Peter Hedrick, smuggler by trade, watched a cold Alaskan sky darken, and wrote in his log, “0700. Sky becoming overcast. Take-off in thirty minutes. Consignment, Poppy seed to Big Bay.” He had a fine load, a big fast ship and a space lane all to himself—almost. One meteor was worth chancing. He snapped the log shut and strolled toward the camouflaged ship.
“My dear,” Mrs. Ashton confided to the private telescreen, “I know just how you feel. Now don’t worry a bit. After all, your John always did like to have his little flings, and everyone understands. He’ll be back. And I wouldn’t worry too much. Peter says he has it from a very good source that this whole thing is just another meteor scare.”
The screen babbled back briefly.
“All right,” Mrs. Ashton smiled. “I’ll surely let you know. Bye-bye.” She cut off the screen and let the smile become a smirk. Mrs. Phelps’ superb husband was in his private yacht somewhere between here and Mars, and everyone but Mrs. Phelps knew he had company. For a few moments, Mrs. Ashton considered the dramatic possibilities in Mr. Phelps and his yacht being crushed by the meteor, but not beyond recognition.
Phil Brownyard was beginning to repress all optimism concerning the position of the meteor. The failure of the blasters to locate it gave pretty good odds that it was well out of the volume assigned to it, and that meant out of the shipping lanes. But there was always one chance. Phil merely shoved the other nine hundred ninety-nine out of his consciousness and clung to that one.
He got to the office early the twenty-eighth day after the alert. There was no sense in sitting at home in the dark, so he opened the office at 0725. The reports were still the same—no contact. The black line on the chart extended now from Mars to within two million miles of Earth. Half a day at the most before Luna would pick up whatever was there. Phil gave a nervous yawn.
The clock crept laboriously to 0730. Phil doodled on a pad, drawing daggers and ominous blots. 0731. He got up and looked out the window at the city, noting the beauty of the towers in the early morning light. 0732. Out in the corridor messenger cars whipped back and forth; all the building was alive except for Spatial Debris and a few others. Phil sat in his soundproofed office and bit the end off a cigar. Paper rustled as he propped his elbows on the desk.
At 0734, the telescreen shrieked. Phil jumped, dropping his cigar. Before the automatic dial could switch the call to his home, he flipped the toggle and leaned forward.
“Brownyard?” A switchboard operator stared sleepily at him.
“Yeah, who is it?”
“Mr. Cushing of Terran Lines, collect. Will you accept the call?”
“Go ahead.”
Cushing’s face blurred too close to the pickup lens. “Brownyard, we’ve found your meteor!” He roared. “It just hit the North America!” The screen blanked out.
Instantly it came to life again. An excited young man appeared and stammered, “North Station Luna calling. Meteor 842M2055 detected. Co-ordinates and orbit follow.”
Phil acknowledged automatically, knowing it was too late. Switching to another band, he called the night Safety office. His stomach knotted, and hurt.
“What’s this about the North America?” he asked Jim Shepard.
“Oh… you, Phil. Well, she’s hit all right. Taking off for Stag Head. Collided at sixty-eight thousand miles; almost nothing left. The patrols are going after her now.”
“O.K.” Phil started to sign off, then tensed. “Hey… hey—!”
“Yeah?” Jim reappeared, his face sympathetic.
“What did you say her distance was?”
“Sixty-eight kilomiles. Why, do you think—?”
“You bet!” Phil stiffened his aching back and went to work. “That couldn’t have been our baby. I just got a contact report from Luna, and I was still convinced that 842 had got the North America. Let’s get busy—here are the co-ordinates.” Phil dug into the writer and came up with the message card. He stuck it into the slot under the screen, received the acknowledgment, and cut off. His hands were shaking badly.
How many hours to work? Phil retrieved the card and scanned it, then went to the chart and plotted the point. Nine hundred and eighty kilo-miles. That left—nine hours. Only nine hours for the blasters to try to match velocities, nine hours to—Phil tightened inside as the curvator started forward to trace a new black line. It swept inside the orbit of the Moon, straight into the green disk that was Earth. The crimson light went on.
