“All Doone ships attack,” Scott said. “Plan R-7.”
This was it. This was it!
The Doones raced in to the kill. Blasting, bellowing, shouting, the guns tried to make themselves heard above the roaring of the monitor. They could not succeed, but that savage, invincible onslaught won the battle.
It was nearly impossible to maneuver a monitor into battle formation, but, once that was accomplished, the only thing that could stop the monster was atomic power.
But the Helldivers fought on, trying strategic formation. They could not succeed. The big battlewagons could not get out of range of the Armageddon s guns. And that meant—
Cinc Flynn’s face showed on the screen.
“Capitulation, sir. Cease firing.”
Scott gave orders. The roar of the guns died into humming, incredible silence.
“You gave us a great battle, cinc.”
“Thanks. So did you. Your strategy with the monitor was excellent.”
So—that was that. Scott felt something go limp inside of him. Flynn’s routine words were meaningless; Scott was drained of the vital excitement that had kept him going till now.
The rest was pure formula.
Token depth charges would be dropped over Virginia Keep. They would not harm the Dome, but they were the rule. There would be the ransom, paid always by the Keep which backed the losing side. A supply of korium, or its negotiable equivalent. The Doone treasury would be swelled. Part of the money would go into replacements and new keels. The life of the forts would go on.
Alone at the rail of the Arquebus, heading for Virginia Keep, Scott watched slow darkness change the clouds from pearl to gray, and then to invisibility. He was alone in the night. The wash of waves came up to him softly as the Arquebus rushed to her destination, three hundred miles away.
Warm yellow lights gleamed from ports behind him, but he did not turn. This, he thought, was like the cloud-wrapped Olympus in Montana Keep, where he had promised Ilene—many things.
Yet there was a difference. In an Olympus a man was like a god, shut away completely from the living world. Here, in the unbroken dark, there was no sense of alienage. Nothing could be seen—Venus has no moon, and the clouds hid the stars. And the seas are not phosphorescent.
Beneath these waters stand the Keeps, Scott thought. They hold the future. Such battles as were fought today are fought so that the Keeps may not be destroyed.
And men will sacrifice. Men have always sacrificed, for a social organization or a military unit. Man must create his own ideal. “If there had been no God, man would have created Him.”
Bienne had sacrificed today, in a queer, twisted way of loyalty to his fetish. Yet Bienne still hated him, Scott knew.
The Doones meant nothing. Their idea was a false one. Yet, because men were faithful to that ideal, civilization would rise again from the guarded Keeps. A civilization that would forget its doomed guardians, the watchers of the seas of Venus, the Free Companions yelling their mad, futile battle cry as they drove on—as this ship was driving—into a night that would have no dawn.
Ilene.
Jeana.
It was no such simple choice. It was, in fact, no real choice at all. For Scott knew, very definitely, that he could never, as long as he lived, believe wholeheartedly in the Free Companions. Always a sardonic devil deep within him would be laughing in bitter self-mockery.
The whisper of the waves drifted up.
It wasn’t sensible. It was sentimental, crazy, stupid, sloppy thinking.
But Scott knew, now, that he wasn’t going back to Ilene.
He was a fool.
But he was a soldier.
THE END.
SHOCK
THE world of the future will be a wonderful place, and the men of the future will be supermen—always perfect. Of course. Naturally. Only—
When Gregg looked up from his book to see the man crawling through the wall of his apartment, he thought briefly that he was crazy. Such things don’t happen to a middle-aged physicist who has arranged his life into an ordered pattern. Nevertheless, there was now a hole in the wall, and a half-naked person with macrocephalia was wedging himself through it.
“Who are you?” Gregg demanded, recovering the use of his tongue.
The man spoke an odd sort of English, slurred and with an extraordinary tonal range, but recognizable. “I’m a mugwump,” he announced, balancing on his middle. “My mug’s in . . . eh? . . . in 1943 and my wump’s in . . . uh!” He gave a convulsive wriggle and burst through, sprawling on the carpet and breathing hard. “That was a nardly squeeze. The valve isn’t quite big enough yet. Forthever.”
