The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “No, it won’t. The blast is channeled. Don’t be a fool, Grace. I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re the fool! You’ll get us all killed!”

  “If they’ve tampered with just one of those cylinders we won’t have to worry about what a hand-gun blast will do. But they won’t save their own skins before the big blast hits us. That’s one thing I can make sure of.”

  He turned and was gone. She started to follow him out into the yard, but became aware of how dangerous that would be just in time. If she followed her husband the children would almost certainly follow her, for she couldn’t order them to stay indoors and hope to be obeyed.

  She rushed to the window and stared out, her face pressed to the pane.

  She could feel Thomas pressing close to her—or was it Hedy or Susan? There was a heaviness in his body which made her almost sure it was Thomas. But that meant nothing, because she loved all of her children equally.

  Suddenly she was sure it was Thomas, because he was speaking to her. “Take it easy, Mom! Dad’ll take care of whoever it is. He’s got a hand-gun to protect him.”

  “Oh, I know he has!” she wanted to scream. “It will be a beautiful way of protecting us all…by sending us straight into eternity. God, dear God, don’t let him blast. Don’t—”

  The blast came then, lighting up the darkness outside, making the windowpanes rattle. For an instant Grace Lynton could see her husband clearly, standing by the shed with a white flare spreading outward from his shoulders.

  Then the flare dwindled and vanished and Grace Lynton had no way of knowing what had happened outside in the dark. She was sure of only one thing. She couldn’t stay inside the house with her husband moving about a few feet from fuel cylinders that might blow up at any moment, for there was at least a fifty percent likelihood that the intruder had accomplished what he’d come to do, before Thomas had seen the light bobbing about in the yard.

  She had straightened and was hugging her son to her, just starting to turn, when John Lynton’s voice rang out sharply from the doorway.

  “Grace! I blasted at him but he got away! Listen carefully. I’ve only a moment to talk.”

  He was standing in the doorway with the hand-gun reholstered at his waist, its handle gleaming dully. His pallor was startling, for it went far beyond mere paleness, as if all the blood had been drawn from his face artificially, leaving the skin gray and shrunken.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think…one of the cylinders has been triggered to blow up,” he went on quickly. “It isn’t heating up. There’d be no heat—just a faint vibration. When I put my hand on the metal I was almost sure I could feel a vibration. We’ve got just one chance of staying alive—and I’ll have to move fast. I’m going to take it to the Spaceport—I can get there in the conveyor truck in ten minutes—and have them dismantle it. They’ll know how. I don’t. I’ll take all six of the cylinders, to make sure.”

  “John, no! It will blow up in the truck. I’m sure of it. We’d better all get out in the desert, as far away from it as we can. If we start right now and run—”

  “We could go in the truck, Dad!” Thomas cried.

  Lynton shook his head. “If just one cylinder blows up—it will take three miles of desert with it. If all six go…twenty miles of desert. There are at least six thousand Colonists within three or four miles of us. There are less than a thousand people at the Spaceport. Only one big sky ship is still unloading. Better a thousand deaths than six or seven thousand…if it blows up before they can dismantle it.”

  “But John—Oh, God, I don’t know.”

  “It’s the best way, the surest way. We can’t think only of ourselves. If I drove straight out into the desert with it and it blows up within twenty minutes the fallout would still kill several thousand Colonists. The Spaceport’s in the other direction, completely isolated. And I can get there in fifteen minutes…even if I’m stopped by the Wendel police and have to blast my way to it.”

  “Why should they try to stop you? They’d die themselves—”

  “Why did they send someone to trigger that bomb? They’ll take any risk now, because they know that Endicott’s new bluff could smash them. That cylinder is smaller than the first atomic bomb ever built—much smaller than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima—and if they have to explode a half-dozen of them in different parts of the Colony to demoralize the Colonists and discredit Endicott they’re prepared to do it, apparently. Even if it kills thirty thousand people. Or maybe they figured the one I’m taking to the Spaceport—and I am taking it there, Grace—would make the Colonists think twice about taking any more Endicott fuel cylinders home with them.”

  “You’re right, John,” Grace Lynton said, with a firmness in her voice which surprised her. “We can’t think only of ourselves. Until you come back—every moment will be a living death. But—you must do it. There’s no other way.”

  “I’ll be back,” Lynton said. “I—I love you, Grace.”

  “And I love you, John—even though I’ve said cruel, cutting things at times. I love you very much.”

  “Take care of yourself, Dad,” Thomas said.

  “I will, son. Don’t worry. Just be the man of the family and keep the kids in line until I get back.”

  13

  I had no way of knowing how long I remained on the outer fringes of what was probably just a weakness-produced blackout before the outlines of the hospital room wavered back, becoming so clear again that I could see the foot of the bed, and a glass-topped table covered with small bottles and a roll of gauze bandage that looked about as big as a liquid fuel cylinder.

