Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

"I'm not sure I understand, sir."

  "You don't have to be so obsequious, Ellaby. I'm less modal than you are, but I make the best of my divergencies. What I meant was this: did you ever hear of a criminal not confessing to his crime?"

  "Well, no."

  "I'll ask you the question again, Ellaby. Why did you want to work near the Dictator?"

  The man leaned close, peered at Ellaby. The room was small, almost a cubicle, the bare walls seeming to close in on all four sides. Ellaby stifled a wild impulse to scream and run out of there, run any place as long as he could leave the room and the personnel advisor behind him. "I'm sorry, but I can't answer that question," he said finally.

  "Tell me, Ellaby, did you ever hear your own voice?"

  What a strange question. "Why, certainly. All the time, when I speak."

  "No, I mean your voice reproduced artificially. Your radio voice?"

  "No, I never heard it."

  "Well, you're about to."

  While the personnel advisor busied himself setting up the radio equipment, Ellaby had a few seconds in which to think. He could still make a clean breast of the whole thing. They had chosen him--Mulden, the Sinclair woman and the others in High Falls--for his modality. Very well, he could use that modality to get out from under. He didn't understand. He didn't know what they were leading him to, slowly, over a period of ten years. He didn't want to assassinate the Dictator. What in the world would he want to do that for? He would gladly name all the names he knew if the personnel advisor would only let him forget the whole mad experience and return to High Falls. He could attend Adjustment Academy if they thought he needed it. Anything. Anything....

  "Please slip these earphones over your head, over your ears. There. Is the microphone close enough to your lips? I think so."

  * * * * *

  A metal band running over the top of Ellaby's cranium held the earphones in place. Another metal band curved around the side of his cheek and chin, leading to a small microphone before his lips.

  "Place your hands on the arms of your chair, please."

  Ellaby did as he was told. Click! Click! A pair of manacles sprang up from the chair arms trapping Ellaby's wrists. Ellaby looked at the personnel tester in unpokered alarm. "What did you do that for?" he asked timidly.

  "So you won't remove the earphones. Now, are we ready?" The personnel advisor pressed a button on his desk. Ellaby thought he heard a faint hum of power in the microphone. "I will ask you once more, Ellaby. Why did you want to work near the Dictator?"

  Ellaby shrugged. He was going to say, "I'm sorry, but I don't have to answer that question." He said, and heard through the earphones: "I'm sorry (I'm) but I (sorry don't have (but) to ans (I) wer that (don't) question) (have to answer that question)."

  "Again, please. I didn't hear you," the personnel tester said.

  It was his own voice Ellaby had heard through the earphones. Playback, with a fraction of a second lapse. Oddly, it un-nerved him. The reproduced voice had no right lagging. He shouted, "I'm sorry (I'm) but I (sorry) don't have (but) to ans (I) wer that (don't question!) (have to) Shut up! (answer) SHUT UP! (that) PLEASE.... (question). PLEASE! (please)."

  "Once more, if you don't mind."

  Ellaby's head was whirling. He blinked sweat from his eyes. "I--please! (I--please!)"

  "The law requires that you make some answer, even if answer is a refusal."

  Criminals confessed, Ellaby thought wildly. Is this why criminals confessed? Did the sound of their own voices drive them mad? It seemed such a simple device, and yet ... and yet ... but he could fool it. He couldn't rush the words out in a quick torrent and: "I don't have to (I don't answer that ques) (have to) tion (answer that question.)" Ellaby--and Ellaby's echo. "Well, I (well) don't (I don't)!" Ellaby blinked more sweat from his eyes. "Mumble (mumble). Sob. (Sob)."

  "Relax, Ellaby. You seem upset. Will you read this, please?" the personnel advisor held a card in front of Ellaby's face.

