“What shall we do, sir?”
“Between you and me, Sergeant—” Captain Simmons’ voice interrupted itself. “Never mind that now. Here comes the Defense Secretary.”
“Foghorn Frank?” Don asked.
“Sh.”
Frank Fogarty had earned his nickname in his younger years when he commanded a tugboat in New York Harbor. That was before his quick rise in the shipbuilding industry where he got the reputation as a wartime expediter that led to his cabinet appointment.
“Is this the gadget?” Don heard Fogarty say.
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Sergeant Cort?” Fogarty boomed. “Can you hear me?” It was no wonder they called him Foghorn.
“Yes, sir,” Don said, wincing.
“Fine. You’ve been doing a topnotch job. Don’t think I don’t know what’s been going on. I’ve heard the tapes. Now, son, are you ready for a little action? We’re going to stir them up at State.”
“Yes, sir,” Don said again.
“Good. Then stand up. No, better not if Superior is still gyrating. Just raise your right hand and I’ll give you a field promotion to major. Temporary, of course. I can do that, can’t I, General?”
Apparently the Chief of Staff was there, and agreed.
“Right,” Fogarty said. “Now, Sergeant, repeat after me.…”
Don, too overwhelmed to say anything else, repeated after him.
“Now then, Major Cort, we’re going to present the State Department with what they would call a fait accompli. You are now Military Governor of Superior, son, with all the power of the U.S. Defense Establishment behind you. A C-97 troop carrier plane is loading. I’ll give you the ETA as soon as I know it. A hundred paratroopers. Arrange to meet them at the golf course, near the blimp. And if Senator Thebold tries to interfere—well, handle him tactfully. But I think he’ll go along. He’s got his headlines and by now he should have been able to find his missing lady friend. Help him in that personal matter if you can. As for Hector Civek and Osbert Garet, be firm. I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble.”
“But, sir,” Don said. “Aren’t you underestimating the Gizls? If they see paratroops landing they’re liable to get unfriendly fast. May I make a suggestion?”
“Shoot, son.”
“Well, sir, I think I’d better go try to have a talk with them and see if we can’t work something out without a show of force. If you could hold off the troops till I ask for them.…”
Foghorn Frank said, “Want to make a deal, eh? If you can do it, fine, but since State isn’t willing to admit that there’s such a thing as an intelligent kangaroo, alien or otherwise, any little deals you can make with them will have to be unofficial for the time being. All right—I’ll hold off on the paratroopers. The important thing is to safeguard the civilian population and uphold the integrity of the United States. You have practically unlimited authority.”
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I’ll do my best.”
“Good luck. I’ll be listening.”
* * * *
“As I see it,” Alis said after Don had explained his connection with the Pentagon, “Senator Thebold licked Hector Civek. Father, who defected from Hector, captured the Senator and vice versa. But now the Gizls have taken over from everybody and you have to fight them—all by your lonesome.”
“Not fight them,” Don said. “Negotiate with them.”
“But the Gizls are on Hector’s side. It seems to come full circle. Where do you start?”
Superior had returned to an even keel and Don helped her up. “Let’s start by taking a walk over to the bubble gum factory. We’ll try to see the Gizl-in-Chief.”
There didn’t seem to be anyone on the grounds of the McFerson place. The boxcar which had been on the siding near the factory was gone. It was probably at the bottom of the Atlantic by now, along with everything else that hadn’t been fastened down. Don wondered if Superior’s gyrations had been strong enough to dislodge the train that had originally brought him to town. The Pennsylvania Railroad wouldn’t be happy about that.
They saw no one in the mansion and started for the basement room in which they’d had their talk with the Gizl, passing through rooms where the furniture had been knocked about as if by an angry giant. They were stopped en route by Vincent Grande, ex-police chief now Minister of Defense. “All right, kids,” he said, “stick ’em up. Your Majesty,” he called, “look what I got.”
Hector Civek, crownless but still wearing his ermine, came up the stairs. “Put your gun away, Vince. Hello, Alis. Hello, Don. Glad to see you survived the earthquake. I thought we were all headed for kingdom come.”