  Someone who couldn’t have been the doctor was sitting in a chair by the bed, leaning a little forward, his eyes level with mine. I was more than startled. An ice-cold measuring worm came out at the base of my spine and started inching its way upward, bunching itself up and lengthening out again, the way measuring worms do when they’re trying to decide if you’re just the right fit for a human-style coffin.

  I had a visitor whose face would have chilled a perfectly well man prepared to defend himself against violence at the drop of a hat. He was looking at me with a glacial animosity in his stare, as if he resented the fact that I was still alive and would do something about it if I gave him the slightest encouragement.

  Even without encouragement I had the feeling that my life hung by a thread which could snap at any moment, so long as he remained that close to me with no one standing by to interfere if he lost control of himself.

  He didn’t have a moronic or particularly brutal looking face. Intelligence of a high order had given his features a cast you couldn’t mistake. It was the kind of look that went with disciplined thinking—long years of it—and behavior that was based on intellectual discernment, however much that discernment had been abused during moments of uncontrollable rage. Uncontrollable rage, as every psychologist knows, can tie the reasoning part of any man’s mind into knots. Everything that was primitive in him seemed to be at the helm now, as if he bore me so much ill-will that he might be capable of trying to take my life with just his bare hands, if he happened to be unarmed. And I was far from sure of that.

  His glacial gray eyes seemed to say: “I’ve got you exactly where I want you, chum. It won’t do you any good to shout for help. It stands to reason that if I could get in here to talk to you at a time like this, throwing my weight around a little further would be no problem at all. Five minutes of privacy will suit me fine. After all, how long will killing you take?”

  He was a fairly big man, compactly built, with hands that looked strong enough to bend a steel bar, if he didn’t mind chancing a rush of blood to the head that might have been a little risky in a man his age.

  I had no idea why he was sitting there, only that the alarm bells were ringing again. Only this time it wasn’t taking place in a crowded subway train in total darkness, or up near t
he top of a swaying spiral where an assassin’s aim could be a little less than sure. It was man to man, tete-a-tete, in a well-lighted hospital room.

  I was flat on my back and weak as hell and Death was looking straight at me out of ice-blue eyes. I had only one straw to clutch at. The hospital room might just possibly be under surveillance and an act of violence that’s likely to boomerang can give an assassin pause.

  His first words ripped that straw from me and crumpled it up, with such vigor I was sure I could hear a crunching sound.

  “I’ve just a few questions to ask you,” he said, in a surprisingly mild tone. “We’ve made sure that there are no recording devices in this room. We always make a careful check as a matter of routine, when we’re forced to demand complete privacy during an interrogation of this sort. It’s something we’d prefer not to do, but there are times—”

  He shrugged, as if he’d made the point clear enough and resented the necessity of making it any plainer.

  “When the internal security of the Colony is endangered,” he went on impatiently, “we do not hesitate to invoke all of our authority. We have no choice. Too many people take it for granted that a privately owned combine is exceeding its authority when it undertakes police investigations not specifically authorized by its charter. They forget that such police powers are implicit in every charter which provides for the exercise of reasonable vigilance in the public domain. Safe-guarding the public, which Wendel Atomics serves, would not be possible if we did not exercise such authority.”

  How true that was I didn’t have enough legal knowledge at my finger-tips to decide. But I was pretty sure it was a bald-faced lie. But just his use of the word “power” explained how he’d managed to get as close to me as he’d done, with no one within earshot to hear me if I burst my lungs shouting.

  The kind of power the Board had given me the right to exercise superceded whatever display of authority Wendel Atomics had used to turn the hospital room into a prison cell. But who would know or make a move to save me—if the silver bird didn’t get a chance to flap its wings on my uniform until they were pumping embalming fluid into my veins and making plans to lower me, with a ceremonial flourish, into a desert grave?

  “There are a few things Wendel Atomics has a right to know,” Glacial Stare was saying. “A legal right—make no mistake about that. I’d advise you not to lie to me. If you do—”

  He shrugged again.

  I said something then that surprised me, because I didn’t think right at the moment I had that much defiance on tap.

  “Shove it!” I said.

  He couldn’t have heard me, because he went on with no change of expression. “Commander Littlefield is within his rights in refusing to permit us to question him as to what took place on board the Mars’ rocket. We have no jurisdiction over such…irregularities in space. If we questioned just one of his officers, the Board would have every right to revoke our charter. But two of the officers have come to us and voluntarily submitted information which we cannot ignore. We believe that the internal security of the Colony is in danger and we intend to take steps to make sure that none of the questions we have a right to ask will remain unanswered.”

  He was laying it on the line, all right, speaking with an almost surgical kind of precision, so that I couldn’t claim later—if I turned stubborn—that I’d failed to understand him. It’s funny how a man who’s holding all the cards will sometimes do that, just on the off-chance that you may have an ace up your sleeve and may use it to make trouble for him later on.

  He must have been pretty sure I didn’t have a concealed ace, however, for he backed up what he was saying with the most dangerous kind of threat. Dangerous to him…if there had been a hidden listening device in the room and a tape with that threat on it had come to the attention of the Board.

