The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  He found himself liking the people. They were what he had always dreamed of—a group devoted to liberty, willing to sacrifice themselves if necessary, with an amazing respect for each other’s rights. Out of them, conceivably, a new world could come—the world he had always aimed for.

  Do nothing, Blake told himself, and the plot would fail. The rebels made tests of the gun’s reaction time, measuring the period between the instant that the peephole in the weapon’s shield was uncovered to the moment when firing the gun would accomplish nothing. The period was too short for most of them to pull the trigger. He, in Jed’s body, had been just enough better than the others to make it possible; no automatic device would work, because they had no way of knowing where the Bigshot would be in the single room where he apparently gave himself the luxury of going without his personal shield.

  Do something, and he was killing himself—and perhaps ruining what was really only the “Period of Transition” they prattled about.

  He got back to the little shack where he and Sherry lived just in time to see a new development. A wail went up along the street as a great van drove up, and Blake stopped to stare at the miserable creatures that were piling out. They couldn’t stand on their legs; their minds had been burned completely. And among them was Rule.

  Two fingers were missing from the gun-hands of each of them, cut off and already healing under the efficient modern surgery.

  Mark met Blake and yanked him inside, where Sherry was crying. “We thought they’d got you. New orders. Not even the technicians at Sarnoff’s know, but I saw a copy. All men with hairy hands are to get fifteen minute burns—enough so they’ll never be more than morons, and we can’t rebuild their minds. And—well, you saw the rest. Sherry, shut up! They didn’t get him!”

  “They will…they will…” She lay huddled for a second more. Then, as the van drove off, leaving the people to sort out their unfortunate friends, she dashed out to help. Her sobs drifted back to him, but didn’t seem to hurt her usefulness in the crowd.

  Blake went to the rickety cabinet where his gun lay and picked it up. Mark caught him. “That can wait. Come in here.” Lather and razor were waiting, and he began shaving the back of Blake’s hands deftly. “We can’t do much of this—the others will have to take their chances. But we need you.”

  The anger wore off as the shaving was completed.

  Mark stepped back to inspect Blake’s hands. “You’ll do—Sherry can take care of it the rest of the time. Jed, I still can’t trust you completely, but you’ve got to come through. Once we get the Bigshot, we can move on down the line. All the shields have time limits built in—that’s why we never got anywhere trying to get any for our own use. In two weeks, the second group will have to recharge the trigger battery relay; only the Bigshot has the key for that. Another ten days, and the third line drops; and it goes on down to the Guards. They have to get their shields set every day. Maybe a few of the higher group will manage to get guns from lowers they can recharge themselves—but their keys change automatically every period, so it won’t help much, if we move fast. It all depends on your getting the Bigshot.”

  “You’re going to have a busy time converting them or burning their minds,” Blake guessed.

  “Burning! Don’t be a fool, Jed. We’ll kill the bas—the sons! They’ve got it coming to them. And don’t think we’re just talking. The rebels, as they call us, outnumber the rest of the world five to one!”

  Blake put the gun back on the table as if it had stung him. Killing off twenty percent of the population might help the crowding, but it wasn’t his idea of a solution—particularly when a lot of the higher technicians, scientists, and coordinators necessarily belonged to the elite who owned the guns that were equipped with shields.

  Anyhow, even without the shields, there were enough plain guns, and the whole State corps would have to fight back—those in secret sympathy with the rebel movement would be driven to it by self-preservation. It would be a welter of blood to make the worst war in history seem anemic.

  “When?” he asked, finally. “The same date?”

  Mark shook his head. “I got orders today. We move on the palace night after tomorrow—as soon as we can force through the passage we found on the maps and set up equipment to rip away the wall where you shoot. And you’d better shoot straight!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Thomas Blake watched them assemble, while sounds from above-ground told him that operations were already in progress. They’d modeled their outward move on a slight improvement over the second revolt. It meant that a fair number of them would be killed in the crisscrossing of stunt blasts, but nobody seemed to consider that important.