  The words swam, blurred together, fused, were readable and then were not. Ellaby read aloud: "A code (a) of eth (code) ics for (eth) mankind (ethics for mankind)." It was, he realized, the preamble to the constitution. "In the (in) nineteenth (the) centur (nine) y the (nine) common (teenth)"--faster, faster!--"(century the common) c-common man was defended (common man) by enlightened liberalism (man was). In the t-twentieth century (in the t-twen) common man was championed by (tieth century) enlightened liberalism (the common man was). In the twenty-first century (championed by enlightened) the common man assumed his proper place (liberalism) at the top of society but (in the twenty-first cen) will protect the rights of the (tury the common man) enlightened liberals or any other minority, (assumed his proper) encouraging them to become (place at the top of) as common as possible (society but will protect the rights of the enlightened liberals or any other minority, encouraging them to become as common as possible).

  "Oh God (Oh)," shouted Ellaby. "Shut (God) it (shut) off (it) make (off) it (make) stop (it) God (stop--God)!"

  "Will you agree to answer my question?"

  "Anything (anything)! ANYTHING (anything)." Now the playback was a faint whisper. Ellaby found himself hysterically fascinated by it, trying to guess the time-lapse, which varied, trying to guess the volume, which varied. Ellaby's head slumped forward on his chest. The unfamiliar wetness at the corners of his mouth was drool. Ellaby didn't quite know it, of course, but he had given himself a very mild and very temporary nervous breakdown.

  Two hours later he was asked one question. He answered: "I want to be near the Dictator so I can kill him."

  * * * * *

  Later, Dorcas Sinclair asked: "What else happened at testing, Ellaby?"

  "Take your time," Mulden cautioned. "He looks nervous."

  "I know it. I want to find out why."

  "After my EEG," said Ellaby softly, "they told me I had too much theta."

  "Damn you!" Dorcas Sinclair swore. "Then you weren't cleared for top secret?"

  "No, I wasn't. Not at first. Then a strange thing happened. They said I was cleared only for secret and asked me why I wanted to be cleared for top secret."

  "You fool!" the woman cried.

  "I told them it was because I wanted to work near the Dictator. I didn't mean to tell them, but--"

  The woman shook her head in despair. "Don't bother finishing," she said. "You can clear out of here, Ellaby. You're through. Ten years. Ten years wasted."

  "If you wish," Ellaby said mildly. "But you're missing the most interesting part. They asked me why I wanted to be near the Dictator."

  Dorcas Sinclair sucked in her breath sharply. Even Mulden seemed anxious. "You didn't tell them?" the woman asked in a frantic whisper.

  "I'm afraid I did."

  "We'll have to flee the city," the woman told Mulden, ignoring Ellaby now. "If he told them that, he probably named names. I have friends in Hampton Roads--"

  "Let him finish," Mulden said. Mulden was looking strangely at Ellaby.

  "They didn't ask me to name anyone in the conspiracy," Ellaby said. "Unless they could poker very well, they seemed perfectly calm. They said they would make an exception in my case. They would clear me for top secret work. I start tomorrow."

  "What's your job?" Mulden asked eagerly.

  "Well, this is the strangest part. I'm to be the Dictator's confidential assistant."

  "Of course!" Mulden cried. "It makes sense. Don't you see, Sinclair? We're not the only ones. There are others, inside the government, who think it's time for a coup. With their help, Ellaby won't fail us."

  Dorcas Sinclair wasn't convinced. "Doesn't it seem peculiar to you that, purely by co-incidence, Ellaby happened to meet these people?"

  But Mulden shrugged. "You know the old saw about the gift horse," he said. "Ellaby will go ahead with the plan. Tomorrow, if all goes well, we'll have a full-scale revolution on our hands. Don't you understand, Sinclair? The Dictator--a figurehead. There are plenty of people around like us, who don't want to do things
just because everyone else does them, who don't want to be stamped by the mold of conformity, who don't want ... but I don't have to go on. The Dictator is a figurehead, a symbol of power. Destroy him and the whole conforming system comes tumbling down in chaos. You'll see tomorrow."

  It was all beyond Ellaby, who was still weary from the playback ordeals. He took the small, palm-sized blaster from Mulden and slipped it into his tunic. Tomorrow he would assassinate the Dictator and suffer the consequences. He almost had in mind to rebel. The people at testing had been very nice--except for those earphones. But the Sinclair woman and Mulden might be able to do as bad--or worse. He'd go through with it.

