Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol XII

by Various

  Hunter drew his blaster and entered the thickly-carpeted hall, glowing with the soft, pink light of the luminous, Martian stone. He cried Ann's name. His voice fell hollowly in the silence, but there was no response. He moved to the end of the hall and pushed open a narrow door.

  He saw the white-tiled laboratory, Ann's transmitter standing on a long table with new platinum grids piled by the dozen beside it, and the barrack rows of hospital beds. From the angle of the room which was hidden by the half-open door, Ann Saymer ran toward him with outstretched hands, crying his name. He took a step toward her. And something struck the back of his head.

  IX

  Hunter's mind rocked. He felt himself falling down the long spiral into unconsciousness. The blaster slipped from his hand and his knees buckled. But he clawed blindly, with animal instinct, at the hands closing on his throat.

  His head cleared. He saw Eric Young's dark face close to his. Hunter swung his fist into Young's stomach, and the hands slid away from his throat. Captain Hunter sprang to his feet, crouching low to meet Young's next attack. Young's swing went wild. Hunter's fist struck at the flabby jaw. Eric Young backed away, reeling under the hammer blows, until he came up against the laboratory table.

  Suddenly he slashed at Hunter with a scalpel. The blade nicked Max's shoulder and cut across his jacket. The cloth parted, sliding down his arms and pinning his hands together. In the split-second it took Hunter to free himself from the torn jacket, Young swung the scalpel again. Hunter dodged. Miscalculating his aim, Eric Young tripped over Hunter's outstretched leg and fell, screaming, upon the point of his own weapon.

  Hunter stood for an instant with his legs spread wide, looking down at Young. Then he dropped to his knees and rolled the grievously wounded man over on his back. The hand grasping the scalpel slowly pulled the blade from the abdominal wound. Blood pulsed out upon the white tile. Young was still barely alive.

  Hunter walked toward the transmitter, where Ann stood, saying nothing, her eyes wide and staring. A tremendous conflict was raging within him. Running away was no solution, but what if he could destroy the system itself? Break the mold and start anew.

  He had the instrument that would do it, the hundreds of obedient slaves Young had already turned loose on the streets. With Ann's transmitter he could transform the disciplined strike of human automatons into a civic disaster. Terror and violence uprooting the foundations of the city.

  But a moment's madness could not overthrow the enduring rationality of Hunter's adjustment index. To loose that horror was to set himself in judgment upon the dreams and hopes, the perversion and the sublimity, of his fellow men. To play at God--a delusion no different from Eric Young's.

  Savagely Hunter lifted a chair and started to swing it at the transmitter. Instantly, Ann Saymer turned to face him, the blaster clasped tightly in her hand.

  "No, Max."

  "But, Ann, those people outside are in desperate danger--"

  "I've gone this far. I won't turn back." In her voice was the familiar drive, the ambition he knew so well. But now it seemed different, a twisted distortion of something he had once admired.

  "We don't need Eric Young," she said. "He's bungled everything. You and I, Max--" She caressed the transmitter affectionately. "With this, we'll possess unlimited power."

  "You mean, Ann--" He choked on the words. "You came here of your own free will? You deliberately planned Mrs. Ames' murder?"

  "She was dangerous, Max. She guessed too much. We knew that when we monitored the call you made from the spaceport. But in the beginning we weren't going to make you responsible. We thought the strangers in the house--your attempt to expose the other woman who called herself Mrs. Ames--would be enough to get you committed to a clinic. I didn't want you to be hurt, Max."

  "Why, Ann?" His voice was dead, emotionless. "Because you loved me? Or because you wanted me to be your ace in the hole, if you failed to manage Eric Young the way you thought you could?"

  "That doesn't matter now, Max, dear. I thought Eric had what I needed. But I was misjudging you all along."

  "You're still misjudging me, Ann. I'm going to smash this machine and afterward--"

  "No you aren't, Max," she said coldly. "I'll kill you first."

  Calmly she turned the dial on the blaster. He lifted the chair again, watching her face, still unable to accept what he knew was true. This was Ann Saymer, the woman he had loved. It was the same Ann whose ambition had driven her from the general school to a First in Psychiatry.