Vincent protested, “This is that traitor Garet’s daughter. We can hold her hostage to keep her father in line.”
“Nuts,” the king said. “I’m getting tired of all this foolishness. I’m sure Osbert Garet is just as shaken up as we are. And that crazy Senator, too. All I want now is for Superior to go back where it came from, as soon as possible. And that’s up to Gizl, I’m afraid.”
“Have you seen him since the excitement?” Don asked.
“No. He went down that elevator of his when the submarine surfaced. I guess his control room, or whatever it is that makes Superior go, is down there. Let’s take a look. Vince, will you put that gun away? Go help them clean up the mess in the kitchen.”
Vincent Grande grumbled and went away.
In the basement room, Hector went to the corner and said, “Hey! Anybody down there?”
A deep voice said, “Ascending,” and the blue-gray kangaroo-like creature appeared. He stepped off the elevator section. “Greetings, friends.”
“Well,” Hector said, “I didn’t know you could talk.”
“Forgive my lack of frankness,” Gizl said. “Alis,” he said, bowing slightly. “Your Majesty.”
“Frankly,” Hector said, “I’m thinking of abdicating. I don’t think I like being a figurehead. Not when everybody knows about it, anyhow.”
“Major Cort,” Gizl said.
Don looked startled. “What? How did you know?”
“We have excellent communications. We thank your military for its assistance with the submarine.”
“A pleasure. And we thank you and your people for saving us when we went flying.”
“Mutuality of effort,” Gizl said. “I’ll admit a dilemma ensued when the submarine attacked. But our obligation to safeguard human lives outweighed the other alternative—escape to the safety of space. Now suppose we have our conference. You, Major, represent Earth. I, Rezar, represent the survivors of Gorel-zed. Agreed?”
“Rezar?” Don said. “I thought your name was Gizl. And what’s Gorel-zed?”
“Little Marie Bendy called me Gizl,” Rezar said. “She couldn’t pronounce Gorel-zed. I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely candid with you about a number of things. But I think I know you better now. I heard your conversation with Foghorn Frank.”
Don smiled. “Do you mean you’ve been listening in ever since I strapped on the transceiver?”
“Oh, yes,” Rezar said. “So recapitulation is unnecessary. But we Gizls, so-called, are still a mystery to you, of course. I suppose you’d like some background. Where from, where to, when, and all that.”
“I certainly would,” Don said. “So would everybody else, I imagine, especially King Hector here, and Mr. Fogarty.”
“By all means let us communicate on the highest level,” Rezar said. “First, where from, eh?”
“Right. Are you listening, Mr. Secretary?”
“I sure am,” Fogarty said. “What’s more, son, you’re being piped directly into the White House—and a few other places.”
“Good,” Rezar said. “Now marvel at our saga.”
CHAPTER XII
The end of a civilization is a tragic thing.
On the desert planet of Gorel-zed, the last world to survive the slow nova of its sun, the Gizls, once the pests but now through brain surgery the possessors in their
hardy bodies of the accumulated knowledge of the frail human beings, were preparing to flee. Their self-supporting ships were ready, capable of crossing space to the ends of the universe.
But their universe was barren. No planet could receive them. All were doomed as was theirs, Gorel-zed. They set out for a new galaxy, knowing they would not reach it but that their descendants might. They became nomads of space, self-sufficient.
For generations they wandered, their population diminishing. Their scientist-philosophers evolved the theory that accounted for their spaceborn ennui with life, their acceptance of their fate, their eventual doom. They had no roots, no place of their own. They had only the mechanistic world of their ships—which were vehicles, not a land. They must find a home of their own, or die.
Several times in their odyssey they had come to a planet which could have housed them. But each time an injunction which had been built into them at the time of the brain surgery prevented them from staying. The doomed human beings on Gorel-zed had built into the very fiber of the Gizls—who were, after all, only animals—the injunction that no human being could be harmed for their comfort.
