“Don’t waste your sympathy, Fenton,” Bryne said, watching him. “You know Torren better than I do. You know what he planned for you. You know how he’s always treated you. When he saw you escaping, he sent the ’copter to make sure you wouldn’t get away. He isn’t human, Fenton. He hates human beings. He hates you and me. Even now he’ll play on your sympathy until he gets you to do what he wants. After that . . . well, you know what to expect.”
Torren shut his eyes again, not quite soon enough to hide the little glitter of confidence, perhaps of triumph, in them. In an almost calm voice he said: “Ben, you’d better shoot him now. He’s a plausible devil.”
“Just what are your plans, Bryne?” Fenton asked in a level voice.
“What you see.” Bryne’s gaunt shoulders moved in a shrug. “I’ll pretend he’s ill, at first. Too ill to see anyone but me. This is a Maskelyne vodor I’ve got here. I’m working out a duplicate of his voice. It’s a coup d’etat, Fenton, nothing new. I’ve got everything planned thoroughly. I’ve done nine-tenths of the management of Ganymede for years now, anyhow. Nobody’s going to wonder much. With your help, I can get the rest of the empire for us, too.”
“And what about me?” Torren demanded thickly.
“You?” The pale eyes flickered toward him and away. “As long as you behave, I suppose you can go on living.” It was a lie. No falser statement of intent was ever spoken. You could tell it by the flat tone of his voice.
“And the Ganymedans?” Fenton asked.
“They’re yours,” Bryne said, still flatly. “You’re the boss.”
“Torren?” Fenton turned his head. “What do you say about the Ganymedans?”
“No,” Torren breathed. “My way stands, Ben.” His voice was an organ whisper. “My way or nothing. Make your choice.”
The slightest possible flicker of a smile twitched the corner of Fenton’s lip. He swung his pistol higher and sent a bullet exploding straight into Bryne’s face.
The gaunt man moved like lightning.
He must have had his farther hand on a gun for some seconds now, because the two explosions came almost as one. In the same instant he sent his chair clattering backward as he sprang to his feet.
He moved too fast. His aim was faulty because of his speed. The bullet whined past Fenton’s ear and smacked into the pillar behind him. Fenton’s shot struck Bryne an invisible blow in the shoulder that spun him half around, knocked him three-quarters off his feet. He scrambled desperately backward to regain his balance. His foot caught in a tangle of ripped-up wiring beside the water bath, and he went over backward in slow motion, his pale stare fixed with a strange illusion of calmness on Fenton’s face as he fell.
For an instant he tottered on the brink of the bath. Then Torren chuckled a vast, deep, terrible chuckle and with tremendous effort lifted a hand far enough to seize Bryne by the wrist.
Still expressionless, still with that pale, intent stare fixed upon Fenton, Bryne went backward into the tank. There was a surge of heaving water. Bryne’s suddenly convulsed limbs splashed a blinding spray and his hand groped out of nowhere for Torren’s throat.
Fenton found himself running, without intending to or—he knew—needing to run. It was pure impulse to finish a job that needed finishing, though it was in better hands than his, now. He put his good hand on the rim of the huge tank, the revolver still gripped in it, leaning forward—
Bryne vanished under the oily, opaque surface. The incalculable weight of Torren’s arm was like a millstone pressing him down, merciless, insensate as stone. After a while the thick, slow bubbles began to rise.
Fenton did not even see the motion Torren made. But when he tried to spring backward, it was too late. A vast, cold, slippery hand closed like iron over his. They wrestled unequally for several slow seconds. Then Torren’s grip relaxed and Fenton stumbled back, wringing his half-crushed fingers, seeing his revolver all but swallowed up in Torren’s enormous grasp.
Torren grinned at him.
Slowly, reluctantly, Fenton grinned back.
“You knew he was lying,” Torren said. “About the bombs.”
“Yes, I knew.”
“So it’s all settled, then,” Torren said. “No more quarreling, eh, son? You’ve come back.” But he still held the revolver watchfully, his eyes alert.
Fenton shook his head.
“Oh, no. I came back, yes. I don’t know why. I don’t owe you a thing. But when the bombs fell I knew you were in trouble. I knew he’d never dare bomb me in sight of the ’visor screens as long as you had any power on Ganymede. I had to find out what was happening. I’ll go, now.”