  With a fighting man's instinct, Hunter calculated his chances as he held the chair high above his head. It was Ann who had to die. He would accomplish nothing if he smashed her transmitter. She knew how to build another. If he threw the chair at her rather than the Exorciser and if he threw it hard enough--

  From the door a fan of flame blazed out, gently touching Ann. She stood rigid in the first muscular tension of paralysis. Hunter dropped the chair, shattering the transmitter. He turned and saw Dawn in the doorway. Somewhere deep in his subconscious mind he had expected her. He was glad she was there.

  "We've known for a long time we would have to break up their little partnership," Dawn explained. "After I talked to you this morning, Captain, I persuaded the others to hold off for another day or so. A clinical experiment of my own.

  "It was unkind of me, I suppose, to make you the guinea pig. But I wanted to watch your reactions while you fought your way to the truth. Now you know it all--more than you bargained for. And you know what we're trying to do. Are you willing to join us?"

  He looked at her.

  "In your third alternative--the cautious, rational rebuilding?"

  "After men understand themselves. When we're able to answer one question: why did you and Ann Saymer, with identical backgrounds, and intelligence, and an identical socio-economic incentive, become such different personalities? What gives you a zero-zero adjustment index that nothing can shake? Not the psychiatric shock of war, Captain. Not physical pain alone or the treachery of the girl you love. We need you, Captain. We need to know what makes you tick."

  "That 'we' of yours. Just what does that embrace?"

  "A cross-section of us all," she told him. "Psychiatrists, executives in both cartels, union officials. We've been working at this for a good many years. We want to make our world over, yes. But this time with reason and without violence--without sacrificing the good we already have."

  "And you yourself, Dawn. Who are you?"

  "I represent that nonentity called the government, Captain."

  "A nonentity wouldn't make you what you are, Dawn."

  "My name, Captain--" She drew a long breath. "My name is Dawn Farren. The rest of my family is dying out as the Von Rausches are. Unlimited power has a way of poisoning the human mind. If wealth is our only ethical goal, what do we really have when we possess it all? Madness. Both cartels are shams, Captain Hunter, just as your frontier wars are shams.

  "Yes, you may as well know that, too. Neither fleet has actually fought the other for a good many years. The planets you blast are hulks already long dead. It's all a sham, but we have to keep it alive. We have to make it seem real--until we're sure we've found something better and more workable for all of us."

  The tension in Ann Saymer's muscles started to relax. Very slowly her body began to slump, in the secondary stage of paralysis.

  "What about her?" Hunter asked. "She can still make another Exorciser--"

  "The dream of enslaving mankind is always insanity. We'll put her in a public clinic, of course. We may have to use her own machine once more to erase the memory of its structure from her mind. After that the patent drawings will be destroyed. It's not a superficial cure for maladjustment that we're after, Captain Hunter, but the cause. All of Ann's research was up a blind alley--a brilliant waste."

  Suddenly Dawn screamed a warning and leveled her blaster at Eric Young. Hunter sprang back as Dawn fired. But her timing was a second too late. In a last, blazing agony of life-bef
ore-death Young had regained consciousness long enough to hurl the scalpel at Hunter's back. Ebbing strength distorted his aim. The blade plunged into Ann's heart as she slumped against the wall.

  After a long pause, Max Hunter moved toward Dawn and took her arm. He clenched his jaw tight and drew her quickly into the hall. "I want out, Dawn. There's no healing here. I won't feel free again until I can look up at the stars."

  "The stars. Then you're going back to the service, Captain? You're running away?"

  He didn't answer her until they stood in Eric Young's garden.

  "Sham battles for shadow cartels," he said. "That's a child's subterfuge for the Tri-D space heroes. No, Dawn, the real war is here in the struggle for information about ourselves so that we can build a new world of freedom and human dignity. You say you need me. All right, Dawn, you've enrolled a recruit."

  "It will be a long, slow war, Captain," she said, her eyes shining. "We may never see a victory, and--we can never make a truce. But at least we've learned how to go about solving the problem--after ten millennia of trial and error."