  Under the circumstances, he slept surprisingly well.

  * * * * *

  Mulden's passionate parting words still ringing in his ears, Ellaby entered the capitol building. "Someday you and your kind will understand, Ellaby," Mulden had said. "Someday you'll know what banal really means, and vulgar. Someday--I promise you, someday--the true social perspective will be re-established. It should not be the role in life of the common man, the mass, the mob, to make the uncommon man as common as possible, but quite the other way around. The other way, Ellaby! Common folk should be given the opportunity to become as uncommon as possible. Otherwise, Ellaby, we've reached a dead end.

  "Kill him and I promise you this: the whole warped system will come tumbling. A man shouldn't be forced to conform, Ellaby. Mankind's greatness stems from lack of conformity. For his own purposes, the Dictator bows to the will of the mob. But he's surrounded himself, with mediocrity. Without him, what can they do? Without him they'll go down in weeks, Ellaby. In days!"

  The guard, a tall blonde woman who looked like a twenty-over-mode to Ellaby, led him down a long, well-lit corridor. No one had searched him. It would have taken the guard a moment to reach within his tunic, find the blaster and drag him off to the Academy. Other people, nameless people on nameless errands, walked by in the corridor without paying Ellaby any attention.

  Was Mulden right? Were there people here, within the building, waiting to help Ellaby?

  Ellaby licked his dry lips and kept walking, finding it difficult to keep his legs from trembling. It was as if a nimbus of terror dogged his footsteps, ready to envelope him momentarily. The guard seemed completely unconcerned. She was humming the melody of the latest song-hit, a wonderfully liltingly banal tune which had been on everyone's lips back in High Falls.

  The blonde guard paused before a door in the long corridor. "Here we are," she said.

  Ellaby opened his mouth to speak, but gulped in air instead. He felt a weak fluttering in his chest. He had never been so afraid in all his life.

  The guard, who was a head taller than Ellaby, glanced down at him. "You don't have to be so nervous," she said in a perfectly normal voice. "Everything's going to be all right."

  "You see, it's a new job and all--"

  "Oh, here! Let's see that blaster."

  Ellaby's heart plunged. He wanted to bolt, to run. She knew. She knew....

  He stood there, too weak to move, while the guard reached inside his tunic, found the blaster taped to his chest, wrenched it loose. She took it out, held it up, flipping open the chamber and examined the inside. "All right," she said. "I only wanted to make sure it was loaded."

  And she took out a key and opened the door. "He's inside," she said, and strolled on down the hall.

  * * * * *

  Ellaby clutched the doorframe for support. He was breathing raggedly now, as if he'd run all the great length of the corridor, sprinting with monsters behind him. He rubbed the shoulder of his tunic against his damp brow and entered the room.

  A man Ellaby's own size was sitting there, viewing a 3D. When he heard Ellaby at the door he got up. He looked very unhappy as Ellaby pointed the blaster at him. He said, "So soon?"

  "They said you would try wiles, trickery, deceit," Ellaby recited. "You won't fool me."

  "You think I'm the Dictator? You're going to kill me? That's very funny. I know, you see. I know."

  "Stand back!" Ellaby screamed.

  "I assure you, I am not the Dictator any more than you will be--"

  The Dictator's face dissolved in a red, jelly-like smear as Ellaby pulled this trigger of his blaster.

  He spent the next ten minutes being very ill.

  Afterwards, they were very efficient. They carted the body away and told Ellaby all he had to do was ring for food or drink or anything he wanted. Occasionally, he would sign some papers. Occasionally--masked--he might be asked to review a parade.

  And all at once, sitting alone in the room with its pleasant view, it came to Ellaby. He passed no judgment, but he understood--and he was afraid.

  The masses ruled, thought Ellaby, hardly knowing what the phrase meant. The system was self-perpetuating, and revolution couldn't change it. The common man--men like Ellaby--had come into his own, for once and for all time.