It made sense, but not much. Manning Gregg’s heavy, leonine features darkened. He reached out, seized a heavy book end, and rose.
“I am Halison,” the newcomer announced, adjusting his toga. “This should be 1943. Norvunder soverless.”
“What?”
“Semantic difficulty,” Halison told him. “I am from about . . . well, several thousand years in the future. Your future.”
Gregg’s gaze went to the hole in the wall. “You’re talking English.”
“Learned it in 1970. This isn’t my first trip into past. Many of them. Looking for something. Important—skandarly important. I use mental power to warp space-time pharron, so valve opens. Lend me clothes, if you please?”
Still holding the book end, Gregg walked to the wall and looked through the circular gap, just large enough to admit a small man’s body. All he could see was a blue, bare wall apparently a few feet away. The adjoining apartment? Improbable.
“Valve will open wider later,” Halison said. “Open at night, closed by day. I must be back before Thursday. Ranil-Mens visits me on Thursdays. But now may I beg clothes? There is something I must find—I have been searching in time for a long carvishtime. Please?”
He was still squatting on the floor. Gregg stared down at his extraordinary visitor. Halison was certainly not Homo sapiens 1943. He had a pinched, bright-pink face, with very large bright eyes, and his cranium was abnormally developed and totally bald. He had six fingers and his toes had fused. And he kept up a continual nervous trembling, as though his metabolism had gone haywire.
“Good Lord!” Gregg said, suddenly understanding. “This isn’t a gag. Is it?” His voice rose.
“Gag, gag, gag. Nevishly holander sprae? Was mugwump wrong? Hard to know what to say in new time-world. You have no conception of our advanced culture, sorry. Hard to get down to same plane with you. Civilization moved fast, fast, after your century. There is not much time. Talk later, but important now that you lend me clothes.”
There was a cold, hard knot just under Gregg’s backbone. “Yes, but—wait. If this isn’t some—”
“Forgive me,” Halison remarked. “I am looking for something; great hurry. I will return soon. By Thursday anyway to see Ranil-Mens. I get much wisdom from him. Now, forgive reedishly.” He touched Gregg’s forehead.
The physicist said, “Talk a bit slower, pi—”
Halison was gone.
Gregg whirled, searching the room with his gaze. Nothing. Except that the hole in the wall had doubled in diameter. What the hell.
He looked at the clock. It was just past eight. It should have been about seven. An hour had passed, it seemed, since Halison had reached out to touch his forehead.
As a sample of hypnotism, it was damned impressive.
Gregg carefully found a cigarette and lit it. Drawing smoke into his lungs, he looked at the valve from across the room and considered. A visitor from the future, eh? Well—
Struck by an obvious thought, he went into the bedroom and discovered that a suit of clothes, a brown Harris tweed, had been confiscated. A shirt was missing, a tie, and a pair of shoes. But the hole in the wall eliminated the chance that this was merely a clever theft. For one thing, Gregg’s wallet was still in his trousers pocket.
He looked through the valve again, but still could see nothing but th
e blue wall. It obviously wasn’t in the next-door apartment of Tommy MacPherson, the aging playboy who had given up night-clubbing for more peaceful pursuits, at his doctor’s suggestion. Nevertheless, Gregg went into the hall and rang the buzzer beside MacPherson’s door.
“ ‘Lo, Mac,” he said when a round, pale face, topped by carefully dyed chestnut hair, appeared to blink sleepily at him. “Busy? I’d like to come in a minute.”
MacPherson enviously eyed Gregg’s cigarette. “Sure. Make yourself at home. I’ve been going over some incunabula my Philadelphia man sent me, and wishing for a drink. Highball?”
“If you’ll join me.”
“Wish I could,” MacPherson groaned. “But I’m too young to die. What’s up?” He followed Gregg into the kitchen and watched the other man carefully examining the wall. “Ants?”
“There’s a hole in my wall,” Gregg said. “It doesn’t come through, though.” Which proved that the valve was definitely off the beam. It had to open either into MacPherson’s kitchen or else—some other place.
“Hole in your wall? How come?”
