by John Brunner
And then—
“Oh God!” whispered Peter softly. “Look at that!”
Startled exclamations revealed that the other passengers had seen it too. Barghin ordered the pilot to interrupt their panicky flight and circle at constant distance, because whatever the risk was now, they couldn’t afford to miss this most incredible sight.
Steadily on a column of luminescent green which violated every law of optics Peter could think of, the metal shell was rising from the ground. Majestically; as lightly and yet as placidly as a balloon in dead calm air …
“What’s he going to do?” wondered Barghin aloud. “Is he armed? Is he going to use that as a permanent mobile headquarters? Or is he just going to go straight on up? Because if he gets higher than a few thousand feet, do you realize what this means? He’s put himself at our mercy!”
“Yes, of course,” Peter breathed. There was a nuclear missile waiting, back behind the evacuated area. If the monster was going to rise far enough for the explosion to avoid injuring the people below, they could at long last use it.
“General!” crackled a voice from the radio. “We have a bogey in our sights, rising on some kind of green rockets from the missile base. Do we fire?” The speaker seemed to be in a state of tension-controlled terror. His voice shook.
“No!” snapped Barghin. “On no account provoke him till we see whether he’s going up or along!”
The thing was still rising, gathering speed now. Barghin hesitated, narrow-eyed, and bent to the microphone again.
“Get me in circuit with Last Resort,” he ordered. When he was connected, he said, “He’s still going up. Are you ready to blow?”
“We’re counted down to six, general,” was the reply. “I’m holding it there.”
“Let’s see, you’re about forty-eight miles off, aren’t you? When his azimuth angle hits twenty degrees, you can blow.”
“Right, general!” said the voice excitedly. “And believe me, the pleasure will be all ours.”
Does he know? Peter wondered, watching the drifting, puzzling ascent of the monster’s craft. Was he perhaps aware that he was laying himself open to the horrible vengeance he had only escaped because these human beings he had considered primitive were not primitive enough to condemn their own species to a nuclear hell until there was no other path open?
Perhaps he was. Perhaps it was shaming to him that the creatures he regarded as expendable vermin should have proved his match, and his code of honor as an allegedly superior being demanded that he suffer death for his failure. They might never know unless one day, out there among the stars where men were also going, their species’ paths crossed again.
The craft was moving sideways a little, as though surveying the city below, or jockeying for a course which demanded absolute precision of planning. Peter’s mouth was dry, and he could hear Barghin muttering to himself.
And then it went. It was as though the column of green, whose brilliance had become nearly blinding, stretched and vanished, leaving no trace but a reddish after-image. They felt the ’copter rock in the wind of the going of it, while they threw their heads back in a vain effort to see where it had gone.
“We beat him, anyway;” said Barghin. “He’s heading back to space, looks like. I’m only sorry he got off so lightly. But we’ve never built anything that could climb like that.”
He spoke to the microphone. “Last Resort, did you blow?”
“He took us by surprise, general,” the answer came, apologetically. “We must have undershot by literally a mile. My God, general, what’s he using for power?”
“How should I know? Maybe when we can question the technicians who worked for him, we’ll be able to piece it together for ourselves—”
“Holy God, no!” The radio voice interrupted in tones of horror. “General, we’ve lost the missile! They were trying to get it back on course, but it’s gone.”
“What? How? Where was it last on track?” Visions of a kiloton warhead flaring at random filled Barghin’s mind. Maybe it had even been seized by the monster! “Quickly!”
“It intersected the green column,” said the radio voice. “It was dead on course. Only the monster wasn’t there any longer. And since then—”
“General,” said Peter quietly, staring upwards through the window of the ’copter. “There’s your missile, or I’m much mistaken. And what’s more, it seems to have done its job.”
Barghin followed his stare incredulously. Against the lightening sky of dawn, a slowly expanding ball of fire was shining like an enormous morning star.
Very faintly, distant thunder came to them.
