“There were no murder-devices, to my knowledge.” The Premier-General sneered at him.
“Come! Come! You had a short-wave radio. There was some frequency which would set them off. You were to wait a chosen moment and violate all the laws of war by murdering troops which had accepted the surrender of your government.”
Igor was silent. He was still held fast. But a little longer, and a lightning-swift movement would free him for leaps toward that coldly mocking figure behind the desk.
“You have been treated leniently,” said the Premier-President in a suddenly soft voice. “You have merely been questioned. Do you know that if I order it you will be staked out here—yes, here in this room—and a tiny pencil-flame played over your body, inch by inch, while my doctors inject remedies to keep you alive so that you will live in screaming torment for days on end?”
Igor remembered to lick his lips, as if he were terrified. But he thought that his guards did not hold him quite as tightly as at the beginning.
“What is your government’s secret weapon?” asked the Premier-President softly. “I am in haste. For every minute you keep me waiting, you will spend what will seem a century begging for death.”
The man meant it. But Igor was suddenly exultant, because he was sure that one of his guards was about to loosen his grip to take a fresh one.
“I do not know, Excellency!” he said. He forced his voice to tremble. “Truly I do not know!”
The Premier-President put the tips of his fingers together.
“I understand,” he said—and his voice was deadly for an instant—“that some fool broadcast the announcement that had been prepared, saying that our army had marched on into your nation. That fool will regret it. But the army had orders to make that advance. To this moment, it has not done so. It did not fail to march through indolence! An hour before the marching-time, voices in communication with my staff here grew thick and sluggish. Words grew vague. Men babbled. The stream of reports dwindled, and those that came were unintelligible. I had a rocket-plane go to my general’s headquarters to demand an explanation. He reported while in flight that all was apparently normal, save that there was no forward movement. The air-fleet had not taken off. No vehicles stirred. No tanks moved.”
Igor’s heart gave a bound.
“The rocket-plane landed,” said the Premier-President evenly. “Its pilot was enclosed in a flight-suit which was air-tight and with its own oxygen supply. He reported that men moved about dazedly, and spoke as if in delirium. They were unable to answer his questions except in babblings like those of dreams or fever. Many lay on the earth, breathing heavily. My pilot thought it a plague, but it was not. He was in an airtight flying-suit. He should have been immune. Presently be spoke thickly of a burning thirst and of weakness. He went back to his plane and took off. He crashed.”
Then he said matter-of-factly:
“Of course he would have been shot and he and his plane burned when he landed, for fear of plague. Yet I do not think it is plague. What is it?”
“I—do not know,” said Igor. He was unspeakably exultant, but he was dazed.
“Bind him,” said the Premier-President softly. “Bring an acetylene torch. He will speak, or he will suffer as no man ever suffered in all the world before!”
The clutching hands tightened on Igor’s limbs. Then an orderly-officer raced in.
“Excellency!” he panted. “The President of the Council of Ministers—our enemy—has asked for a television contact!”
“Arrange it,” said the Premier-President coldly. “Here.” He turned his eyes back to Igor.
“You have a slight reprieve,” he said softly. “I shall show you to your President, as the man who was to set off his devices. I shall tell him that you have revealed everything and that we have already made countermeasures ready.” Then he said bleakly, “Perhaps, if all goes well, I will spare your life, but if you give one grimace to tell your President that I lie, the torch will be waiting.”
There was a bustling. Igor’s brain was sheer confusion, with such honest rejoicing in it that the relief was agony. He saw men roll in a clumsy device with a huge television-screen and scanner atop it. A cable trailed behind. A technician worked swiftly at its dials. He sweated visibly. Then he stood up and saluted, his hands visibly clammy with fear.
“Ah,” said the Premier-President. He looked at the screen. After a moment he nodded. “You wished to sue for peace, Mr. President of the Council of Ministers? It is a little late! You have struck shrewdly at my army. You will pay for that!”