Torren hefted the revolver thoughtfully. “Back to your Ganymedans?” he asked. “Ben, my boy, I brought you up a fool. Be reasonable! What can you do for them? Flow can you fight me?” He rumbled with a sudden deep chuckle. “Bryne thought I was helpless! Step over there, Ben. Switch on the ’visor.”
Watching him carefully, Fenton obeyed. The snowy hills outside sprang into view. Far off above them, tiny specks upon the blue-lit clouds, a formation of planes was just visible, humming nearer.
“About ten minutes more at the outside, I’d say,” Torren estimated. “There are a lot of things about this set-up nobody even guesses except me. I wonder if Bryne really imagined I hadn’t thought of every possibility. I allowed for this years and years ago. When my regular signals stopped going out an alarm went off—out there.” The huge head nodded. “My guards would have got here in another ten minutes whether you came or not. Still, son, I’m obliged. You spared me that much time of feeling—helpless. You know how I hate it. Bryne could have killed me, but he could never have held me helpless very long. I owe you something, Ben. I don’t like being obligated. Within reason, I’m willing to give you—”
“Nothing I want,” Fenton cut in. “Only freedom for the Ganymedans, and that I’ll have to take. You won’t give it. I can take it, Torren. I think I know the way, now. I’m going back to them, Torren.”
The huge hand floating at the surface of the water turned the pistol toward Fenton.
“Maybe you are, son. Maybe not. I haven’t decided yet. Want to tell me just how you plan to stop me on Ganymede?”
“There’s only one way.” Fenton regarded the pistol with a grim smile. “I can’t fight you. I haven’t any money or any influence. Nobody on Ganymede has except you. But the Ganymedans can fight you, Torren. I’ll teach them. I learned guerilla warfare in a hard school. I know all there is to know about fighting against odds. Go on and put your new towers up, Torren. But—try and keep them up! We’ll blow them apart as fast as you can put them together. You can bomb us, but you can’t kill us all—not soon enough, you can’t.”
“Not soon enough—for what?” Torren demanded, the small eyes burning upon Fenton’s. “Who’s going to stop me, son? I’ve got all the time there is. Ganymede belongs to me!”
Fenton laughed, almost lightly.
“Oh, no it doesn’t. You lease it. But Ganymede belongs, to the solar system. It belongs to the worlds and the people of the worlds. It belongs to your own people, Torren—the Thresholders who are going to inherit the planets. You can’t keep the news of what’s happening quiet here on Ganymede. The Earth government owns the towers. When we blow them over the government will step in to find out what goes on. The scandal will get out, Torren. You can’t keep it quiet!”
“Nobody will care,” Torren grunted. But there was a new, strange, almost hopeful flint in his eyes. “Nobody’s going to war over a little satellite like Ganymede. Nobody has. any stake here but me. Don’t be childish, Ben. People don’t start wars over an ideal.”
“It’s more than an ideal with the Thresholders,” Fenton said. “It’s their lives. It’s their future. And they’re the people with power, Torren—not the Earth-bred men like me. The Thresholders are the future of the human race, and they know it, and Earth knows it. The new race on Mars with the three-yard chest expansions, and the new people on Venus with gills and
fins may not look much like the Ganymedans, but they’re the same species, Torren. They’ll go to war for the Ganymedans if they have to. It’s their own hides at stake. Ideals don’t come into it. It’s survival, for the Thresholders. Attack one world and you attack all worlds where Thresholders live. No man’s an island, Torren—not even you.”
Torren’s breath came heavily in his tremendous chest.
“Not even me, Ben?”
Fenton laughed and stepped backward toward the open pillar. On the screen the planes were larger now, nearer and louder.
“Do you know why I was so sure you hadn’t ordered those bombs to kill me?” he asked, reaching with his good hand for the open door. “For the same reason you won’t shoot me now. You’re crazy, Torren. You know you’re crazy. You’re two men, not one. And the other man is me. You hate society because of the debt it owes you. Half of you hates all men, and the Ganymedans most of all, because they’re big like you, but they can walk like men. Their experiment worked and yours failed.
So you hate them. You’ll destroy them if you can.”
