The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  Just that thought made me decide to open my eyes and try to raise myself a little, because he had a right to know how grateful I felt.

  He was just going through the door. I could see that he was tall, blond and rather sturdily built, but a wave of dizziness made me sink back against the pillows again before I could get a really good look at him. It’s hard to tell what a man looks like anyway, when he’s facing away from you, and you can only see his disappearing shoulders and the back of his head.

  When I opened my eyes for the second time, a full minute later, the eyes that looked back at me were just as I’d pictured them. A deep, lustrous brown. Her face was very much as I’d pictured it too, except that I’d no way of knowing whether she was a blonde or a brunette. She looked a little like Joan. Her hair was done up in a different way, and her lips were a little fuller than Joan’s and her cheekbones not quite so prominent. Her nose, too, was a fraction of an inch shorter. But otherwise she could have passed for Joan’s sister. Not a twin sister, for the resemblance wasn’t anything like that pronounced. But it was close to the family likeness you see quite often in portraits of two sisters when one is smiling and the other looks seriously troubled.

  It flashed across my mind that if they had been standing side by side, both wearing the same expression, the resemblance would have been considerably more striking.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me too much, because of what she’d said to the doctor. Women who think and feel in much the same way are very likely to bear a family resemblance physically. It’s the sort of thing which makes an anthropologist shake his head in vigorous denial. But facts are facts and who was I to dispute them?

  “Just lie quiet,” she whispered, patting me on the shoulder. “Dr. Crawford says you mustn’t try to talk. You’re going to be all right. I’m Miss Cherubin, your day nurse.”

  She smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. “You should have a night nurse too, but I’ve been staying on in her place.”

  Cherubin. An angel? No—cherubim was spelt with an “M.” And she wasn’t that young or quite as rosy-cheeked as cherubs are supposed to be.

  What made it really tragic was my inability to reach out and touch her or ask her a single question, because right at that moment another wave of dizziness swept over me and I blacked out again.

  11

  Right at this point there has to be a shift in the way I’ve been recording events as they happened, because what happened next took place elsewhere, while I was flat on my back in the hospital. By “what happened next” I mean…to me and Joan personally and to Commander Littlefield and the Martian Colonization Board and everything I’d come to Mars to take cognizance of, and do my best to change for the better.

  I know, I know. Ten million separate events are taking place all the time on Earth and on Mars and by no stretch of the imagination could they be thought of as an immediate part of this record. But when the threads all start to draw together and tighten about you in a destiny-altering way you have to keep the time-sequence in order and record developments as they take place. Otherwise when they become of immediate concern later on the entire picture will seem out of focus. The frame will start lengthening out and the people in the picture will be out-of-kelter also, and scattered all over the landscape. The only way you can keep them sharply in focus is to record what happens to them when it happens.

  It shouldn’t be too difficult, because there’s a seeing eye that hovers over the Mars’ Colony day and night. The big Time-Space eye that records everything that takes place in the universe, so that nothing is ever really lost beyond re-capture. The past, the present and the future keep flickering, in a backward-forward way, across that immense retina, and some day a technique may be developed for running history off in reverse and you’ll see events that took place thousands of years ago as if they were happening today on a lighted screen.

  So…let’s look through that Big Eye straight down at the Mars Colony, you and I together. And remember. In this particular instance we won’t need a history-reversing gimmick at all, because what we’ll see and hear is NOW. It starts as a two-person conversation:

  “John, I’m frightened. What if the insulation isn’t absolutely foolproof? What if one of those Endicott Fuel containers isn’t shielded in just the right way? Suppose the radio-active stuff inside builds up to what the nuclear physicists call critical mass and there’s an atomic explosion? Blowups have happened…even in the Endicott Laboratories under the strictest kind of supervision.”

  “Now look. There’s not the slightest danger. Do you think for one moment Endicott would take that big a risk—even though Wendel has the entire combine backed into a corner?”

  “They’d take any kind of risk now, because they have no choice. John, if you were going to give me another baby you’d have given me fair warning. I could have steeled myself to endure the harshness and unfairness of it. But when you bring death home with you—”

  The woman had been very pretty once. You could see that just by glancing at her. But now her face had a drawn, haggard look and her pallor was more than pronounced. It verged on grayness. Her hair was thinning and turning white and only her eyes remained lustrous, truly alive, as if all that remained of the woman she had once been had been drawn to a focus in the gaze she was training on her husband in desperate appeal.

  “Why did you do it, John? You’re not just endangering your life and mine. If we didn’t have four children…maybe I wouldn’t be talking this way.”

  “I told you I was forced into it, didn’t I? Wendel is calling Endicott’s bluff. We can no longer go on buying Endicott fuel cylinders openly on margin, hundreds of them and letting all of them stay in Wendel’s custody, because we don’t really own them at all. The price goes up or the price goes down and we sell out and buy again—and we’re supposed to own four-fifths of the Endicott Combine. But there’s not a single Colonist who owns the equivalent of four or five cylinders outright. I don’t own these six cylinders. But I had to bring them home with me.”

  “I just don’t understand why. It’s too complicated for me. A nuclear explosion would be much easier for me to understand.”