Igor heard the heavy, weary voice of the head of his own nation. He could not see the screen. That was pointed at the Premier-President. The tones of his own President were as weary and as heart-broken as when he had announced the surrender of the eastern province of Igor’s country.
“Excellency,” said Igor’s president, “I do not sue for peace. I offer it. Mine is a small and peaceful nation, Excellency. We wish only to till our fields and sit in our own dooryards in the twilight. We have no desire for conquest or empire. We wish only to be left alone.”
The Premier-President smiled acidly.
“Yet you sowed plague among my soldiers, and—”
The voice of Igor’s president interrupted. It was very sad.
“Let us not play, Excellency. I am heartsick! We have had to destroy your army! If you will not listen, we may have to destroy your nation! I beg of you to listen to me! We have a means of destruction that nothing can withstand.”
The Premier-President smiled widely. It was an excellent smile; a convincing smile. It had even a seemingly authentic overtone of triumph. He beckoned. The soldiers moved Igor, walking stiffly, into the range of the scanner which sent the image of the Premier-President over the television-waves. Igor saw the careworn, untriumphant face of his own president on the screen.
“This man,” said the leader of all of Igor’s enemies, “was one of yours. He has told us all that he knows of your dastardly means of making war, and our technicians have supplied what he did not understand. We prepare not only a complete and unbreakable defense—that is practically arranged now—but a swift and many times more deadly use of your own weapon against yourself!”
He settled back, smiling. He was amazingly convincing. Igor almost admired him. But his own old president regarded Igor kindly from the screen.
“Poor fellow!” he said. “My niece grieves for you, Igor. But of course you told nothing. You may tell all now, Igor.”
Igor licked his lips.
“Sir,” he said, dry-throated, “I—can’t. They—questioned me. I—might have told if I knew. But I did not know.”
The Premier-President turned and looked at him. It was a sentence of death by torture. He stiffened, because there was nothing that his own President could do for him now, save—
“Tell Elsa, sir—”
“Wait,” said the image on the television-screen. “I think you can tell our secret, Igor. I know that you once broadcast most interestingly about our atomic-energy plant. And I am sure that you remember the nursery-rhyme; the one about the west wind that is cosy and warm and will save us from harm? Ah, yes! I see that you understand. Explain to his Excellency, so that he will know it is very stupid to lie to us and say that he will use our weapon against us! He must make peace, Igor.”
Igor had been very pale. Now, suddenly, he was paler. He swallowed.
“Yes, sir,” he said steadily. “I will explain his defeat to his Excellency.”
“Have him,” said his president wearily, “give you facilities for communicating with us. I appoint you our envoy pro tem for concluding an armistice. When you wish assistants, let me know and they will be flown in. We are not vindictive. We shall require the return of our two provinces. I think we had better keep—and destroy—the equipment of his army. I suspect that they had better hold elections where you are, Igor. And we may ask them to pay for the damage to our crops and homes. But that will be all we will ask. We ar
e a small and peaceful nation, Igor. I shall expect to hear from you very soon.”
The television-screen went blank. There was silence. “Well!” said the Premier-President.
Igor swallowed again.
“We have atomic energy as you do,” he said as though his throat hurt him. “Like you, we have found that the greatest difficulty with uranium piles is the enormous amount of radioactive dust they produce. Short-lived radioactive dust, but very deadly. We—we have found that by utilizing that artificial radioactivity to create more artificial radioactivity, we can preserve most of the usefulness of even short-lived elements, though the element itself dies.”
The Premier-President drummed on his desk.
“My patience is growing short,” he said, “and there is an acetylene-torch waiting to go to work upon you, Mr. Envoy.”
