by Fritz Leiber
When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking once more, but it had something to say that was probably the result of a rapid conference and compromise.
“Attention, everyone! I wish to inform you that the plane in which you are traveling can be exploded—melted in the air, rather—if we activate a certain control at this end. We will not do so, now or subsequently, if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when you told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion in full faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?”
We all told him “Yes,” though I don’t imagine we sounded very happy about it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that the voice was being really sincere—an illusion, I supposed, but still a comforting one.
Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and while the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze—which hadn’t shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let alone “straight strings of pink stars”—I was receiving a cram course in gunnery! (Do you wonder I don’t try to tell this part of my story consecutively?)
* * * *
It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: if you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five they unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five keys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the viewport and let you aim and fire the plane’s main gun in any forward direction. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed by changing over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn’t get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special talents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner’s control over the main gun, and I wouldn’t have managed even that except that Alice, from the thinking she’d been doing about patterns of five, was quick at understanding from the voice’s descriptions which buttons were meant. She couldn’t work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnt hand, but she could point them out for me.
After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If something showed up in it I’d be able to make a stab at getting a shot in. Not that I knew what my gun fired—the voice wasn’t giving away any unnecessary data.
Naturally I had asked why didn’t the voice teach me to fly the plane so that I could maneuver in case of attack, and naturally the voice had told me it was out of the question—much too difficult and besides they wanted us on a known course so they could plan better for the drop and recovery. (I think maybe the voice would have given me some hints—and maybe even told me more about the steel cubes too and how much danger we were in from them—if it hadn’t been for the second voice, which presumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sure among other things that the first voice didn’t get soft-hearted.)
So there I was being a front gunner. Actually a part of me was getting a big bang out of it—from antique Banker’s Special to needle cannon (or whatever it was)—but at the same time another part of me was disgusted with the idea of acting like I belonged to a live culture (even a smart, unqueer one) and working in a war (even just so as to get out of it fast), while a third part of me—one that I normally keep down—was very simply horrified.
Pop was back by the door with the box and ’chute, ready to make the drop.
Alice had no duties for the moment, but she’d suddenly started gathering up food cans and packing them in one bag—I couldn’t figure out at first what she had in mind. Orderly housewife wouldn’t be exactly my description of her occupational personality.
Then of course everything had to happen at once.
The voice said, “Make the drop!”
Alice crossed to Pop and thrust out the bag of cans toward him, writhing her lips in silent “talk” to tell him something. She had a knife in her burnt hand too.
* * * *
But I didn’t have time to do any lip-reading, because just then a glittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead—a whole half dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot, as if a super-fast gigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web.
Wind whistled as the door of the plane started to open.
I fought to center my sight on the blank central spot, which drifted toward the left.
One of the straight lines grew dazzlingly bright.
I heard Alice whisper fiercely, “Drop these!” and the part of my mind that couldn’t be applied to gunnery instantly deduced that she’d had some last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead of the steel cubes.
I got the sight centered and held down the firing combo. The thought flashed to me: it’s a city you’re firing at, not a plane, and I flinched.
The dazzlingly pink line dipped down toward me.
Behind me, the sound of a struggle. Alice snarling and Pop giving a grunt.
Then all at once a scream from Alice, a big whoosh of wind, a flash way ahead (where I’d aimed), a spatter of hot metal inside the cabin, a blinding spot in the middle of the World Screen, a searing beam inches from my neck, an electric shock that lifted me from my seat and ripped at my consciousness!
* * * *
When I came to (if I really ever was out—seconds later, at most) there were no more pink lines. The haze was just its disgustingly tawny evening self with black spots that were only after-images. The cabin stunk of ozone, but wind funneling through a hole in the one-time World Screen was blowing it out fast enough—Savannah had gotten in one lick, all right. And we were falling, the plane was swinging down like a crippled bird—I could feel it and there was no use kidding myself.