  It would at least keep all the local Iron Guard busy, and probably stir up their officers enough to disorganize the whole palace. There would be fighting on almost every street, and the bulk of their mob would be storming the palace itself from mined tunnels they were digging frantically. All was to be concentrated to reach its highest fury at precisely midnight.

  “How do you know he will be there?” Blake asked.

  Sherry looked at him in surprise. “He’s been boasting for years that clear conscience induces sleep, and that his puts him to bed at midnight every night. He’ll never believe we have a chance until it’s too late.”

  It sounded plausible; dictators usually showed their pride in just such stupid ways. Anyhow, Blake had to confess to himself, it was exactly the thing he’d been starting to say for the past year; he’d meant it as a joke, but such things became habits in time.

  Yet he must know. Thomas Blake, the Bigshot, had necessarily been Thomas Blake in Jed’s body forty years before. He’d heard every plan, and he should remember it.

  Blake fingered the two guns he carried—one for any trouble on the street, the other for the coup they were attempting. He couldn’t let these people down. The honest desperation on their faces wouldn’t permit all this courage and planning to go for nothing. He couldn’t kill his older self and invite such a savage massacre as only the French Reign of Terror could match.

  History was becoming clearer now. Blake’s fine, free colonial people had been men of courage—and men of strong hatreds. They’d slaughtered the Indians just as readily as they had marched against tyranny. And even their opposition to tyranny had been founded more on hate than on any innate love of justice. Justice, in fact, had come about as a sort of afterthought—when the men they hated had fled or were killed.

  He was sweating coldly in the dank basement under the old auditorium. Some decision had to be made; none was possible.

  The ten in the execution party moved out at last, trying to look like nonpartisans caught in the whirls of the rising rebellion, and anxiously beading homeward.

  Something struck against Blake’s back, and he stumbled. His hand leaped to the gun at his waist instantly, and he fired before he was sure of his target. It was a head shot, by sheer instinct; the blow that might have only stunned, knocked the man’s head back sharply, until it seemed to dangle on his neck.

  Surprisingly, the weapons of the others echoed his—silent in themselves, but causing loud thuds whenever the beams hit. The surprise of seeing the whole group fire into their own crowd of rebels cut short the sickness that was rising in Blake. He turned, just as one of the black-clothed Iron Guard came up.

  “Good shooting,” the man said. “But take it easy. That first shot was vicious and we don’t want killing. Here, bunch up. So—I think I can stretch my shield enough to give us all some protection.”

  Sherry looked up at him with grateful awe written large on her face. “Thank you, officer. We were going home to my aunt’s from a party—and then all—this happened…”

  The Guard nodded. “It’ll get worse, from what I’m told. But right now, I guess I can escort you a ways. Where to, ma’am?”

  “The subway, I guess,” she answered; “we’ll be safer there than on the street, anyway.”

  The Guard nodded, and began leading t
hem. Some of the force from the stun blasts got through, with the shield stretched out—a trick Blake hadn’t known was possible—but it helped.

  Blake caught at the man’s sleeve while they waited for a yelling mob to dash by. “How do you get to be a Guard?” he asked.

  The man looked around in surprise. “I thought everyone knew that, citizen. We’re picked when we’re in school—character, intelligence, all that. Then we get twenty years’ training in science, sociology, and everything else you can name. It’s pretty tough, but worth it—except for these riots. There the mob has all the advantage—our shields don’t protect us from stones and clubs, and we can’t use lethal speed on our guns without special orders. Lot of the mob gets trampled on, too.”

  They were at the subway, then, and Blake started down. He jerked back at a sudden gasp, to see the Guard falling, his head a bloody pulp from a sap in Mark’s hand.