“My country’s weapon, your Excellency,” said Igor quietly, “was radioactive dust. It is the most deadly substance known. We waited for your army to enter, because we hoped you would not. Then we waited in the desperate hope that you would stop there. But your army received orders to advance. So we dared wait no longer. The province you invaded, Excellency, is dead. Radioactive dust fills its every corner. For a time your soldiers walked and lived and breathed in dust which burned out their lives—quite painlessly, but certainly. Your pilot in his air-tight suit was naked before radiations which will penetrate steel. Your soldiers grew fevered. They grew delirious. They—some of them may still breathe and move, Excellency, but they are dead.”
The Premier-President said coldly:
“You lie. My troops had air-patrols from ground-level to sixty thousand feet. No fleet of planes could have gotten through them to scatter poisonous dust over all a province! It could not have been done! You lie! What you say is impossible! My scientists—”
“In my country,” said Igor quietly, “there is a nursery rhyme about the west wind that will save us from harm. I think it has done so, Excellency. In this latitude, a few thousand feet up, there is always a wind blowing from the west to the east. The Japanese sent balloons across the Pacific by its means. The early Atlantic fliers flew from west to east with its air. I think, Excellency, that my countrymen simply spread their radioactive dust on that west wind. Knowing the size of the particles, they knew the rate of their descent. The wind carried the slowly, slowly falling dust at a known rate in a known direction and let it settle on the earth at a known spot. That spot became empty of all life. Not only man, but birds and plants and even bacteria, Excellency, cannot live where your army lies now. It will not be so for long, of course. The dust will exhaust itself in days or weeks. But your men will have to lie unburied—”
The Premier-President clenched his hands and looked terribly at Igor. But Igor went on evenly.
“Your air-fleet, Excellency, could protect your army against another air-fleet, but not against small planes spreading dust in the air fifty miles or more within our own borders! No matter how great your fighting-ships, they could not defeat a cloud of dust a hundred miles long that ancient cargo-planes could make. And—” Igor managed to smile faintly “—you cannot threaten to turn our weapon against us, Excellency, because the west wind blows from us to you, and not ever the other way about.”
There was stillness. A desperate, deadly stillness. Slowly, the face of the Premier-President went gray. Until this instant, obviously, he could not really believe that permanent and irreparable harm had been done to his army. It had seemed preposterous. But—now—it was so perfectly and invincibly simple and inescapable! It was unbeatable. His whole nation now lay at the mercy of its tiny neighbor to the west. Numbers meant nothing. Armies and airfleets and propaganda and chicanery meant less than nothing.
In the province to westward, that had been yielded to threat, his army was very still. The tanks and the planes and the troop-carriers were motionless, with dead men all around them. As the dawn light grew stronger, a faint, faint luminosity that lay upon the ground faded and became invisible in the stronger light, but it was there. It would be weeks before any man could enter the abandoned province without walking to his death. But presently—in time—it would be green and smiling again.
Now, though, the men who had expected to overwhelm a little nation and strut as conquerors through its towns lay very still, limply and with glazed eyes in the dawn light.
The Premier-President was not an imaginative man, but he saw them clearly. He had sent them there. And he heard the terrible cry that would rise from his people when they knew that their sons were dead. The people who had idolized him were little people, common people, but their horror at what he had cost them would thin into anguished fury. He could not face those people. Not possibly.
He stood up from his desk and shrugged his shoulders. He put something in his mouth and chewed swiftly. He grimaced, as if it had a foul taste. He started to walk toward the door. He did not make it. He crashed to the floor and lay still.
Igor’s knees felt weak under him. There were white-faced, panic-stricken officers suddenly babbling at him.
“What shall we do?” they demanded frantically. “Your government may loose another cloud at any instant. You must stop them, Excellency! Accept our surrender and get in touch—”
Igor walked, wabbling, to the desk of the Premier-President. In his gray-flannel prison pajamas, barefooted and unshaven and disheveled, he sank into the Premier-President’s chair because there was no other in the room.