  The man Ellaby had slain was no Dictator. He had tried to tell Ellaby that before he perished. Now Ellaby had taken his place. Ellaby was no Dictator, either.

  But he would do until the next one came along.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE GRAVEYARD OF SPACE

  By Stephen Marlowe

  He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to share it?"

  "No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes.

  Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like when she had worked by his side at the mine. It had not been much of a mine. It had been a bust, a first class sure as hell bust, like everything else in their life together. And it had aged her. Had it only been three years? he thought. Three years on asteroid 4712, a speck of cosmic dust drifting on its orbit in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Uranium potential, high--the government had said. So they had leased the asteroid and prospected it and although they had not finished the job, they were finished. They were going home and now there were lines on Diane's face although she was hardly past twenty-four. And there was a bitterness, a bleakness, in her eyes.

  The asteroid had ruined them, had taken something from them and given nothing in return. They were going home and, Ralph Meeker thought, they had left more than their second-hand mining equipment on asteroid 4712. They had left the happy early days of their marriage as a ghost for whomever tried his luck next on 4712. They had never mentioned the word divorce; Diane had merely said she would spend some time with her sister in Marsport instead of going on to Earth....

  "We'd be swinging around to sunward on 4712," Ralph mused.

  "Please. That's over. I don't want to talk about the mine."

  "Won't it ever bother you that we never finished?"

  "We finished," Diane said.

  He smoked the cigarette halfway and offered it to her. She shook her head and he put the butt out delicately, to save it.

  Then a radar bell clanged.

  "What is it?" Ralph asked, immediately alert, studying the viewport. You had to be alert on an old tub like the Gormann '87. A hundred tonner, it had put in thirty years and a billion and some miles for several owners. Its warning devices and its reflexes--it was funny, Ralph thought, how you ascribed something human like reflexes to a hundred tons of battered metal--were unpredictable.

  "I don't see anything," Diane said.

  He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was next to impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen--and completely impossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you false information. You could shut it off and pray--but the odds would still be a hundred to one against you.

  "There!" Diane cried. "On the left! The left, Ralph--"

  He saw it too. At first it looked like a jumble of rocks, of dust as the asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms which pursued their errat
ic, dangerous orbits through the asteroid belt.

  But it was not dust.

  "Will you look at that," Diane said.

  The jumble of rocks--which they were ready to classify as dust--swam up toward them. Ralph waited, expecting the automatic pilot to answer the radar warning and swing them safely around the obstacle. So Ralph watched and saw the dark jumble of rocks--silvery on one side where the distant sunlight hit it--apparently spread out as they approached it. Spread out and assume tiny shapes, shapes in miniature.

  "Spaceships," Diane said. "Spaceships, Ralph. Hundreds of them."

  They gleamed like silver motes in the sun or were black as the space around them. They tumbled slowly, in incredible slow motion, end over end and around and around each other, as if they had been suspended in a slowly boiling liquid instead of the dark emptiness of space.

  "That's the sargasso," Ralph said.

  "But--"

  "But we're off course. I know it. The radar was probably able to miss things in our way, but failed to compensate afterwards and bring us back to course. Now--"

  Suddenly Ralph dived for the controls. The throbbing rockets of the Gormann '87 had not responded to the radar warning. They were rocketing on toward the sargasso, rapidly, dangerously.

  "Hold on to something!" Ralph hollered, and punched full power in the left rockets and breaking power in the right forward rockets simultaneously, attempting to stand the Gormann '87 on its head and fight off the deadly gravitational attraction of the sargasso.

  The Gormann '87 shuddered like something alive and Ralph felt himself thrust to the left and forward violently. His head struck the radar screen and, as if mocking him the radar bell clanged its warning. He thought he heard Diane scream. Then he was trying to stand, but the gravity of sudden acceleration gripped him with a giant hand and he slumped back slowly, aware of a wetness seeping from his nose, his ears--

  All of space opened and swallowed him and he went down, trying to reach for Diane's hand. But she withdrew it and then the blackness, like some obscene mouth as large as the distance from here to Alpha Centauri, swallowed him.