  “I hope, for your sake,” he said, “that you’ll keep nothing back. It is very unpleasant to sit in a Big-Image interrogation room and have part of your mind destroyed. The part you value most, that makes you what you are—destroyed, sliced away. Yes…sliced away is quite accurate, even though no instrument would be needed and not a hand would be laid on you. You can cut deep into the brain with vibrations alone. But nothing…physical ever takes place in the Big-Image interrogation room. No knife or vibrator, as you know. The destruction is brought about in a quite different way. But it’s just as drastic and irreversible as a prefrontal lobotomy.”

  He stopped talking abruptly, looking past me at the opposite wall, as if he could already see the shadow of a broken and tormented man projected there. I could see it too, and I didn’t like to think that I was coming that close to sharing his thoughts. But it was useless to pretend that the man who was casting that shadow might not turn out to be me.

  So they had them on Mars, too, with the Wendel police on hand to make sure that the big screen with its multiple sound tracks and the smoothly operating projector were kept carefully hidden from the law. Big-Image interrogation rooms—a cruel vestige of the brain-washing techniques that had so outraged world opinion in the middle decades of the twentieth century that they had been castigated and outlawed by the United Nations, the World Court and every responsible Governmental agency on Earth.

  But the criminal mind has very little respect for world opinion or restrictions on brutal practices that are very difficult to enforce. Big-Image interrogation had begun as a police investigation procedure, which made it easy for the wrong kind of police force to resort to it and claim historic precedent and moral justification as a cover-up if their activities ever came to light.

  I was sure that Glacial Stare had mentioned it solely to turn the screw as far as it would go, hoping I’d turn pale and answer his questions in a completely cooperative way. I was sure that if I did he’d stop threatening me immediately, listen with attentive ear to what I had to say and apologize for letting me think, even for a moment, that it was just a part of my mind he’d been planning to destroy. Why should he want to upset me that way, when the only thing he’d had in mind from the start was to persuade me to talk and then relieve me of all anxiety by killing me?

  He wasn’t giving me credit for having the kind of brain it would have been worth taking the trouble to destroy, even in part, but there was nothing to be gained by reminding him of that.

  You don’t have to be a professional historian or even a data-collecting research specialist in the police procedure field to pinpoint the origin of Big-Image interrogation in the middle years of the twentieth century.

  Three out of five well-informed people can tell you exactly how it began, if you jog them into remembering by showing them a micro-film recording of what took place during just one of those interrogations sixty or seventy years ago.

  My memory didn’t need to be jogged. I’d examined too many micro-film recordings made even earlier than that—so many years before I was born that the grooves have to be altered if you want to run them off in the projectors that were in common use at the turn of the century, because they ante-date even those old-style machines.

  As early as 1965 someone had discovered and pointed out that the cinema was no longer just an entertainment medium. Everyone at the time, I suppose, had made that discovery already, in a private sort of way, but an entire society can have a blind spot and go right on clinging to established patterns of thought, if only because people in general are a little reluctant to discuss openly anything that threatens to overturn the apple cart.

  At any rate, about 1965 someone whose name has not come down to us—quite possibly he was a drama critic, that most curious of breeds—had pointed out that the cinema had become a potentially mind-shattering instrument of torture, which could be used to brain-wash a spectator until he became a hopeless psychotic, incapable of distinguishing reality from illusion. Schizophrenic or manic depressive, take your pick.

  It was the bigger-than-life illusion that could do that—the s
trange, often terrifying sense of being caught up in some super-reality that had no real existence in time or space, in the ordinary way that time-and-space manifests itself to us in everyday life.

  The cinema became potentially that kind of torture medium the instant the first of the twenty-million-dollar spectacles in full color appeared on the screen.

  We know what that kind of illusion can do today and when we watch a screen spectacle that distorts reality for three or four hours by making everything seem fifty or a hundred times as large as life…we make sure that we are entering a theater that is Government supervised and not a Big-Image interrogation room presided over by a sadist in police uniform.

  Everyone knows how it is today, and stays on guard, perpetually alert. But back in the twentieth century the danger wasn’t clearly understood, and that lack of understanding was taken advantage of by the brain-washers in uniform to exact confessions at a terrible price.

  Everyone is familiar with the disorientation I’m talking about. Even the old stage plays and the earlier black-and-white movies and not a few books could bring it about to some extent, when you left the theater or closed the book, and passed from a world of dramatically heightened illusion into the drabness of everyday life.

  But the big screen spectacles in full color, with electronic sound effects, make the world of illusion and the world of sober reality seem as far apart as two contradictory constructs in symbolic logic. When you look at that kind of motion picture you get the illusion that all of the events on the screen, even the intimate, two-person closeups, are taking place on a gigantic scale.

  The sharpness and brightness of everything, the brilliance of the colorama, the dramatic selectivity which makes each scene burn its way into your brain as a titan encounter in a world of giants is so overwhelming that when you emerge from the theater after watching such a film the world of reality seems small, stunted, anaemic by contrast.