“Yes, we got confirmation from both the space stations and the lunar base,” said Barghin. “As we figure it, Mr. President, that column of green on which the monster’s ship went up was a sort of visible by-product of a raging controlled energy. Not nuclear. Electro-gravitic, they tell me. And inside the column, space was twisted. Changed. It doesn’t make sense to anyone but a physicist or a mathematician. We guess that the laws of gravity didn’t apply inside that column, and that was why the monster’s ship could go up so fast.
“Only the speed with which the missile arrived enabled it to penetrate the outside of the column. Inside, gravity was polarized, or something. What it amounts to is that the missile flew straight up, along the column, instead of continuing horizontally. And about a hundred and ten miles up, it caught up with the monster, and …”
The President ran his finger around the neck of his shirt. He said, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter exactly how it happened, so long as it did happen. Things will be back to normal in a little while, I guess, though reports I’ve seen on the state of the casualties they’re bringing out of Jacksonville means that a hell of a lot of people are going to be in mental homes for a while … Dr. Gordon, do your people think there are any more monsters like that hiding under the sea?”
Gordon shook his head. “Lord knows,” he said. “I hope not. And in fact I doubt it. It was probably a million-to-one chance that we alerted this one, so even if others are hiding down there, they won’t be awakened till we really begin to explore the great depths.”
He buried his face in his hands. “I was so sure,” he murmured. “When we found Atlantica, I thought we’d found Atlantis, and maybe the secrets of a lost civilization.”
“Well,” said Peter, “in a way we did. Only the secrets were not very pleasant ones. How far might we not have come by now if our ancestors in those days hadn’t had the weight of him and his kind on their necks!”
“I must say it’s going to give a lot of people qualms when the next batch of appropriations for space research comes up,” said the President bluntly. “Myself included, I think. If that thing was a sample of the life that grows on other worlds, then—”
“On the contrary, Mr. President,” said Peter. “That thing had experience before it came to Earth, I think. This implies that it had met races similar to ours, and when we go out to the stars we’re going to find other species similar to man, as well as monsters like the one we unearthed. We dealt with him. I’d almost be inclined to give up oceanography and go into space research just for the privilege of being among the first to meet another race like ourselves.”
“Only we’re going to have to be hellishly careful,” said Barghin. “Well have to go out with H-bombs in one hand and the pipe of peace in the other, and I’m afraid we shall probably guess wrong when it comes to choosing between them. But it’s the only way.”
The President smiled suddenly. “I’m glad that thing was found when it was,” he said. “From the purely personal point of view, I’m pretty sure the public at large will regard it as something that happened during my term of office, and it will count heavily against me. But if it had come up, say, fifteen or twenty years ago, when there were nuclear weapons poking out from under every stone, the use of an H-bomb on Jacksonville would have triggered a war even if we warned the public why it was being used. They’d have assumed t
he monster was a Russian secret weapon!”
“Or a century ago,” supplied Barghin. “When we’d only have had guns to oppose it, instead of missiles, and no television to give us information from robot watchposts. We would be slaving for him still.”
The whole appalling horror, Peter reflected, had directly afflicted perhaps one in a thousand of the people in the world. That included those who suffered under the monster’s lash, those who manned the cordon, those who struggled to extract information about him from his behaviour and to locate his psychological and physical weaknesses, those who treated the sick after he had hurt them, and those who fled their homes and were now straggling back.
And they had got the better of him in a few short months.
It was a good augury. When they met his kind again, it would not be the effort of a mere one-tenth of one per cent of man that opposed their strength to the monsters. It would be—it would have to be—one hundred per cent.
He would not be among them. He moved his stump tentatively. Not in person. But at least, if he was no longer whole in body, he was whole and free in his mind.
Which was more than the monster’s subjects had been the first time he appeared on Earth.
He looked across at Mary, and the memory of Luke came into his mind. Poor devil! What was the secret that he had been about to reveal and never was allowed to utter? Peter could not be sure, but he was fairly certain it was connected with the fact that Luke had managed to secure a position of trust in the monster’s retinue while all the time scheming to oppose him. It was something only a free man could know.
Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power.
If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
www.sfgateway.com
Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Avengers of Carrig
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreaming Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions of Time
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934-1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1960
All rights reserved.
The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1960
This eBook first published in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10117 3
This eBook produced by
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