He found the door, pushed it open wide. On the threshold he said: “You didn’t adopt me on a whim, Torren. Part of your mind knew exactly what it was doing. You brought me up the hard way. My life was spent in a symbolic Centrifuge, just like yours. I am you. I’m the half that doesn’t hate the Ganymedans at all. I’m the half that knows they’re your people, the children you might have had, walking a free world as yours would have walked if your experiment had come out right, like theirs. I’ll fight for them, Torren. In a respirator and mask, but I’ll fight. That’s why you’ll never kill me.”
Sighing, Torren tilted the pistol. His thick finger squeezed itself inside the guard, began slowly to tighten upon the trigger. Slowly.
“Sorry, son,” he said, “but I can’t let you get away with it.”
Fenton smiled. “I said you were crazy. You won’t kill me, Torren. There’s been a fight going on inside you ever since you left the Centrifuge—until now. Now it’s going on outside, in the open. That’s a better place. As long as I’m alive, I’m your enemy and yourself. Keep it on the outside, Torren, or you will go mad. As long as I’m alive I’ll fight you. But as long as I’m alive, you’re not an island. It’s your battle I’m fighting. You’ll do your best to defeat me, Torren, but you won’t kill me. You won’t dare.”
He stepped back into the pillar, reached for the spring to close the door. His eyes met Torren’s confidently.
Torren’s teeth showed under grimacing lips.
“You know how I hate you, Ben,” he said in a thick, fierce voice. “You’ve always known!”
“I know,” Fenton said, and touched the spring. The door slid shut before him. He was gone.
Torren emptied the revolver with a sort of wild deliberation at the unmarred surface of the pillar, watching the bullets strike and ricochet off it one by one until the hall was full of their whining and the loud explosions of the gun. The pillar stood blank and impervious where Fenton’s face had been.
When the last echo struck the ceiling Torren dropped the gun and fell back into his enormous tank, caught his breath and laughed, tentatively at first and then with increasing volume until great billows of sound rolled up the walls and poured between the pillars toward the stars. Enormous hands flailed the water, sending spray high. The vast bulk wallowed monstrously, convulsed and helpless with its laughter.
On the screen the roar of the coming planes grew until their noise swallowed up even Torrents roaring mirth.
THE END
THE VOICE OF THE LOBSTER
Even the slickest of confidence tricks can backfire at times, but Macduff proves he’s the most resourceful swindler in all space!
CHAPTER I
Getaway
TILTING his cigar at a safe angle Terence Lao-Tse Macduff applied a wary eye to the peephole in the curtain and searched the audience for trouble.
“A setup,” he muttered under his breath. “Or is it? I have the inexplicable sensation of wet mice creeping slowly up and down my spine. What a pity I wasn’t able to get that Lesser Vegan girl to front for me. Ah, well. Here I go.”
He drew up his rotund form as the curtain slowly rose.
“Good evening to you all,” he said jovially. “I am happy to see so many eager seekers after knowledge, from all parts of the Galaxy, gathered here tonight on this, Aldebaran’s greenest world—”
Muffled noises rose from the audience, mingled with the musky odor of Aldebaranese and the scents of many other races and species. For it was Lottery Time on Aldebaran Tau and the famous celebration based on the counting of seeds in the first sphyghi fruit of the season had as usual drawn luck-worshippers from all over the Galaxy. There was even an Earthman, with shaggy red hair and a scowling face, who sat in the front row, glaring up at Macduff.
Uneasily evading that glare, Macduff went on with some haste.
“Ladies, gentlemen and Aldebaranese, I offer you my All-Purpose Radio-isotopic Hormone Rejuvenating Elixir, the priceless discovery which will give you the golden treasury of youth at a sum easily within the reach of each and every—”
An ambiguous missile whizzed past Macduff’s head. His trained ear screened out words in a dozen different interstellar tongues and realized that none of them implied approval.
The red-haired Earthman was bellowing, “The mon’s a crook! Nae doot aboot it!” Macduff, automatically dodging an overripe fruit, looked pensively at him.
“Oh-oh,” Macduff was thinking. “I wonder how he found out those cards were marked for black light?”