He had known it would end this way, for a long time. From the instant he had deciphered the first flash, he had had a funny feeling; he had known that the danger volume would sweep over Earth, but he had hoped for just a little more luck, one little favor from the laws of probability. The invisible fingers of Earth tugged, and the great rock obeyed.
Trembling with tension, Phil called Computing and got them to work. In half an hour the answer returned. The west coast of the European continent would be hit; it would take three hours to pinpoint the spot.
Phil frowned and rubbed his forehead. It was silly to feel this way, of course. He had carried out his duties as well as he could—a thousand ships had been warned, the space lanes had been held clear. But he felt a sense of responsibility that he could not shake.
At eleven fifteen Fred Holland walked in holding a card. “Here it is. We’ve got it down to a twenty-mile circle in southwestern France. Impact time is 1618.” He dropped the card on the desk. “Look, Phil, there’s nothing you can do that you haven’t done.”
“One more thing.” Phil took the card without looking at it and sent it to the main Safety office. “Now I can resign.”
“This is Jim, Phil. The North America was hit by an unscheduled ship that took off from Alaska somewhere. What’s the dope on the meteor? I heard it’s bad.”
“Yeah. Southwestern France, somewhere.” Phil wondered vaguely about the identity of the other ship. For some reason, the feeling of guilt grew stronger. “Any survivors?” he asked.
And his heart did not change its pace when Jim said, “No.”
Thirteen hundred, and the hourly news. Phil listened dully as the reports came in from the reopened space lanes. A private yacht had been sighted cruising illegally in the lane. Some scandal or other impended. Planetoid 17321 left the lane and the gap caused by its presence closed. Collision near Mars in the rush to take advantage of approaching conjunction. Stag Head Station operative again. On and on.
The meteor was between Earth and the Moon, now, its pace quickening. In two more hours and some minutes it would rocket into Earth’s atmosphere; incandescent and thundering it would smash into France with a towering splash of earth, rock and living things. Ten million refugees streamed along the roads leading out of that imaginary circle, quiet and terrified, peering into the luminous afternoon sky. Police were thick in the mobs, suppressing panic.
Phil quit listening to the news at 1500. He busied himself around the office, collecting papers accumulated over the past eight years.
Maybe I can afford to retire. That would be nice. Get away, at any rate. Maybe Claire would like Venus.
He came on the computations he had made, those about the mass of the meteor. A strange hope kindled, but the figures were right. He began to fill his briefcase. As he started to leave, he looked long at the clock. Twelve minutes. As the door shut, a card in its capsule bumped against the end of the pneumatic tube. The punchings on it indicated that a distress signal had been picked up from somewhere near the trade route.
Eight years ago, a meteor had got by the warning net—another big one. That one had smashed into a loaded passenger liner, and the disaster had broken Phil’s predecessor. Now Phil had to watch an even worse disaster—had watched it from its first remote beginnings.
He sat in a subway train, holding a newspaper and looking at his watch. Not many people were in the car—most of them were sitting by television screens, watching France with morbid anticipation. The car whistled past a few deserted stops and began to brake. The minute hand o
n Phil’s watch crept over the ten, past it, while Phil read the billboards.
Two minutes. The train started smoothly, went quickly to maximum velocity, then slowed for Phil’s stop.
“Phil—is that you? Hey, Phil?”
He looked up blindly, then glanced out the window. The end of the line. Must have missed my stop. Claire will be worried—
“Hey, Phil—” Fred stopped by the hunched figure. “Come on, Phil, I’ll take you home in my car.”
It was pleasant to lie in bed and only half-think. The sun shone warmly in the window and the sky was blue. Phil smiled and stretched. Then his head swung to the window—the sun was too high! It must be noon! He started to get up, and felt an overpowering lassitude cloud his mind. He lay back and thought, They’ll call me if they need me. The dusk swirled around him and he relaxed in it again.