  The leader of the group put the sap away, smiling in grim satisfaction. “Darned—sorry, Sherry—dratted hypocrite. I don’t mind the ones that go around beating us up on the sly or giving us tickets for standing on corners. But these mealy-mouthed polite ones! Fpha! They’re too good for us! Hey, Jed, what’s the matter?”

  Blake held back the retching of his stomach and forced a grin to his lips. “Too much Guard,” he answered, and saw an approving smile cross Sherry’s lips.

  He avoided looking at her then as they went down the steps. He’d heard enough to know that in general the Guards were like the one Mark had killed; they’d been conditioned into believing that to serve the State was all that mattered, but they’d also been taught manners, courtesy, and at least a normal consideration of the people under them. There was no more justice in Mark’s words than in his brutal action.

  The train was pulling in, and Mark waved them aboard. If the riots developed properly, it might be one of the last ones to run along on its rubber-insulated monorail.

  They found their mistake too late, just as the door was closing. It was a Guard train, carrying prisoners back to the palace. Apparently the Guards who had taken it over had lacked the key needed to break the automatic controls that stopped it at every station.

  They were inside before the Guards at the door could stop them. Mark yelled once, and began swinging the sap. Blake skewed sideways as the train started, to pounce into the stomach of an older Guard. He kicked at a shin, jerked around the pain-doubled man, and darted for a strap. His other hand found the big clasp knife that most of the men carried, and he dragged it from his pocket. The plastic strap came loose, its heavy metal hand-hold forming a perfect close-quarters club.

  This was no time to argue about the right and wrong of killing Guards. His pacifist inclinations were intellectual, and his emotions had been well conditioned in two lives: Jed had been a natural brawler, and Blake had done rather well in the usual school and high school fracases. In a brawl of this size, the issues were simplified to the basic question of whose side you came in on.

  The Guards were handicapped. They were responsible for a group of prisoners, and their normal security was useless here, since all fighting was at close quarters, with weapons too slow to be bothered by their shields. The prisoners were naturally against them—and even handcuffed, their legs were enough to upset the Guards, while some of them were able to get to the doors and prevent men from joining the police force from other cars.

  Blake swung out, protecting the rest of his party on one side while they cut their own straps. Then a pattern of general mayhem began; he felt a big fist jolt against his ear and reeled, but Jed’s body was rugged. He swung a backhand that dragged the handle across the Guard’s teeth with a crescendo clicking. It caught one of the prisoners on the followthrough, but the man cheerfully plunged into the pleasure of breaking the Guard’s ribs with his heavy shoes.

  The train slowed at another station, but nobody left; the Guards were jammed in, and the citizens were too busy. Blake’s wrist was sore from the pounding when he finally switched hands. At the next station, they heaved out the unconscious Guards. Mark prepared to move back into the next car, until one of the other men caught his hand and pointed. Apparently, they’d reached their destination.

  The closing doors caught Blake across-the shoulders, sending him sprawling to his hands and knees. He saw that most of the party, including Sherry and Mark, were out, and then was up, dashing after them. Guards were pouring down the entrance, with a mob behind them. Mark yelled.

  The group darted into the men’s washroom. Sherry hesitated, but she swallowed her inculcated prudery and followed them. The door shut with a sound that indicated a lock had already been added to it. Mark knocked on a white panel, and it swung open.

  “Clear sailing,” he told them, breathing harshly through what remained of his teeth. One eye was swelling closed, and his lip was smashed, but he obviously didn’t feel it.

  “Good work, Jed; I guess I was wrong about you, at that. Well, we’re under the palace!”

  CHAPTER 7

  With the two who had been waiting in the tunneled passage from the washroom, there were nine of them now. Nine men to end the tightest rule any man had held on the planet—and uncounted millions outside serving as a screen for their operations.

  For a few minutes, all Blake’s doubts had been settled, but they came back now.

  “Two minutes, maybe,” Mark announced. “Lew, you come with Jed and me. The rest stay back.”

