Back at the power plant Superintendent King could do nothing but chew his nails and wait. He had not even the release of running over to Goddard Field to watch the progress of the research, for, urgently as he desired to, he felt an even stronger, an overpowering compulsion to watch over the bomb more lest it—heartbreakingly!—blow up at the last minute.
He took to hanging around the control room. He had to stop that; his unease communicated itself to his watch engineers; two of them cracked up in a single day—one of them on watch.
He must face the fact—there had been a grave upswing in psychoneurosis among his engineers since the period of watchful waiting had commenced. At first, they had tried to keep the essential facts of the plan a close secret, but it had leaked out, perhaps through some member of the investigating committee. He admitted to himself now that it had been a mistake ever to try to keep it secret—Lentz had advised against it, and the engineers not actually engaged in the change-over were bound to know that something was up.
He took all of the engineers into confidence at last, under oath of secrecy. That had helped for a week or more, a week in which they were all given a spiritual lift by the knowledge, as he had been. Then it had worn off, the reaction had set in, and the psychological observers had started disqualifying engineers for duty almost daily. They were even reporting each other as mentally unstable with great frequency; he might even be faced with a shortage of psychiatrists if that kept up, he thought to himself with bitter amusement. His engineers were already standing four hours in every sixteen. If one more dropped out, he’d put himself on watch. That would be a relief, to tell himself the truth.
Somehow, some of the civilians around about and the nontechnical employees were catching on to the secret. That mustn’t go on—if it spread any farther there might be a nation-wide panic. But how the hell could he stop it? He couldn’t.
He turned over in bed, rearranged his pillow, and tried once more to get to sleep. No soap. His head ached, his eyes were balls of pain, and his brain was a ceaseless grind of useless, repetitive activity, like a disk recording stuck in one groove.
God! This was unbearable! He wondered if he were cracking up—if he already had cracked up. This was worse, many times worse, than the old routine when he had simply acknowledged the danger and tried to forget it as much as possible. Not that the bomb was any different—it was this five-minutes-to-armistice feeling, this waiting for the curtain to go up, this race against time with nothing to do to help.
He sat up, switched on his bed lamp, and looked at the clock. Three thirty. Not so good. He got up, went into his bathroom, and dissolved a sleeping powder in a glass of whiskey and water, half and half. He gulped it down and went back to bed. Presently he dozed off.
He was running, fleeing down a long corridor. At the end lay safety—he knew that, but he was so utterly exhausted that he doubted his ability to finish the race. The thing pursuing him was catching up; he forced his leaden, aching legs into greater activity. The thing behind him increased its pace, and actually touched him. His heart stopped, then pounded again. He became aware that he was screaming, shrieking in mortal terror.
But he had to reach the end of that corridor; more depended on it than just himself. He had to. He had to! He had to!
Then the sound hit him, and he realized that he had lost, realized it with utter despair and utter, bitter defeat. He had failed; the bomb had blown up.
The sound was the alarm going off; it was seven o’clock. His pajamas were soaked, dripping with sweat, and his heart still pounded. Every ragged nerve throughout his body screamed for release. It would take more than a cold shower to cure this case of the shakes.
He got to the office before the janitor was out of it. He sat there, doing nothing, until Lentz walked in on him, two hours later. The psychiatrist came in just as he was taking two small tablets from a box in his desk.
“Easy… easy, old man,” Lentz said in a slow voice. “What have you there?” He came around and gently took possession of the box.
“Just a sedative.”
Lentz studied the inscription on the cover. “How many have you had today?”
“Just two, so far.”
“You don’t need a sedative; you need a walk in the fresh air. Come, take one with me.”
“You’re a fine one to talk—you’re smoking a cigarette that isn’t lighted!”
“Me? Why, so I am! We both need that walk. Come.”
Harper arrived less than ten minutes after they had left the office. Steinke was not in the outer office. He walked on through and pounded on the door of King’s private office, then waited with the man who accompanied him—a hard young chap with an easy confidence to his bearing. Steinke let them in.