“Take that body out,” he ordered wearily, “and get another television contact with my government, and tell the propaganda department to break the news and say that there will be free elections to set up a new and more rational government and—”
He was horribly tired. And there was something that he had been craving for what seemed to him a long, long time. It was almost an obsession, now. He’d had no food in thirty-six hours.
“And somebody,” he said heavily, “somebody bring me a cup of coffee.”
*
PLANET OF SAND
(Originally Published in 1948)
CHAPTER 1
There Was bright, pitiless light in the prison corridor of the Stallifer. There was the hum of the air renewal system. Once in every so often there was a cushioned thud as some item of the space ship’s machinery operated a relay somewhere. But it is very tedious to be in a confinement cell. Stan Huckley—Lieutenant, J.G., Space Guard, under charges and restraint—found it rather more than tedious. He should have been upheld, perhaps, by the fact that he was innocent of the charges made against him by Rob Torren, formerly his immediate superior officer. But the feeling of innocence did not help. He sat in his cell, holding himself still with a grim resolution. But a deep, a savage, a corrosive anger grew and grew and grew within him. It had been growing in just this manner for weeks.
The Stallifer bored on through space. From her ports the cosmos was not that hostile, immobile curtain of unwinking stars the early interstellar travelers knew. At twelve hundred light-speeds with the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times per second for velocity control, the stars moved visibly. Forty glimpses of the galaxy about the ship in every second made it seem that the universe were always in view. And the stars moved. The nearest ones moved swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. From force of habit the motion gave the feeling of perspective, so that the stars appeared to be distributed in three dimensions. From the ship they seemed very small, like fireflies. All the cosmos seemed small and almost cosy. The Rim itself appeared no more than a few miles away. The Stallifer headed for Earth and Rhesi II. She had been days upon her journey; she had come a distance which it would stagger the imagination to compute.
In his cell, though, Stan Buckley could see only four walls. There was no variation of light; no sign of morning or night or afternoon. At intervals, a guard brought him food. That was all—except that his deep and fierce and terrible anger grew until it seemed that he would go mad with it.
He had no idea of the hour
or the day when, quite suddenly, the pitiless light in the corridor dimmed. Then the door he had not seen since his entrance into the prison corridor clanked open. Footsteps came toward the cell. It was not the guard who fed him. He knew that much. It was a variation of routine, which should not have varied until his arrival on Earth.
He sat still, his hands clenched. A figure loomed outside the cell door. He looked up coldly. Then fury so great as almost to be frenzy filled him. Rob Torren looked in at him.
There was silence. Stan Buckley’s muscles tensed until it seemed that the bones of his body creaked. Then Rob Torren said caustically:
“It’s lucky there are bars, or there’d be no chance to talk! Either you’d kill me and be beamed for murder, or I’d kill you and Esther would think me a murderer. I’ve come to get you out of this if you’ll accept my terms.”
Stan Buckley made an inarticulate, growling noise.
“Oh, surely!” said Rob Torren. “I denounced you, and I’m the witness against you. At your trial, I’ll be believed and you won’t. You’ll be broken and disgraced. Even Esther wouldn’t marry you under such circumstances. Or maybe,” he added sardonically, “maybe you wouldn’t let her.”
Stan Buckley licked his lips. He longed so terribly to get his hands about his enemy’s throat that he could hardly hear the other’s words.
“The trouble is,” said Rob Torren, “that she probably wouldn’t marry me either, if you were disgraced by my means. So I offer a bargain. I’ll help you to escape—I’ve got it all arranged—on your word of honor to fight me. A duel. To the death.”
His eyes were cold. His tone was cold. His manner was almost contemptuous. Stan Buckley said hoarsely:
“I’ll fight you anywhere, under any conditions!”
“The conditions,” Rob Torren told him coldly,” are that I will help you to escape. You will then write a letter to Esther, saying that I did so and outlining the conditions of the duel as we agree upon them. I will, in turn, write a letter to the Space Guard brass, withdrawing my charges against you. We will fight. The survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?”
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 52