“I’ll show you.”
“I’m not that curious,” MacPherson remarked. “Phone the landlord. He may be interested.”
Gregg scowled. “I mean it, Mac. I want you to take a look. It’s—funny. And I’d rather like confirmation.”
“It’s either a hole or it isn’t,” MacPherson said simply. “Is that razor-edged brain of yours poisoned by alcohol? I wish mine was.” He looked wistfully at the portable bar.
“You’re no help,” Gregg said. “But you’re better than nobody. Come on!” He lugged the protesting MacPherson into his apartment and pointed to the valve. Mac went over, muttering something about a mirror, and peered into the gap. He whistled softly. Then he put his arm through, stretching it as far as possible, and tried to touch the blue wall. He couldn’t quite make it.
“The hole’s got bigger,” Gregg said quietly, “even since a few minutes ago. You see it too, eh?”
MacPherson found a chair. “Let’s have a drink,” he grunted. “I need it. Anyhow it’s an excuse. Make it short, though,” he added with a flash of last-minute caution.
Gregg mixed two highballs and gave MacPherson one. As they drank, he told the other what had happened. Mac was unhelpful.
“Out of the future? Glad it didn’t happen to me. I’d have gone off my crock.”
“It’s perfectly logical,” Gregg argued, partly with himself. “The guy—Halison—certainly wasn’t a 1943 product.”
“He must have looked like a combination of Baby Sandy and Karloff.”
“Well, you don’t look like a Neanderthaler or a Piltdown man, do you? That skull of his—Halison must have a tremendous brain. His I.Q.—well!”
“What good’s all that if he wouldn’t talk to you?” MacPherson asked cogently.
For some reason Gregg felt a slow flush creeping warmly up his neck. “I must have seemed like an ape to him,” he said flatly. “I could scarcely understand him—and no wonder. But he’ll be back.”
“By Thursday? Who’s this Ranilpants?”
“Ranil-Mens,” Gregg said. “A friend, I suppose. A . . . a teacher. Halison said he got wisdom from him. Perhaps Ranil-Mens is a professor at some future university. I can’t quite think straight. You don’t realize the implications of all this, Mac, do you?”
“I don’t want to,” MacPherson said, tasting his drink. “I’m a bit scared.”
“Rationalize it away,” Gregg advised. “I’m going to.” He looked again at the wall. “That hole’s getting pretty big. Wonder if I could step through it?” He walked close to the valve. The blue wall was still there, and a blue floor at a slightly lower level than his own gray carpet. A pungent, pleasant breath of air floated in from the unknown, oddly reassuring.
“Better not,” MacPherson said. “It might close up on you.”
For answer Gregg vanished into the kitchen and returned with a length of thin clothesline. He made a loop around his waist, handed the other end to MacPherson, and crushed out his cigarette in a convenient tray.
“It won’t close till Halison gets back. Or anyway it won’t close too fast. I hope. Sing out if you see it starting to shut, though, Mac. I’ll come diving back headfirst.”
“Crazy fool,” MacPherson said.
Gregg, rather pale around the lips, stepped into the future. The valve was more than four feet in diameter by now, its lower edge two feet from the carpet. Gregg had to duck. He straightened up, remembering to breathe, and looked back through the hole into MacPherson’s white face.
“It’s O.K.,” he said.
“What’s over there?”
Gregg flattened himself against the blue wall. The floor felt soft under his feet. The four-foot circle was like a cut-out disk, an easel set up in empty air, a film process shot. He could see MacPherson there, and his own room.
But he was in another room now, large, lit with a cool radiant glow, and utterly different from anything he had ever seen before.
The windows drew his attention first, oval, tall openings in two of the blue walls, transparent in the center, and fading around the edges to translucence and then azure opaqueness. Through them he glimpsed lights, colored lights that moved. He took a step forward and hesitated, looking back to where MacPherson waited.
“What’s it like?”
“I’ll see,” Gregg said, and circled the valve. It was invisible from the other side. Perhaps light rays were bent around it. He couldn’t tell. A little frightened, he returned briefly to glimpse MacPherson again, and, relieved, continued his explorations.