  * * *

  Contents

  THE WHITE INVADERS

  by Raymond King Cummings

  CHAPTER I

  A White Shape in the Moonlight

  The colored boy gazed at Don and me with a look of terror.

  "But I tell you I seen it!" he insisted. "An' it's down there now. A ghost! It's all white an' shinin'!"

  "Nonsense, Willie," Don turned to me. "I say, Bob, what do you make of this?"

  "I seen it, I tell you," the boy broke in. "It ain't a mile from here if you want to go look at it."

  Don gripped the colored boy whose coffee complexion had taken on a greenish cast with his terror.

  "Stop saying that, Willie. That's absolute rot. There's no such thing as a ghost."

  "But I seen--"

  "Where?"

  "Over on the north shore. Not far."

  "What did you see?" Don shook him. "Tell us exactly."

  "A man! I seen a man. He was up on a cliff just by the golf course when I first seen him. I was comin' along the path down by the Fort Beach an' I looked up an' there he was, shinin' all white in the moonlight. An' then before I could run, he came floatin' down at me."

  "Floating?"

  "Yes. He didn't walk. He came down through the rocks. I could see the rocks of the cliff right through him."

  Don laughed at that. But neither he nor I could set this down as utter nonsense, for within the past week there had been many wild stories of ghosts among the colored people of Bermuda. The Negroes of Bermuda are not unduly superstitious, and certainly they are more intelligent, better educated than most of their race. But the little islands, this past week, were echoing with whispered tales of strange things seen at night. It had been mostly down at the lower end of the comparatively inaccessible Somerset; but now here it was in our own neighborhood.

  "You've got the fever, Willie," Don laughed. "I say, who told you you saw a man walking through rock?"

  "Nobody told me. I seen him. It ain't far if you--"

  "You think he's still there?"

  "Maybe so. Mr. Don, he was standin' still, with his arms folded. I ran, an'--"

  "Let's go see if he's there," I suggested. "I'd like to have a look at one of these ghosts."

  * * * * *

  But even as I lightly said it, a queer thrill of fear shot through me. No one can contemplate an encounter with the supernatural without a shudder.

  "Right you are," Don exclaimed. "What's the use of theory? Can you lead us to where you saw him, Willie?"

  "Ye-es, of course."

  The sixteen-year-old Willie was shaking again. "W-what's that for, Mr. Don?"

  Don had picked up a shotgun which was standing in a corner of the room.

  "Ain't no--no use of that, Mr. Don."

  "We'll take it anyway, Willie. Ready, Bob?"

  A step sounded behind us. "Where are you going?"

  It was Jane Dorrance, Don's cousin. She stood in the doorway. Her long, filmy white summer dress fell nearly to her ankles. Her black hair was coiled on her head. In her bodice was a single red poinsettia blossom. As she stood motionless, her small slight figure framed against the dark background of the hall, she could have been a painting of an English beauty save for the black hair suggesting the tropics. Her blue-eyed gaze went from Don to me, and then to the gun.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Willie saw a ghost." Don grinned. "They've come from Somerset, Jane. I say, one of them seems to be right here."

  "Where?"

  "Willie saw it down by the Fort Beach."

  "To-night?"

  "Yes. Just now. So he says, though it's all rot, of course."

  "Oh," said Jane, and she became silent.

  * * * * *

  She appeared to be barring our way. It seemed to me, too, that the color had left her face, and I wondered vaguely why she was taking it so seriously. That was not like Jane: she was a level-headed girl, not at all the sort to be frightened by Negroes talking of ghosts.

  She turned suddenly on Willie. The colored boy had been employed in the Dorrance household since childhood. Jane herself was only seventeen, and she had known Willie here in this same big white stone house, almost from infancy.

  "Willie, what you saw, was it a--a man?"

  "Yes," said the boy eagerly. "A man. A great big man. All white an' shinin'."

  "A man with a hood? Or a helmet? Something like a queer-looking hat on his head, Willie?"

  "Jane!" expostulated Don. "What do you mean?"

