“That much we know.” The professor saw they were tiring of the terse scientist and shifted gears. “But if the veil of time were rent that shrouds the years between us and the Home Suns People, how much more would we learn? Would we despise the Home Suns People as our frontiersman ancestors did, or would we cry: “This is our spiritual home—this world of rank and order, this world of formal verse and exquisitely patterned arts’?”
If the veil of time were rent—?
We can try to rend it . . .
~ * ~
Wing Commander Arris heard the clear jangle of the radar net alarm as he was dreaming about a fish. Struggling out of his too-deep, too-soft bed, he stepped into a purple singlet, buckled on his Sam Browne belt with its holstered .45 automatic and tried to read the radar screen. Whatever had set it off was either too small or too distant to register on the five-inch C.R.T.
He rang for his aide, and checked his appearance in a wall-mirror while waiting. His space tan was beginning to fade, he saw, and made a mental note to get it renewed at the parlor. He stepped into the corridor as Evan, his aide, trotted up— younger, browner, thinner, but the same officer type that made the Service what it was, Arris thought with satisfaction.
Evan gave him a bone-cracking salute, which he returned. They set off for the elevator that whisked them down to a large, chilly dark underground room where faces were greenly lit by radar screens and the lights of plotting tables. Somebody yelled “Attention!” and the tecks snapped. He gave them “At ease” and took the brisk salute of the senior teck, who reported to him in flat, machine-gun delivery:
“Object-becoming-visible-on-primary-screen-sir.”
He studied the sixty-inch disk for several seconds before he spotted the intercepted particle. It was coming in fast from zenith, growing while he watched.
“Assuming it’s now traveling at maximum, how long will It be before it’s within striking range?” he asked the teck.
“Seven hours, sir.”
“The interceptors at Idlewild alerted?”
“Yessir.”
Arris turned on a phone that connected with Interception. The boy at Interception knew the face that appeared on its screen, and was already capped with a crash helmet.
“Go ahead and take him, Efrid,” said the wing commander.
“Yessir!” and a punctilious salute, the boy’s pleasure plain at being known by name and a great deal more at being on the way to a fight that might be first-class.
Arris cut him off before the boy could detect a smile that was forming on his face. He turned from the pale lumar glow of the sixty-incher to enjoy it. Those kids—when every meteor was an invading dreadnaught, when every ragged scouting ship from the rebels was an armada!
He watched Efrid’s squadron soar off on the screen and then he retreated to a darker corner. This was his post until the meteor or scout or whatever it was got taken care of. Evan joined him, and they silently studied the smooth, disciplined functioning of the plot room, Arris with satisfaction and Evan doubtless with the same. The aide broke silence, asking:
“Do you suppose it’s a Frontier ship, sir?” He caught the wing commander’s look and hastily corrected himself: “I mean rebel ship, sir, of course.”
“Then you should have said so. Is that what the junior officers generally call those scoundrels?”
Evan conscientiously cast his mind back over the last few junior messes and reported unhappily: “I’m afraid we do, sir. We seem to have got into the habit.”
“I shall write a memorandum about it. How do you account for that very peculiar habit?”
“Well, sir, they do have something like a fleet and they did take over the Regulus Cluster, didn’t they?”
What had got into this incredible fellow, Arris wondered in amazement. Why, the thing was self-evident! They had a few ships—accounts differed as to how many—and they had, doubtless by raw sedition, taken over some systems temporarily.
He turned from his aide, who sensibly became interested in a screen and left with a murmured excuse to study it very closely.
The brigands had certainly knocked together some ramshackle league or other, but— The wing commander wondered briefly if it could last, shut the horrid thought from his head, and set himself to composing mentally a stiff memorandum that would be posted in the junior officer’s mess and put an end to this absurd talk.
His eyes wandered to the sixty-incher, where he saw the interceptor squadron climbing nicely toward the particle— which, he noticed, had become three particles. A low crooning distracted him. Was one of the tecks singing at work? It couldn’t be!
It wasn’t. An unsteady shape wandered up in the darkness, murmuring a song and exhaling alcohol. He recognized the Chief Archivist, Glen.
“This is Service country, mister,” he told Glen.
“Hullo, Arris,” the round little civilian said, peering at him. “I come down here regularly—regularly against regulations— to wear off my regular irregularities with the wine bottle. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
He was drunk and argumentative. Arris felt hemmed in. Glen couldn’t be talked into leaving without loss of dignity to the wing commander, and he couldn’t be chucked out because he was writing a biography of the chamberlain and could, for the time being, have any head in the palace for the asking. Arris sat down unhappily, and Glen plumped down beside him.
The little man asked him.
“Is that a fleet from the Frontier League?” He pointed to the big screen. Arris didn’t look at his face, but felt that Glen was grinning maliciously.
“I know of no organization called the Frontier League,” Arris said. “If you are referring to the brigands who have recently been operating in Galactic East, you could at least call them by their proper names.” Really, he thought— civilians!
“So sorry. But the brigands should have the Regulus Cluster by now, shouldn’t they?” he asked, insinuatingly.
This was serious—a grave breach of security. Arris turned to the little man.
“Mister, I have no authority to command you,” he said measuredly. “Furthermore, I understand you are enjoying a temporary eminence in the non-service world which would make it very difficult for me to—ah—tangle with you. I shall therefore refer only to your altruism. How did you find out about the Regulus Cluster?”
“Eloquent!” murmured the little man, smiling happily. “I got it from Rome.”
Arris searched his memory. “You mean Squadron Commander Romo broke security? I can’t believe it!”
“No, commander. I mean Rome—a place—a time—a civilization. I got it also from Babylon, Assyria, the Mogul Raj— every one of them. You don’t understand me, of course.”
