kind of lion—dangerous only to over-ambitious men with destructive ideas.”

  I started to reply but he waved me to silence. “Hold on, Ralph—let me finish. You won’t be wearing that insignia in public straight off. But I hope you’ll have enough good sense to make the best possible use of it to overcome the first really big obstacle in your path.”

  He nodded. “It will be a kind of blackmail, in a way—morally reprehensible. You’ll be taking advantage of something it isn’t in a woman’s nature to resist. But you have no choice. You’ve got to go to Mars and if you went alone you’d be about as useful to us as a celibate kangaroo, all packaged and ready to be sent on a journey to the taxidermist.”

  He seemed to realize it wouldn’t have to be quite that drastic, for he grimaced wryly. “All right, all right. You could go out and find another woman and I probably could talk the Board into being the opposite of stuffy about it. But I happen to know what kind of man you are, and how you feel about Joan. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman in the world for you.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I had the insignia in my inner breast pocket, and I knew that there were few obstacles it couldn’t blast away on Earth or on Mars, if I kept remembering what it symbolized with Joan at my side.

  I went out into the cool night again, past that long tremendous building with just one of its floors ablaze, past the big sky ships looming like sentinel ghosts on their launching pads, past winking lights and speeding cars and pedestrians walking slowly and something inside of me made me feel I’d undergone a kind of sea change, and could face whatever the future might hold without grabbing for a life-line that didn’t exist.

  It was a good way to feel. A man had to sink or swim without having a life-line thrown to him—if he hoped to live long enough to change things around in an important way on Mars. He had to keep his head and breast the raging currents with the sturdiest kind of overhand strokes, or be drawn down into the undertow and battered senseless against the rocks that lined the shoreline.

  The change must have shown a little on the surface, in the set of my jaw or just the way I was walking, because no less than three pedestrians turned to stare at me as I went striding past them on my way to the New Chicago Underground.

  I was almost at the northern entrance of the big, tree-lined square directly opposite the Administration Building when it hit me—the memory-recall, the swift emergence from its cubby-hole deep in my mind of the narrow brush I’d had with Death and hadn’t even discussed with Trilling.

  It had been a mistake not to discuss it, because it concerned the Board as much as it did me. Someone who knew about the insignia—or had made a shrewd guess as to just how big a job was awaiting me on Mars—had wanted me dead. The attempt on my life took on a much larger, more crucial dimension when viewed in that light.

  There were three hundred million people in the United States, and if I’d been just a private citizen, with no more than my own safety at stake, I could have lost myself in that immense ocean of humanity for a week or a month and gained a brief respite. There are plenty of ways you can protect yourself against a surprise attempt on your life, if you have the time to take safety precautions. When there’s a would-be assassin at large who is dead set on measuring you for a coffin you have to work the problem out carefully, with a minimum of risk.

  It takes skill and psychological insight, but it can be done. You’ve just got to remember that an assassin is never quite normal. Even when a socio-political motivation is the governing passion of his life you’re one jump ahead of him the instant you’ve figured out exactly how his mind works.

  In fact, one of those safety precautions could have been protecting me as I crossed the square, if I hadn’t let my stubborn pride stand in the way. Why hadn’t I asked Trilling to provide me with armed protection?

  Two alert bodyguards, trailing me on the street and down into the Underground and standing watch outside my apartment all night long—and staying fifty paces behind me until the Mars’ rocket zero-count ended and the big sky ship took off with a roar…would have given the Board the kind of reassurance they had a right to expect.

  I started to turn back, then changed my mind abruptly. I’d taken just as great a risk by walking from the lakeside to the skyport right after the attack, hadn’t I? And I’d be in the Underground in another three or four minutes, with people around me and—

  All right. It was an out-of-focus rationalization and nothing more—an attempt to find an excuse for not turning back. But when I do something reckless for complicated reasons, when I’ve forged ahead despite my better judgment, I’m usually just impulsive enough to carry the folly-ball all the way across the goal line.

  It was the thing I’d have to guard most against on Mars, that damnable twisted pride and impulsiveness, that taking of too much for granted when I started to do something I knew was unwise, but had an overpowering urge to carry out anyway.

  Every weaving shadow beneath the double row of trees that towered on both sides of me could have cloaked a crouching figure adjusting another small mechanical killer to the deadliest possible angle of flight. But I had another reason for not wanting to go back. Trilling might fall in with the armed guard idea but I doubted it like hell. I could picture him saying instead: “Ralph, even an armed car can be blown up. You’re staying under lock and key all night…right here in the Administration Building.”

  I could even picture him saying much the same thing to Joan, her image bright enough on his office tele-screen to be visible from where I’d be standing: “He’s not coming home tonight, Joan. We’re sending an armored car to pick you up in the morning. Wait, hold on—I’ll let you talk to him!”

  And I could almost hear her replying: “Don’t bother to send the car. I’m not going with him. Please don’t think too harshly of me, please try to unders
tand. I just can’t—”

  I started down the long boulevard on the far side of the square, still walking rapidly and feeling suddenly confident I’d been justified in not turning back. I could see the entrance to the Underground glimmering in the darkness a hundred feet ahead of me and there were people all around me walking in both directions. I wasn’t even troubled by the feeling that everyone gets at times—that something terrible and unexpected can happen right in the midst of a crowd, if only because the presence of many people exposes you to a dangerously wide range of unpredictable human emotions.

  For the barest instant, when I crossed the narrow strip of pavement directly in front of the kiosk, fear tugged at my nerves and I felt myself growing tense. But I became calm again the moment I looked around and saw that the only pedestrian within thirty feet of me was a hurrying girl with a portfolio under her arm. When she saw how intently I was staring at her she frowned and a look of annoyance came into her eyes.

  Oh, for God’s sake, I told myself, get rid of this nagging uncertainty, and stop behaving like a fool. If he intended to try again tonight I’d know by now. He’s missed a dozen very good chances, so something must be making him super-cautious, if he hasn’t keeled over just from the strain of watching me refuse to die. Killing’s never easy, even for a professional. It must be a little like being cut open, watching your own blood pouring out of you, because all violence inflicts a two-way trauma…severe enough at times to make even a mad slayer fling down his gun before going on a rampage of indiscriminate slaughter.

  There were arguments I could have used to wrap it up even tighter—such as the way he’d be trapped and blasted down almost instantly if he launched another attack on me so close to the spaceport’s three interlocking, hyper-sensitive security alert systems.

  But I didn’t even pause to weigh them, because right up to that minute I’d done very well, and the fear which had come upon me had been as brief as an autumnal flurry of wind when you’re coming around a tall building at breakneck speed.