The second time he woke he felt his mind gradually coming to life. Bit by bit, his senses returned. The covers were too warm—it was dark again—someone was in the room.
“Claire?” A sense of panic stirred him.
“Quiet, darling. How do you feel?”
“All right, I guess. What time is it?” He relaxed.
“Nineteen thirty. Are you—all right?” Her voice showed strain.
“Sure, honey. Turn on the video, will you?” Claire turned, tears of relief in her eyes.
“All right. Fred wants to see you.” She stopped at the door and smiled at him. “We were worried about you, darling.”
Phil got up as soon as she had left and went to her dressing table. In the mirror his face was puffed with sleep and lined by long fatigue. He heard Fred coming and got back into bed.
Fred came over to the bed and grinned down at Phil. “Boy, you look like hell.”
Phil found himself grinning back, feeling better. “I sure blew myself to a tantrum.”
“The doctor said human beings still have to sleep now and then.”
“What about the meteor?”
Fred sat back and looked quizzically at Phil. “Still think it must have been your fault?”
“No… I guess not. No.”
“Well, then, you’ll blow your cork when you hear.” Phil’s heart started pounding violently.
“It came in, all right, right where we planted it,” Fred said. “Only it burned up before it got through fifty miles of atmosphere. What a show!”
“Did they blast it?” Phil sat up in bed.
“Nope. Same meteor Luna spotted. Only those kids on Luna never thought to check on the mass. It weighed just a little over half a ton, and blew up halfway down.”
“But where’s 842? Are the lanes still cleared?”
“Eight forty-two? Nobody knows. T. V. McPherson says he found some big gouges out of Deimos that look recent. Your baby is probably way, way south by now, according to him.”
Phil began to laugh.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just struck me funny. I’ve been losing sleep over a ghost of a meteor for a whole month. Nine hundred and ninety-nine chances, and I had to take the one left over. Look… I’ll see you tomorrow… come over for dinner. Right now, I’m going back to sleep. Excuse me.” He rolled onto his side and began to drift off. As Fred reached out to turn off the video, the announcer was saying something about a prospector; something about a prospector who might have been lost if a patrol craft hadn’t chased a yacht into his failing distress beam. But before Phil could get it straight, he fell asleep.
LAST ENEMY
by H. Beam Piper
ALONG THE U-SHAPED TABLE, THE SUBDUED CLATTER OF DINNERWARE AND the buzz of conversation was dying out; the soft music that drifted down from the overhead sound outlets seemed louder as the competing noises diminished. The feast was drawing to a close, and Dallona of Hadron fidgeted nervously with the stem of her wineglass as last-moment doubts assailed her.
The old man at whose right she sat noticed, and reached out to lay his hand on hers.
“My dear, you’re worried,” he said softly. “You, of all people, shouldn’t be, you know.”
“The theory isn’t complete,” she replied. “And I could wish for more positive verification. I’d hate to think I’d got you into this—”
Garnon of Roxor laughed. “No, no!” he assured her. “I’d decided upon this long before you announced the results of your experiments. Ask Girzon; he’ll bear me out.”
“That’s true,” the young man who sat at Garnon’s left said, leaning forward. “Father has meant to take this step for a long time. He was waiting until after the election, and then he decided to do it now, to give you an opportunity to make experimental use of it.”
The man on Dallona’s right added his voice. Like the others at the table, he was of medium stature, brown-skinned and dark-eyed, with a wide mouth, prominent cheek-bones and a short, square jaw. Unlike the others, he was armed, with a knife and pistol on his belt, and on the breast of his black tunic he wore a scarlet oval patch on which a pair of black wings, with a tapering silver object between them had been superimposed.
“Yes, Lady Dallona; the Lord Garnon and I discussed this, oh, two years ago at the least. Really, I’m surprised that you seem to shrink from it, now. Of course, you’re Venus-born, and customs there may be different, but with your scientific knowledge—”
“That may be the trouble, Dirzed,” Dallona told him. “A scientist gets in the way of doubting, and one doubts one’s own theories most of all.”