  “I’m coming,” Sherry stated. Her glance at Mark was defiant, and then surprised as the man merely shrugged.

  Two minutes to make up his mind. Blake couldn’t even get his ledgers out for a book-balancing in that length of time. He’d posted too many entries in the daybook, and the whole business needed a complete new audit. But now it boiled down to the simple question of whether he could kill himself—even if he decided he should do so.

  He thought he could. He’d always been sure he could commit suicide for a cause he believed in, if necessary—and this was the same thing, with a forty-year lapse between pulling the trigger and dropping dead.

  The passageway was crude, and they stumbled upward slowly. They were obviously inside a wall, where tamped earth had been used to fill the space left by the masonry. It was thick with age and dirt odors, and Mark’s flash barely lighted their way. They crawled up now on their hands and knees. Then a bulky piece of machinery appeared ahead, facing a blank stone wall.

  Lew went to it. “All tapped. If we aimed it right, this should pull out the plug left, and there’ll be a hole big enough to shoot through. Better get used to the light, Jed.”

  Blake focussed his eyes where the flash was, while Mark brought it around until it rested on the plug that the machine was gripping. Lew touched a button, and the machine whined faintly.

  For the moment, he had decided. On one side was courage and devotion; on the other side, retreat and aloofness behind thick stone walls. When in Rome…well, it was as good a rule as any now. And maybe he was only doing it to convince himself he had the courage to fire at himself.

  The plug popped out and sidewise, leaving a six-inch opening. Blake got a quick view of a tremendous room, at least a hundred feet long, with a bed at the far side. On the bed, stark naked and asleep lay the older man who had been in Sarnoff’s laboratory—Thomas Blake the Big-shot. Tom Blake N. He should have guessed!

  The gun was already up, and swinging into position. His thoughts seemed to have swiveled off into a dimension where time was infinitely variable. It wouldn’t be hard now. The man had already proven his duplicity, had tried to wipe out his own younger self. Why shouldn’t that younger self eliminate him?

  “He’s naked!” Sherry’s horrified whisper sounded beside Blake’s ear, just as the trigger came back.

  It was a clean miss, he had jerked at the last split second.

  Hell exploded inside. Gongs sounded, and Guards came pouring out of every cranny, while the old man sat up, staring quietly at the hole in the wall. His old eyes found it before the
Guards did, and he pointed.

  Mark let out a yell, and pushed the other three ahead of him. They went sprawling down the tunnel, just as a tremendous thwack reached their ears, what was left of Mark fell past them. Sherry was ahead, and Lew behind. Blake started to look back, but he had no need, another sound broke out, and half of Lew’s head went past his ear, spattering gore.

  Then they hit a curve in the tunnel. The big booming of the high-speed stasis guns went on, but they were simply cutting holes through the palace now, unable to locate their targets.

  They hit the washroom, charging through those who had waited behind. The lock was stuck, and one of the men was working on it. There was no need to report the results to anyone—Sherry’s face gave that away.

  She was sobbing and cursing herself in the same breath. Then she met Blake’s eyes hopelessly, with the expression of Judas the day after. He started toward her, but she cut him off quickly. “We’ll have to split up—they saw us together, up there. I’ll be at the cellar—where they brought you back—tomorrow!”

  The door finally came loose, and she darted out. He could sense the feelings in her, but there was nothing he could do. He let her go, giving her time to get away, before he sped up the steps, after her. The station was almost deserted, except for a dead Guard and several badly wounded citizens.

  Behind him, the sound of the stasis guns came again, indicating that guards had broken down through the tunnel and were after him. He sped up the stairs, expecting to find the street; instead, he came out into a monstrous hail, crowded at the entrance by a mass of guards defending a big gate which had dropped. Blake raced up the hall, swinging off at the first stairway. He cut down another hall, and darted into a room at random. There was a fat dowager inside, stripped to ankle-length pantaloons and camisole, but she gave no trouble; she simply fainted.