  "I saw him--saw it," said Jane nervously.

  "Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "You did? When? Why didn't you tell us?"

  "I saw it last night." She smiled faintly. "I didn't want to add to these wild tales. I thought it was my imagination. I had been asleep--I fancy I was dreaming of ghosts anyway."

  "You saw it--" Don prompted.

  "Outside my bedroom window. Some time in the middle of the night. The moon was out and the--the man was all white and shining, just as Willie says."

  "But your bedroom," I protested. "Good Lord, your bedroom is on the upper floor."

  But Jane continued soberly, with a sudden queer hush to her voice, "It was standing in the air outside my window. I think it had been looking in. When I sat up--I think I had cried out, though none of you heard me evidently--when I sat up, it moved away; walked away. When I got to the window, there was nothing to see." She smiled again. "I decided it was all part of my dream. This morning--well, I was afraid to tell you because I knew you'd laugh at me. So many girls down in Somerset have been imagining things like that."

  * * * * *

  To me, this was certainly a new light on the matter. I think that both Don and I, and certainly the police, had vaguely been of the opinion that some very human trickster was at the bottom of all this. Someone, criminal or otherwise, against whom our shotgun would be efficacious. But here was level-headed Jane telling us of a man standing in mid-air peering into her second-floor bedroom, and then walking away. No trickster could accomplish that.

  "Ain't we goin'?" Willie demanded. "I seen it, but it'll be gone."

  "Right enough," Don exclaimed grimly. "Come on, Willie."

  He disregarded Jane as he walked to the door, but she clung to him.

  "I'm coming," she said obstinately, and snatched a white lace scarf from the hall rack and flung it over her head like a mantilla. "Don, may I come?" she added coaxingly.

  He gazed at me dubiously. "Why, I suppose so," he said finally. Then he grinned. "Certainly no harm is going to come to us from a ghost. Might frighten us to death, but that's about all a ghost can do, isn't it?"

  We left the house. The only other member of the Dorrance household was Jane's father--the Hon. Arthur Dorrance, M.P. He had been in Hamilton all day, and had not yet returned. It was about nine o'clock of an evening in mid-May. The huge moon rode high in a fleecy sky, illumining the island with a light so bright one c
ould almost read by it.

  "We'll walk," said Don. "No use riding, Willie."

  "No. It's shorter over the hill. It ain't far."

  * * * * *

  We left our bicycles standing against the front veranda, and, with Willie and Don leading us, we plunged off along the little dirt road of the Dorrance estate. The poinsettia blooms were thick on both sides of us. A lily field, which a month before had been solid white with blossoms, still added its redolence to the perfumed night air. Through the branches of the squat cedar trees, in almost every direction there was water visible--deep purple this night, with a rippled sheen of silver upon it.

  We reached the main road, a twisting white ribbon in the moonlight. We followed it for a little distance, around a corkscrew turn, across a tiny causeway where the moonlit water of an inlet lapped against the base of the road and the sea-breeze fanned us. A carriage, heading into the nearby town of St. Georges, passed us with the thud of horses' hoofs pounding on the hard smooth stone of the road. Under its jaunty canopy an American man reclined with a girl on each side of him. He waved us a jovial greeting as they passed.

  Then Willie turned us off the road. We climbed the ramp of an open grassy field, with a little cedar woods to one side, and up ahead, half a mile to the right, the dark crumbling ramparts of a little ancient fort which once was for the defense of the island.

  Jane and I were together, with Willie and Don in advance of us, and Don carrying the shotgun.

  "You really saw it, Jane?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I thought I did. Then I thought that I didn't."

  "Well, I hope we see it now. And if it's human--which it must be if there's anything to it at all--we'll march it back to St. Georges and lock it up."

  She turned and smiled at me, but it was a queer smile, and I must admit my own feelings were queer.

  "Don't you think you're talking nonsense, Bob?"

  "Yes, I do," I admitted. "I guess maybe the whole thing is nonsense. But it's got the police quite worried. You knew that, didn't you? All this wild talk--there must be some basis for it."