Harper brushed on past him with a casual greeting, then checked himself when he saw that there was no one else inside.
“Where’s the chief?” he demanded.
“Gone out. Should be back soon.”
“I’ll wait. Oh—Steinke, this is Greene. Greene—Steinke.”
The two shook hands. “What brings you back, Cal?” Steinke asked, turning back to Harper.
“Well… I guess it’s all right to tell you—”
The communicator screen flashed into sudden activity, and cut him short. A face filled most of the frame. It was apparently too close to the pickup, as it was badly out of focus. “Superintendent!” it yelled in an agonized voice. “The bomb—”
A shadow flashed across the screen, they heard a dull smack, and the face slid out of the screen. As it fell it revealed the control room behind it. Someone was down on the floor plates, a nameless heap. Another figure ran across the field of pickup and disappeared.
Harper snapped into action first. “That was Silard!” he shouted, “in the control room! Come on, Steinke!” He was already in motion himself.
Steinke went dead-white, but hesitated only an unmeasurable instant. He pounded sharp on Harper’s heels. Greene followed without invitation, in a steady run that kept easy pace with them.
They had to wait for a capsule to unload at the tube station. Then all three of them tried to crowd into a two-passenger capsule. It refused to start, and moments were lost before Greene piled out and claimed another car.
The four-minute trip at heavy acceleration seemed an interminable crawl. Harper was convinced that the system had broken down, when the familiar click and sigh announced their arrival at the station under the bomb. They jammed each other trying to get out at the same time.
The lift was up; they did not wait for it. That was unwise; they gained no time by it, and arrived at the control level out of breath. Nevertheless, they speeded up when they reached the top, zigzagged frantically around the outer shield, and burst into the control room.
The limp figure was still on the floor, and another, also inert, was near it. The second’s helmet was missing.
The third figure was bending over the trigger. He looked up as they came in, and charged them. They hit him together, and all three went down. It was two to one, but they got in each other’s way. The man’s heavy armor protected him from the force of their blows. He fought with senseless, savage violence.
Harper felt a bright, sharp pain; his right arm went limp and useless. The armored figure was struggling free of them.
There was a shout from somewhere behind them, “Hold still!”
Harper saw a flash with the corner of one eye, a deafening crack hurried on top of it, and re-echoed painfully in the restricted space.
The armored figure dropped back to his knees, balanced there, and then fell heavily on his face. Greene stood in the entrance, a service pistol balanced in his hand.
Harper got up and went over to the trigger. He tried to reduce the dampening adjustment, but his right hand wouldn’t carry out his orders, and his left was too clumsy. “Steinke,” he called, “come here! Take over.”
Steinke hurried up, nodded as he glanced at the readings, and set busily to work.
It was thus that King found them when he bolted in a very few minutes later.
“Harper!” he shouted, while his quick glance was still taking in the situation. “What’s happened?”
Harper told him briefly. He nodded. “I saw the tail end of the fight from my office—Steinke!” He seemed to grasp for the first time who was on the trigger. “He can’t manage the controls—” He hurried toward him.
Steinke looked up at his approach. “Chief!” he called out. “Chief! I’ve got my mathematics back!”
King looked bewildered, then nodded vaguely, and let him be. He turned back to Harper. “How does it happen you’re here?”
“Me? I’m here to report—we’ve done it, chief!”
“Eh?”
“We’ve finished; it’s all done. Erickson stayed behind to complete the power-plant installation on the big ship. I came over in the ship we’ll use to shuttle between Earth and the big ship, the power plant. Four minutes from Goddard Field to here in her. That’s the pilot over there.” He pointed to the door, where Greene’s solid form partially hid Lentz.
“Wait a minute. You say that everything is ready to install the bomb in the ship? You’re sure?”
“Positive. The big ship has already flown with our fuel—longer and faster than she will have to fly to reach station in her orbit; I was in it—out in space, chief! We’re all set, six ways from zero.”