“That’s the scientific attitude, I’m told,” Dirzed replied, smiling. “But somehow, I cannot think of you as a scientist.” His eyes traveled over her in a way that would have made most women, scientists or otherwise, blush. It gave Dallona of Hadron a feeling of pleasure. Men often looked at her that way, especially here at Darsh. Novelty had something to do with it—her skin was considerably lighter than usual, and there was a pleasing oddness about the structure of her face. Her alleged Venusian origin was probably accepted as the explanation of that, as of so many other things.
As she was about to reply, a man in dark gray, one of the upper-servants who were accepted as social equals by the Akor-Neb nobles, approached the table. He nodded respectfully to Garnon of Roxor.
“I hate to seem to hurry things, sir, but the boy’s ready. He’s in a trance-state now,” he reported, pointing to the pair of visiplates at the end of the room.
Both of the ten-foot-square plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, a pervading dullness.
“One of our best sensitives,” a man with a beard, several places down the table on Dallona’s right, said. “You remember him, Dallona; he produced that communication from the discarnate Assassin, Sirzim. Normally, he’s a low-grade imbecile, but in trance-state he’s wonderful. And there can be no argument that the communications he produces originate in his own mind; he doesn’t have mind enough, of his own, to operate that machine.”
Garnon of Roxor rose to his feet, the others rising with him. He unfastened a jewel from the front of his tunic and handed it to Dallona.
“Here, my dear Lady Dallona; I want you to have this,” he said. “It’s been in the family of Roxor for six generations, but I know that you will appreciate and cherish it.” He twisted a heavy ring from his left hand and gave it to his son. He unstrapped his wrist watch and passed it across the table to the gray-clad upper-servant. He gave a pocket case, containing writing tools, slide rule and magnifier, to the bearded man on the other side of Dallona. “Something you can use, Dr. Harnosh,” he said. Then he took a belt, with a knife and holstered pistol, from a servant who had brought it to him, and gave it to the man with the red badge. “And something for you, Dirzed. The pistol’s by Farnor of Yand, and the knife was forged and tempered on Luna.”
The man with the winged-bullet
badge took the weapons, exclaiming in appreciation. Then he removed his own belt and buckled on the gift.
“The pistol’s fully loaded,” Garnon told him.
Dirzed drew it and checked—a man of his craft took no statement about weapons without verification—then slipped it back into the holster.
“Shall I use it?” he asked.
“By all means; I’d had that in mind when I selected it for you.”
Another man, to the left of Girzon, received a cigarette case and lighter. He and Garnon hooked fingers and clapped shoulders.
“Our views haven’t been the same, Garnon,” he said, “but I’ve always valued your friendship. I’m sorry you’re doing this, now; I believe you’ll be disappointed.”
Garnon chuckled. “Would you care to make a small wager on that, Nirzav?” he asked. “You know what I’m putting up. If I’m proven right, will you accept the Volitionalist theory as verified?”
Nirzav chewed his mustache for a moment. “Yes, Garnon, I will.” He pointed toward the blankly white screen. “If we get anything conclusive on that, I’ll have no other choice.”
“All right, friends,” Garnon said to those around him. “Will you walk with me to the end of the room?”
Servants removed a section from the table in front of him, to allow him and a few others to pass through; the rest of the guests remained standing at the table, facing toward the inside of the room. Garnon’s son, Girzon, and the gray-mustached Nirzav of Shonna, walked on his left; Dallona of Hadron and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh on his right. The gray-clad upper-servant, and two or three ladies, and a nobleman with a small chin-beard, and several others, joined them; of those who had sat close to Garnon, only the man in the black tunic with the scarlet badge hung back. He stood still, by the break in the table, watching Garnon of Roxor walk away from him. Then Dirzed the Assassin drew the pistol he had lately received as a gift, hefted it in his hand, thumbed off the safety, and aimed at the back of Garnon’s head.
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 67