The room was about thirty feet square, with a high-domed roof, and the lighting source was at first difficult to discover. Everything in the room had a slight glow. Absorption of sunlight, Gregg thought, like luminous paint. It seemed effective.
There wasn’t much to see. There were low couches, functional-looking padded chairs, comfortable and pastel-tinted, and a few rubbery tables. A square glassy block as large as a small overnight bag, rubbery in texture, was on the blue floor. Gregg could not make out its purpose. When he picked it up gingerly, colors played phosphorescently for a few moments within it.
There was a book on one of the tables, and he pouched this for future reference. MacPherson hailed him.
“Manning? O.K. in there?”
“Yeah. Just a minute.”
Where were the doors? Gregg grinned wryly. He was slightly handicapped by lacking even the basic technological knowledge for this unknown world. The doors might be activated by pressure, light, or sound. Or even odor, for all he knew. A brief inspection could tell him nothing. But he was worried about the valve. If it closed—
Well, no great harm would be done, Gregg supposed. This future world was peopled by humans sufficiently similar to himself. And they’d have enough intelligence to return him to his own time-sector—Halison’s appearance proved that. Nevertheless, Gregg preferred to have an open exit.
He went to the nearest window and looked out. The constellations in the purple sky had changed slightly, not much in a few thousand years. The rainbow lights darted here and there. Aircraft. Beneath him, the dark masses of buildings were dimly visible in the shadow. There was no moon. A few towers rose to his own height, and he could make out the rounded silhouettes of their summits.
One of the lights swept toward him. Before Gregg could draw back he glimpsed a small ship—antigravity, he thought—with a boy and a girl in the open cockpit. There was neither propeller nor wing structure. The pair resembled Halison in their large craniums and pinched faces, though both had hair on their heads. They, too, wore togalike garments.
And they did not seem strange, somehow. There was no—alienage. The girl was laughing, and, despite her bulging forehead and meager features, Gregg thought her strangely attractive. Certainly there was no harm in these people. The vague fears of a coldly, ruthlessly inhuman super-race went glimmering.
They glided past, not twenty f
eet away, looking straight at Gregg—and did not see him. Astonished, the physicist reached out to touch the smooth, slightly warmish surface of the pane. Odd!
But there were no lights in the other buildings. The windows must be one-way only, to insure privacy. You could see out, but not in.
“Manning!”
Gregg turned hurriedly, recoiling the rope as he returned to the valve. MacPherson’s worried frown greeted him.
“I wish you’d come back. I’m getting jittery.”
“All right,” Gregg said amiably, and crawled through the hole. “But there’s no danger. I bagged a book. Here’s some incunabula for you!” He drew the volume from his pocket.
MacPherson took it but didn’t open it immediately. His pale eyes were on Gregg’s.
“What did you find?”
Gregg went into detail. “Quite remarkable in its suggestions, you know. A tiny slice out of the future. It didn’t seem so strange when I was in there, but now it seems funny. My drink’s warm. Another?”
“No. Oh, well—yes. Short.”
MacPherson examined the book while Gregg went into the kitchen. Once he glanced up at the valve. It was a little larger, he thought. Not much. Perhaps it had nearly reached its maximum.
Gregg came back. “Can you read it? No? Well, I expected that. Halison said he had to learn our language. I wonder what he’s looking for—in his past?”
“I wonder who Ranil-Mens is.”
“I’d like to meet him. Thank Heaven I’ve got a high I.Q. If I can get Halison—or somebody—to explain things to me, I ought to be able to grasp the rudiments of future technology. What a chance, Mac!”
“If he’s willing.”
“You didn’t meet him,” Gregg said. “He was friendly, even though he did hypnotize me. What’s that?” He seized the book to examine a picture.
“Octopus,” MacPherson suggested.
“Chart. I wonder. It looks almost like an atomic structure, but it’s no compound I’ve ever run into. I wish I could read these infernal wiggles. They look like a combination of Burmese and Pitman. Even the numerical system’s different from the Arabic. A whole treasure chest out there, and no key!”
Collected Fiction Page 334