This meant that the world of Ladnora, whose gentle saffron inhabitants were incapable of offering resistance, could not be conquered. The Ladnorans, in their generosity, had offered the refugees from Gorel-zed a hemisphere of their own. But the Gizls required a world of their own, not a half-world. They accepted a small continent only and made it spaceborne and took it with them.
The Crevisians were the next to be visited. They ruled a belt of fertile land around the equator of their world—the rest was icy waste. The Gizls took a slice of each polar region and, joining them, made them spaceborne.
In time they reached the system of Sol.
Mars attracted them first because of its sands. Mars was like Gorel-zed in many ways. But that very resemblance meant it was not for them. Mars was a dead world, as their own Gorel-zed had become.
But the next planet they came to was a green planet. The Gizls moored the acquisitions in the asteroid belt and visited Earth.
Here, at their planetfall, Australia, was the perfect land. Even its inhabitants—the great kangaroos, the smaller wallabies—breathed Home to the Gizls. But there were also the human beings who had made the land their own. And though memory of their origin had weakened in the Gizls, the injunction had not.
For a time they set up a kind of camp in the great central desert and with delight found their legs again. Out of the cramped ships they came, to bound in freedom and fresh breathable air across the wasteland. But hardy, naked, black human beings lived in the desert and they attacked the Gizls with their primitive weapons. And when the Gizls fled, not wishing to harm them, they came to white men, who attacked them with explosive weapons.
And so they took to their ships and were spaceborne again. But the attraction of Earth was strong and they sought another continent, called North America.
And in the center of it they found a great race whose technology was nearly as great as their own. These people had an intelligence and drive which rivaled that of their human antecedents, whose minds had been transferred to the Gizl’s hardy, cumbersome bodies.
* * * *
Rezar paused. His intelligent eyes seemed misplaced in his heavy animal body.
“What attracted you to Superior, of all places?” Alis asked.
Rezar seemed to smile. “Two things. Cavalier and bubble gum.”
“What?” Alis said. “You’re kidding!”
“No,” Rezar said. “It’s true. Bubble gum because after generations of subsistence on capsule food our teeth had weakened and loosened, and bubble gum strengthened them. Nourishment, no. Exercise, yes. And Cavalier Institute because here were men who spoke in terms which paralleled the secret of our spacedrive.”
Alis laughed. “This would make Father expire of joy,” she said. “But now you know he’s just a phony.”
“Alas,” Rezar said. “Yes, alas. But he was so close. Magnology. Cosmolineation. It’s jargon merely, as we learned in time. Osbert Garet is mad. Harmless, but mad.”
Don asked Rezar, “But if this built-in morality of yours is so strong, why didn’t it prevent you from taking off with Superior?”
Rezar replied, “There are factions among us now. An evolution of a sort, I suppose. Nothing is static. One faction”—he tapped his chest—“is completely bound by the injunction. But in the other, self-preservation places a limit on the injunction.”
The explanation seemed to be that the other faction, which grew in strength with every failure to find a world of their own, felt that on a planet such as Earth, with a history of men warring against men, required the Gizls to be no more moral than the human inhabitants themselves.
“The Good Gizls versus the Bad Gizls?” Alis asked.
Rezar seemed to smile. The Bad Gizls, led by one called Kaliz, had got the upper hand for a time and elevated Superior, intending to join it to the bits and pieces of other planets they had previously collected and stored in the asteroid belt. But Rezar’s influence had persuaded them not to head directly into space—at least not until they had solved the problem of how to put Superior’s inhabitants “ashore” first.
Don, unaccustomed to his new role of interplanetary arbitrator, said tentatively:
“I can’t authorize you to take Superior, even if you do put us all ashore, but there must be a comparable piece of Earth we could let you have.”
“But Superior is not all,” Rezar said. “To use one of your nautical expressions, Superior merely represents a shake-down cruise. Our ability to detach such a populated center had shown the feasibility of raising other typical communities—such as New York, Magnitogorsk and Heidelberg—each a different example of Earth culture.”