“I understand that you’re trifling with Service security and that you’re a fat little, malevolent, worthless drone and scribbler!”
“Oh, commander!” protested the archivist. “I’m not so little!” He wandered away, chuckling.
Arris wished he had the shooting of him, and tried to explore the chain of secrecy for a weak fink. He was tired and bored by this harping on the Fron—on the brigands.
His aide tentatively approached him. “Interceptors in striking range, sir,” he murmured.
“Thank you,” said the wing commander, genuinely grateful to be back in the clean, etched-line world of the Service and out of that blurred, water-color, civilian land where long-dead Syrians apparently retailed classified matter to nasty little drunken warts who had no business with it. Arris confronted the sixty-incher. The particle that had become three particles was now—he counted—eighteen particles. Big ones. Getting bigger.
He did not allow himself emotion, but turned to the plot on the interceptor squadron.
“Set up Lunar relay,” he ordered.
“Yessir.”
Half the plot room crew bustled silently and efficiently about the delicate job of applied relativistic physics that was ‘lunar relay.’ He knew that the palace power plant could take i
t for a few minutes, and he wanted to see. If he could not believe radar pips, he might believe a video screen.
On the great, green circle, the eighteen—now twenty-four— particles neared the thirty-six smaller particles that were interceptors, led by the eager young Efrid.
“Testing Lunar relay, sir,” said the chief teck.
The wing commander turned to a twelve-inch screen. Unobtrusively, behind him tecks jockeyed for position. The picture on the screen was something to see. The chief let mercury fill a thick-walled, ceramic tank. There was a sputtering and contact was made.
“Well done,” said Arris. “Perfect seeing.”
He saw, upper left, a globe of ships—what ships! Some were Service jobs, with extra turrets plastered on them wherever there was room. Some were orthodox freighters, with the same porcupine-bristle of weapons. Some were obviously home-made crates, hideously ugly—and as heavily armed as the others.
Next to him, Arris heard his aide murmur, “It’s all wrong, sir. They haven’t got any pick-up boats. They haven’t got any hospital ships. What happens when one of them gets shot up?”
“Just what ought to happen, Evan,” snapped the wing commander. “They float in space until they desiccate in their suits. Or if they get grappled inboard with a boat hook, they don’t get any medical care. As I told you, they’re brigands, without decency even to care for their own.” He enlarged on the theme. “Their morale must be insignificant compared with our men’s. When the Service goes into action, every rating and teck knows he’ll be cared for if he’s hurt. Why, if we didn’t have pick-up boats and hospital ships the men wouldn’t—” He almost finished it with “fight,” but thought, and lamely ended—”wouldn’t like it.”
Evan nodded, wonderingly, and crowded his chief a little as he craned his neck for a look at the screen.
“Get the hell away from here!” said the wing commander in a restrained yell, and Evan got.
The interceptor squadron swam into the field—a sleek, deadly needle of vessels in perfect alignment, with its little cloud of pick-ups trailing, and farther astern a white hospital ship with the ancient red cross.
The contact was immediate and shocking. One of the rebel ships lumbered into the path of the interceptors, spraying fire from what seemed to be as many points as a man has pores. The Service ships promptly fiddled it and it should have drifted away—but it didn’t. It kept on fighting. It rammed an interceptor with a crunch that must have killed every man before the first bulwark, but aft of the bulwark the ship kept fighting.
It took a torpedo portside and its plumbing drifted through space in a tangle. Still the starboard side kept squirting fire. Isolated weapon blisters fought on while they were obviously cut off from the rest of the ship. It was a pounded tangle of wreckage, and it had destroyed two interceptors, crippled two more, and kept fighting.
Finally, it drifted away, under feeble jets of power. Two more of the fantastic rebel fleet wandered into action, but the wing commander’s horrified eyes were on the first pile of scrap. It was going somewhere—
The ship neared the thin-skinned, unarmored. gleaming hospital vessel, rammed it amidships, square in one of the red crosses, and then blew itself up, apparently with everything left in its powder magazine, taking the hospital ship with it.
The sickened wing commander would never have recognized what he had seen as it was told in a later version, thus:
“The crushing course they took
And nobly knew
Their death undaunted
By heroic blast
The hospital’s host
They dragged to doom
Hail! Men without mercy
From the far frontier!”
Lunar relay flickered out as overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark corner and sank into a chair.
“I’m sorry,” said the voice of Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere. “No doubt it was quite a shock to you.”
“Not to you?” asked Arris bitterly.
“Not to me.”
“Then how did they do it?” the wing commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. “They don’t even wear .45’s. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got away with it. They elect ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?”
“It means,” said the fat little man with a timbre of doom in his voice, “that they’ve returned. They always have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out—on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets or the stars. They—they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.
“They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets or the stars—a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”
“‘But what shall we do?”
“We shall cower, I suppose, beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not, defending the palace within a very few hours’. But you will have your revenge.”
“How?” asked the wing commander, with haunted eyes.
The fat little man giggled and whispered in the officer’s ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke. He didn’t believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later by one of Algan’s gunfighters, he believed it even less.
~ * ~
The professor’s lecture was drawing to a close. There was time for only one more joke to send his students away happy. He was about to spring it when a messenger handed him two slips of paper. He raged inwardly at his ruined exit and poisonously read from them:
“I have been asked to make two announcements. One, a bulletin from General Sleg’s force. He reports that the so-called Outland Insurrection is being brought under control and that there is no cause for alarm. Two, the gentlemen who are members of the S.O.T.C. will please report to the armory at 1375 hours—whatever that may mean—for blaster inspection. The class is dismissed.”
Petulantly, he swept from the lectern and through the door.
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~ * ~
Big Book of Science Fiction Page 23