  “All right…i’ll go over it again. But try to listen more carefully this time. Before this big, cut-throat war started only one man suspected that one of the two competing combines might try to sell its fluid property to the Colonists on margin. They were supposed to cooperate, not compete, because it was thought that Wendel couldn’t possibly keep its nuclear generators operating without fuel. It can’t, of course, but only one man suspected that Endicott might refuse to be dwarfed by Wendel in a sharp-practice duel and fight to stay big and powerful by letting the Colonists buy and sell fuel on speculation. That would put the Colonists right in the middle, don’t you see?”

  “Yes…i do,” the woman who had once been almost beautiful said. “Thank you for giving me credit for having that much intelligence. You seem to forget that I have a fairly good memory too. We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

  “Sure we have. But it doesn’t seem to have made too deep an impression on you. You can sum it all up by saying that on paper, from day to day, it’s the Colonists who now own the Endicott Combine, or most of it. So it’s the Colonists who are carrying the battle directly to Wendel, fighting for the right to go on wildcatting, to get rich overnight or end up pauperized. It’s wildcatting in a sense, just as it was when oil instead of atomic fuel was the big prize to be fought over Earthside. When a Colonist buys Endicott fuel cylinders on margin, it’s practically the same as if he were digging an oil well in his own backyard.”

  “Go on, John,” the woman said wearily.

  “There’s that much uncertainty in it, don’t you see? And he’s really doing it entirely single-handed and on his own, because he’s digging in what is practically a paper graveyard in some respects, unless he’s one of the lucky ones. Endicott keeps the f
uel. It doesn’t go out of their hands. But Wendel still has to buy it directly from the Colonists, who are supposed to own it, and the price fluctuations keep Wendel from becoming all-powerful and Endicott from going under or being dwarfed.

  “In the main, it’s the Colonists who have most to gain by keeping Endicott powerful and solvent…although the battle lines aren’t so tightly drawn that it doesn’t become profitable, at times, to go over to the Wendel side. There’s a lot of sniping between the lines.”

  “I know all that, John.”

  “Well, here’s what it all boils down to, what you didn’t seem to grasp. You asked me why I brought these six cylinders home. It’s because of the one man who did suspect, right from the first, and when the charters were drawn up, that a war of this kind might be waged. I can’t even tell you his name. He was probably a minor legal expert or auditor employed by the Board, who had shrewd prophetic gifts…enough foresight, at least…to insert in fine print in both of the charters a provision that Wendel is now using to call Endicott’s bluff.

  “That provision doesn’t say that Endicott can’t sell some of their fluid assets on margin. But it sets a limit to that kind of speculative buying and selling. The same limit would apply to Wendel, but Wendel has no fluid assets to sell on margin, and it can’t very well break up its generators and big transmission lines and sell them to the Colonists piecemeal, even on margin. It wouldn’t look right, because you can’t pretend that a fragment of a pipe that is still being operated by a combine is a speculative commodity that has passed into other hands and is subject to day-to-day fluctuations.

  “If you want to think of fluid assets as simply a share in a Combine’s profits, that’s another matter. But I’m not talking about that kind of fluid asset. Endicott has been selling to the Colonists in a literal sense—moveable fluid assets. And in fine print in the Endicott charter it says that Endicott can only sell about a third of its fuel cylinders on margin. The others have to be purchased outright and carried home and held by the purchaser until the price is right and he can dispose of them at a profit. Or sell at a loss, as property.”

  “But you say you didn’t buy those cylinders outright. How could you have done that?” the woman protested. “Just one cylinder would cost—a third of a million dollars.”

  “Naturally I didn’t buy them outright. I bought them on margin. But Wendel can’t prove that. Endicott is covering up for me and because I’ve brought them home and can slap my hand on the cool metal and tell Wendel to go to hell if they try to dispute my ownership—Endicott still has a chance to come out on top. Wendel is calling Endicott’s bluff, sure. But Endicott is countering with another bluff and they can make it stick. Their auditing department knows just how to do that. So every Colonist who wants to go on wildcatting now has to bring a few cylinders home, to make it look as if he’d bought them outright. Possession puts you nine-tenths on the winning side in any legal argument. You ought to know that!”

  “Ought I? Just suppose I did. Would that stop me from becoming terrified, when I know exactly what could happen if the metal isn’t as cool as you hope it will be when you slap your hand on it, and the Wendel police stay cold-blooded about it, and wait around for the fissionable material inside to reach critical mass.”

  “You know damn well it would take an awful lot of accidental jarring and jolting to trigger a fuel cylinder and make it blow up. It probably couldn’t happen, except in a laboratory where they’re careless about such things because of overconfidence.”

  “Dinner’s on the table,” the woman said. “We may as well go back into the house while we’ve still got a home, and gather the children around us, and tell them a few more lies about what the future is going to be like in the Colony, now that one father in three will be bringing nuclear fuel cylinders home with him.”

  The man—his name was John Lynton—nodded and they returned into the pre-fab. Lynton preceded his wife into the dwelling and the woman paused for an instant in the doorway to stare back at the long metal shed where the six cylinders were reposing…letting her gaze take in as well the double row of foot-high cactus plants which encircled the yard and the sun-reddened stretch of open desert beyond. Then she let the door swing shut behind her, and turned to face her four hungry children.