He held up his arms dramatically for silence, took a backward step and kicked the trigger on the trap door. Instantly he dropped out of sight. From the audience rose a tremendous bellow of balked fury.
Macduff, scuttling rapidly past discarded flats of scenery, heard feet thundering above him.
“There will be chlorophyll spilled tonight,” he mused, sprinting. “That’s the trouble with these Aldebaranese, they’re still vegetables at heart. No sense of ethics, merely tropisms.”
His racing feet tripped over a half-empty box of progesterone, a hormone necessary when a sucker, or customer, was fowl or mammal strain.
“Can’t be the hormones,” he pondered, kicking boxes out of his path. “It must have been the radio-isotope. I shall write a scorching letter to that Chicago outfit. Fly-by-nights, of course. I should have suspected the quality of their product at that price. Three months, forsooth! Why, it hasn’t been a fortnight since I sold the first bottle—and it’s taken this long to finish the payoffs and start hoping for a net profit.”
This was serious. Tonight had been the first occasion on which he hoped to put the profits from All-Purpose Radio-isotopic Hormone Rejuvenating Elixir into his own pocket. Aldebaran officials had a greed which one didn’t normally associate with vegetable ancestry. How was he going to get enough money to ensure his passage spaceward in a hurry if speed seemed indicated?
“Trouble, trouble,” Macduff murmured, as he fled down a corridor, ducked out of the exit and foresightedly sent a tower of empty boxes crashing down, blocking the door. Screams of rage came from behind him.
“Sounds like Babel,” he said, trotting. “That’s the trouble with galactic travel. Too many overemotional races.” Doubling and twisting along a planned course, he continued to mutter marginal comments, for Macduff generally moved in a haze of sotto voce remarks confidingly addressed to himself, usually approving in nature.
AFTER a time, deciding that he had put a safe distance between himself and justice, he slowed his pace, paused at a dingy hock-shop and paid out a few coins from his paltry store. In return he was given a small battered suitcase, which contained everything necessary for a hurried departure—everything, that is, except the really vital factor. Macduff had no space ticket.
Had he anticipated the full extent of Aldebaranese rapacity and corruption he could perhaps have brought along more payoff funds. But he had wanted his
arrival to coincide with the great sphyghi festival and time pressed. Still, there were ways. Captain Masterson of the Sutter owed him a favor and the Sutter was due to take off early next morning.
“Possibly,” Macduff ruminated, trudging on, “something might be arranged. Let me see, now. Item One. There’s Ao.” Ao was the Lesser Vegan girl whose remarkable semi-hypnotic powers would make her such an excellent front man, figuratively speaking.
“Borrowing ticket money won’t solve Item One. If I succeed in getting Ao I’ll have to deal with her guardian, Item Two.”
Item Two represented an Algolian native named Ess Pu.[1] Macduff had taken pains to keep himself informed of Ess Pu’s whereabouts and so knew that the Algolian was no doubt still involved in the same game of dice he had begun two days ago at the UV Lantern Dream-Mill, not far from the center of town. His opponent was probably still the Mayor of Aldebaran City.
“Moreover,” Macduff reflected, “both Ess Pu and Ao have tickets on the Sutter. Very good. The answer is obvious. All I have to do is get in that dice game, win Ao and both tickets and shake the dust of this inferior planet from my feet.”
Swinging the suitcase jauntily, he scuttled along by hack alleys, conscious of a distant, mounting tumult, until he reached the door of the UV Lantern Dream-Mill, a low broad arch closed with leather curtains. On the threshold he paused to glance back, puzzled by the apparent riot that had broken out.
Submerged feelings of guilt, plus his natural self-esteem, made him wonder if he himself might be the cause of all that uproar. However, since he had only once roused the inhabitants of an entire planet against him[2] he concluded vaguely that perhaps there was a fire.
So he pushed the curtains aside and entered the UV Lantern, looking around sharply to make certain Angus Ramsay wasn’t present. Ramsay, as the reader will guess, was the red-haired gentleman last heard defaming Macduff in the theater.
“And, after all, he was the one who insisted on buying a bottle of the Elixir,” Macduff mused. “Well, he isn’t here. Ess Pu, however, is. In all fairness, I’ve given him every chance to sell me Ao. Now let him take the consequences.”
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