King stared at the dumping switch, mounted behind glass at the top of the instrument board. “There’s fuel enough,” he said softly, as if he were alone and speaking only to himself; “there’s been fuel enough for weeks.”
He walked swiftly over to the switch, smashed the glass with his fist, and pulled it.
The room rumbled and shivered as two and a half tons of molten, massive metal, heavier than gold, coursed down channels, struck against baffles, split into a dozen dozen streams, and plunged to rest in leaden receivers—to rest, safe and harmless, until it should be reassembled far out in space.
HINDSIGHT
by Jack Williamson
SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE CIGAR.
But Brek Veronar didn’t throw it away. Earth-grown tobacco was precious, here on Ceres. He took another bite off the end, and pressed the lighter cone again. This time, imperfectly, the cigar drew—with an acrid, puzzling odor of scorching paper.
Brek Veronar—born William Webster, Earthman—was sitting in his big, well-furnished office, adjoining the arsenal laboratory. Beyond the perdurite windows, magnified in the crystalline clarity of the asteroid’s synthetic atmosphere, loomed a row of the immense squat turret forts that guarded the Astrophon base—their mighty twenty-four-inch rifles, coupled to the Veronar autosight, covered with their theoretical range everything within Jupiter’s orbit. A squadron of the fleet lay on the field beyond, seven tremendous dead-black cigar shapes. Far off, above the rugged red palisades of a second plateau, stood the many-colored domes and towers of Astrophon itself, the Astrarch’s capital.
A tall, gaunt man, Brek Veronar wore the bright, close-fitting silks of the Astrarchy. Dyed to conceal the increasing streaks of gray, his hair was perfumed and curled. In abrupt contrast to the force of his gray, wide-set eyes, his face was white and smooth from cosmetic treatments. Only the cigar could have betrayed him as a native of Earth, and Brek Veronar never smoked except here in his own locked laboratory.
He didn’t like to be called the Renegade.
Curiously, that whiff of burning paper swept his mind away from the intricate drawing of a new rocket-torpedo gyropilot pinned to a board on the desk before him, and back across twenty years of time. It returned him to the university campus, on the low yellow hills beside the ancient Martian city of Toran—to the fateful day when Bill Webster had renounced allegiance to his native Earth, for the Astrarch.
Tony Grimm and Elora Ronee had both objected. Tony was the freckled, irresponsible redhead who had come out from Earth with him six years before, on the other of the two annual engineering scholarships. Elora Ronee was the lovely dark-eyed Martian girl—daughter of the professor of geodesics, and a proud descendant of the first colonists—whom they both loved.
He walked with them, that dry, bright afternoon, out from the yellow adobe buildings, across the rolling, stony, ocher-colored desert. Tony’s sunburned, blue-eyed face was grave for once, as he protested.
“You can’t do it, Bill. No Earthman could.”
“No use talking,” said Bill Webster, shortly. “The Astrarch wants a military engineer. His agents offered me twenty thousand eagles a year, with raises and bonuses—ten times what any research scientist could hope to get, back on Earth.”
The tanned, vivid face of Elora Ronee looked hurt. “Bill—what about your own research?” the slender girl cried. “Your new reaction tube! You promised you were going to break the Astrarch’s monopoly on space transport. Have you forgotten?”
“The tube was just a dream,” Bill Webster told her, “but probably it’s the reason he offered the contract to me, and not Tony. Such jobs don’t go begging.”
Tony caught his arm. “You can’t turn against your own world, Bill,” he insisted. “You can’t give up everything that means anything to an Earthman. Just remember what the Astrarch is—a superpirate.”
Bill Webster’s toe kicked up a puff of yellow dust. “I know history,” he said. “I know that the Astrarchy had its beginnings from the space pirates who established their bases in the asteroids, and gradually turned to commerce instead of raiding.”