  One thought alone sustained Grace Lynton at that moment. There had never been any need, so far, for the children to go to bed hungry. Their hunger was due solely to the demands of healthy young appetites when dinner was a little delayed and they had been playing strenuously in the yard all afternoon or going on exploring expeditions.

  12

  They were all downstairs now, waiting to be fed, hardy perennials like all children everywhere. Thomas with his shining morning face—it seemed to stay that way right up until bedtime—and Susan, seven, and still doll-wedded, and the twins, Hedy and Louise. Three girls and one boy, and Grace Lynton felt a little sorry for her son at times, until she remembered that a boy of thirteen isn’t troubled by too many girls in a family when he’s seven or eight years their senior. The girls were simply very young children to him and he was—well, right next door at least to being grown up.

  “All right,” John Lynton said, seating himself at the head of the table. “Let’s fall to and see who gets through first.”

  “Did you have a tough day, Dad?” Thomas asked, reaching for a knife and fork, and drawing a still steaming serving bowl toward him. His unruly hair was so blond it seemed almost white and there was a double row of freckles across the bridge of his nose.

  The other three children were brunettes, with hair ranging in color from chestnut brown to jet black. Even the twins did not closely resemble each other, as non-identical twins so often fail to do.

  “Don’t annoy your father with questions now, Thomas…please,” Grace Lynton said.

  “Why not?” Lynton asked, frowning at his wife. “I did have a tough day and there’s no sense in soft-pedaling it. Sometimes I almost wish we hadn’t come to Mars. No matter how rigorous a Board screening is…there are some things it can’t tell you about yourself. Will you make a good father on a world without trees or grass, with no way of getting out into the green countryside and sitting down on the moss-covered bank of a trout stream, with your kid at your side and having a heart to heart talk with him in the cool shade of a big oak or cedar.”

  “The stew’s good, Mom,” Thomas said. “Is it all right if I fill up my plate again?”

  “Did I ever say you couldn’t, Thomas?” Grace Lynton snapped, unable to keep irritation out of her voice, despite her son’s compliment. “There’ll never be any food shortages in this house, if we have to sell all of the furniture.”

  “Leave enough for me, Thomas,” Hedy Lynton said.

  “Don’t worry, I will,” Thomas said. “But if you keep on eating the way you do you’ll grow up fat, and no man in the Colony will marry a fat woman when there are so many thin ones.”

  “That’s very well put, Thomas,” Lynton said. “I have a brilliant son—practically a genius. But don’t let it go to your head, boy. Unless you’re in the electronic field or have some other technical specialty a straightforward, rugged he-man can do more for the Colony.”

  “What kind of talk is that, John?” Grace Lynton demanded. “There’s nothing unmanly about a genius, in any field.”

  “No, I suppose not. But I wouldn’t want him to be a poet or a painter. They just stand back and observe life and I’d like to see my son wade in fighting.”

  The daylight outside had started fading before Lynton and his wife had returned indoors. But now the quickly-arriving Mars’ night was almost at hand, and the twilight had deepened outside and was giving way to complete darkness at the edge of the desert.

  The two adults and four children seated about the table hadn’t once glanced toward the window, for the food and contentious conversation had absorbed all of their attention.

 
It was Thomas who saw the light first, flickering on and off close to the shed. He had always wanted, deep down, in a secret way that he had never dared to discuss with anyone, to be an artist and paint at least a hundred pictures that would show the people who looked at them exactly what life on Mars was like. And his father’s gaze, trained upon him in such a steady way, had made him squirm inwardly, as if his secret might at any moment be exposed. To avoid his father’s gaze he’d looked straight out the window and seen the strange light flickering on and off.

  “Dad!” he said.

  “What is it, son?”

  “There’s a light moving around out in the yard, close to the shed.”

  If Thomas had suddenly toppled over dead his father could not have leapt up from the table with more horror in his eyes.

  “Why…why…good God! Wendel wouldn’t go that far! It would be an act of madness!”

  “John, you don’t think—”

  Thomas’ mother was on her feet too now, her face drained of all color, her eyes darting to the window and back to the tight-lipped, violently trembling man at the head of the table. John Lynton’s face had gone as white as her own.

  For a minute Thomas thought that his father was going to rush right out into the yard and grab hold of the intruder, as fast as he’d leapt up from the table. Then he saw he’d guessed wrong about that.

  Lynton crossed the room in five long strides, swung open the weapon locker and grabbed hold of a holstered hand-gun instead. He strapped the holster to his waist before whipping out the weapon and snapping off the safety mechanism.

  He was starting for the door when Grace Lynton called out warningly: “John, don’t! John!”

  He swung about, staring at her in consternation. “Don’t what? If they’ve tampered with those cylinders I’ll make sure they won’t live to blow up another man’s home—or half the Colony!”

  “You can’t blast them down!” Her voice rose shrilly. “No, John! A hand-gun blast that close to a fuel cylinder would set off a chain reaction—”