Don heard a gasp from the Pentagon—or it might have come from the White House.
“You mean you’ve burrowed under each one of those ‘communities’?” Don asked.
Rezar shrugged. “Kaliz’s faction,” he said, as if to dissociate himself from the project of removing some of Earth’s choicest property. “They aim at a history-museum of habitable worlds.”
“Interplanetary souvenirs,” Alis said. “With quick-frozen inhabitants? Don, what are you going to do?”
Don didn’t even know what to say. His eyes met Hector’s.
“Don’t look at me,” Hector said. “I definitely abdicate.”
“Look,” Don said to Rezar, “how far advanced are these plans? I mean, is there a deadline for this mass levitation?”
“Twenty-four hours, your time,” Rezar said.
“Can’t you stop them? Aren’t you the boss?”
The alien turned Don’s question back on him. “Are you the boss?”
Don had started to shake his head when Foghorn Frank’s voice boomed out.
“Yes, by thunder, he is the boss! Don, raise your right hand. I’m going to make you a brigadier general. No, blast it, a full general. Repeat after me.…”
* * * *
General Don Cort squared his shoulders. He was almost getting used to these spot promotions.
“Now negotiate,” Fogarty said. “You hear me, Mr. Gizl-Rezar? The United States of America stands behind General Cort.” There was no audible objection from the White House. “Who stands behind you?”
“A democratic government,” Rezar said. “Like yours.”
“You represent them?” Fogarty asked.
“With my council, yes.”
“Then we can make a deal. Talk to him, Don. I’ll shut up now.”
Don said to Rezar, “Was it your decision to burrow under New York and Magnitogorsk and Heidelberg?”
“I agreed to it, finally.”
“But you agreed to it in the belief that the Earth-people were a warring people and that your old prohibitions did not apply. But we are not a warring people. Earth is at peace.”
“Is it?” Rezar asked sadly. “Your plane warred on the submarine.”
“In s
elf-defense,” Don said. “Don’t forget that we defended you, too. And we’d do it again—but not unless provoked.”
Rezar looked thoughtful. He tapped his long fingernails on the table. Finally he said, “I believe you. But I must talk to my people first, as you have talked to yours. Let us meet later”—he seemed to be making a mental calculation—“in three hours. Where? Here?”
“How about Cavalier?” Alis suggested. “It would be the first important thing that ever happened there.”
* * * *
For the first time since Superior took off, all of the town’s elected or self-designated representatives met amicably. They gathered in the common room at Cavalier Institute as they waited for Rezar and his council to arrive for the talks which could decide, not only the fate of Superior, but of New York and two foreign cities as well.
Apparently the Pentagon expected Don to pretend he had authority to speak for Russia and Germany as well as the United States. But could he speak for the United States constitutionally? He was sure that Bobby Thebold, comprising exactly one percent of that great deliberative body, the Senate, would let him know if he went too far, crisis or no crisis.
The Senator, reunited with Geneva Jervis, sat holding her hand on a sofa in front of the fireplace in which logs blazed cheerfully. Thebold looked untypically placid. Jen Jervis, completely sober and with her hair freshly reddened, had greeted Don with a cool nod.
Thebold had been chagrined at learning that Don Cort was not the yokel he had taken him for. But he recovered quickly, saying that if there was any one thing he had learned in his Senate career it was the art of compromise. He would go along with the duly authorized representative of the Pentagon, with which he had always had the most cordial of relations.
“Isn’t that so, sweetest of all the pies?” he said to Jen Jervis.
Jen looked uncomfortable. “Please, Bobby,” she said. “Not in public.” The Senator squeezed her hand.
Professor Garet, whose wife and daughter were serving tea, stood with Ed Clark near the big bay window, through which they looked occasionally to see if the Gizls were coming. Maynard Rubach sat in a leather armchair next to Hector Civek, who had discarded his ermine and wore an old heavy tweed suit. Doc Bendy sat off in a corner by himself. He was untypically quiet.
The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Page 59