His voice was injured and defiant. “But, so far as I’m concerned, the Astrarchy is just as respectable as such planet nations as Earth and Mars and the Jovian Federation. And it’s a good deal more wealthy and powerful than any of them.”
Tense-faced, the Martian girl shook her dark head. “Don’t blind yourself, Bill,” she begged urgently. “Can’t you see that the Astrarch really is no different from any of the old pirates? His fleets still seize any independent vessel, or make the owners ransom it with his space-patrol tax.”
She caught an indignant breath. “Everywhere—even here on Mars—the agents and residents and traders of the Astrarchy have brought graft and corruption and oppression. The Astrarch is using his wealth and his space power to undermine the government of every independent planet. He’s planning to conquer the system!”
Her brown eyes flashed. “You won’t aid him, Bill. You—couldn’t!”
Bill Webster looked into the tanned, intent loveliness of her face—he wanted suddenly to kiss the smudge of yellow dust on her impudent little nose. He had loved Elora Ronee, had once hoped to take her back to Earth. Perhaps he still loved her. But now it was clear that she had always wanted Tony Grimm.
Half angrily, he kicked an iron-reddened pebble. “If things had been different, Elora, it might have been—” With an abrupt little shrug, he looked back at Tony. “Anyhow,” he said flatly, “I’m leaving for Astrophon tonight.”
That evening, after they had helped him pack, he made a bonfire of his old books and papers. They burned palely in the thin air of Mars, with a cloud of acrid smoke.
That sharp odor was the line that had drawn Brek Veronar back across the years, when his nostrils stung to the scorched-paper scent. The cigar came from a box that had just arrived from Cuba, Earth—made to his special order.
He could afford such luxuries. Sometimes, in fact, he almost regretted the high place he had earned in the Astrarch’s favor. The space officers, and even his own jealous subordinates in the arsenal laboratory, could never forget that he was an Earthman—the Renegade.
The cigar’s odor puzzled him.
Deliberately, he crushed out the smoldering tip, peeled off the brown wrapper leaves. He found a tightly rolled paper cylinder. Slipping off the rubber bands, he opened it. A glimpse of the writing set his heart to thudding.
It was the hand of Elora Ronee!
Brek Veronar knew that fine graceful script. For once Bill Webster had treasured a little note that she had writte
n him, when they were friends at school. He read it eagerly:
DEAR BILL : This is the only way we can hope to get word to you, past the Astrarch’s spies. Your old name, Bill, may seem strange to you. But we—Tony and I—want you to remember that you are an Earthman.
You can’t know the oppression that Earth now is suffering, under the Astrarch’s heel. But independence is almost gone. Weakened and corrupted, the government yields everywhere. Every Earthman’s life is choked with taxes and unjust penalties and the unfair competition of the Astrarch traders.
But Earth, Bill, has not completely yielded. We are going to strike for liberty. Many years of our lives—Tony’s and mine—have gone into the plan. And the toil and the sacrifices of millions of our fellow Earthmen. We have at least a chance to recover our lost freedom.
But we need you, Bill—desperately.
For your own world’s sake, come back. Ask for a vacation trip to Mars. The Astrarch will not deny you that. On April 8th, a ship will be waiting for you in the desert outside Toran—where we walked the day you left.
Whatever your decision, Bill, we trust you to destroy this letter and keep its contents secret. But we believe that you will come back. For Earth’s sake, and for your old friends, TONY AND ELORA.
Brek Veronar sat for a long time at his desk, staring at the charred, wrinkled sheet. His eyes blurred a little, and he saw the tanned vital face of the Martian girl, her brown eyes imploring. At last he sighed and reached slowly for the lighter cone. He held the letter until the flame had consumed it.
Next day four space officers came to the laboratory. They were insolent in the gaudy gold and crimson of the Astrarch, and the voice of the captain was suave with a triumphant hate:
“Earthman, you are under technical arrest, by the Astrarch’s order. You will accompany us at once to his quarters aboard the Warrior Queen.”
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 7