But staring at the control panel wouldn’t keep us from crashing if that was in the cards. I looked around and there were Pop and Alice glaring at each other across the closing door. He looked mean. She looked agonized and was pressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow as if he’d stamped on the hand, maybe. I didn’t see any blood though. I didn’t see the box and ’chute either, though I did see Alice’s bag of groceries. I guessed Pop had made the drop.
Now, it occurred to me, was a bully time for Voice Two to melt the plane—if he hadn’t already tried. My first thought had been that the spatter of hot metal had come from the Savannah craft spitting us, but there was no way to be sure.
I looked around at the viewport in time to see rocks and stunted trees jump out of the haze. Good old Ray, I thought, always in at the death. But just then the plane took a sickening bounce, as if its antigravity had only started to operate within yards of the ground. Another lurching fall and another bounce, less violent. A couple of repetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and then we were sort of bumping along on an even keel with the rocks and such sliding past fast about a hundred feet below, I judged. We’d been spoiled for altitude work, it seemed, but we could still cripple along in some sort of low-power repulsion field.
I looked at the North America screen and the buttons, wondering if I should start us back west again or leave us set on Atla-Hi and see what the hell happened—at the moment I hardly cared what else Savannah did to us. I needn’t have wasted the mental energy. The decision was made for me. As I watched, the Atla-Hi button jumped up by itself and the button for the cracking plant went down and there was some extra bumping as we swung around.
Also, the violet patch of Atla-Hi went real dim and the button for it no longer had a violet nimbus. The Los Alamos blue went dull too. The cracking-plant dot glowed a brighter green—that was all.
All except for one thing. As the violet dimmed I thought I heard Voice One very faintly (not as if speaking directl
y but as if the screen had heard and remembered—not a voice but the fluorescent ghost of one): “Thank you and good luck!”
CHAPTER 6
Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
—Thomas de Quincey
“And a long merry siege to you, sir, and roast rat for Christmas!” I responded, very out loud and rather to my surprise.
“War! How I hate war!”—that was what Pop exploded with. He didn’t exactly dance in senile rage—he was still keeping too sharp a watch on Alice—but his voice sounded that way.
“Damn you, Pop!” Alice contributed. “And you too, Ray! We might have pulled something, but you had to go obedience-happy.” Then her anger got the better of her grammar, or maybe Pop and me was corrupting it. “Damn the both of you!” she finished.
It didn’t make much sense, any of it. We were just cutting loose, I guess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour.
I said to Alice, “I don’t know what you could have pulled, except the chain on us.” To Pop I remarked, “You may hate war, but you sure helped that one along. Those grenades you dropped will probably take care of a few hundred Savannans.”
“That’s what you always say about me, isn’t it?” he snapped back. “But I don’t suppose I should expect any kinder interpretation of my motives.” To Alice he said, “I’m sorry I had to slap your burnt fingers, sister, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you about my low-down tactics.” Then to me again: “I do hate war, Ray. It’s just murder on a bigger scale, though some of the boys give me an argument there.”
“Then why don’t you go preach against war in Atla-Hi and Savannah?” Alice demanded, still very hot but not quite so bitter.
“Yeah, Pop, how about it?” I seconded.
“Maybe I should,” he said, thoughtful all at once. “They sure need it.” Then he grinned. “Hey, how’d this sound: HEAR THE WORLD-FAMOUS MURDERER POP TRUMBULL TALK AGAINST WAR. WEAR YOUR STEEL THROAT PROTECTORS. Pretty good, hey?”
We all laughed at that, grudgingly at first, then with a touch of wholeheartedness. I think we all recognized that things weren’t going to be very cheerful from here on in and we’d better not turn up our noses at the feeblest fun.
“I guess I didn’t have anything very bright in mind,” Alice admitted to me, while to Pop she said, “All right, I forgive you for the present.”
“Don’t!” Pop said with a shudder. “I hate to think of what happened to the last bugger made the mistake of forgiving me.”
We looked around and took stock of our resources. It was time we did. It was getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun, and there weren’t any cabin lights coming on and we sure didn’t know of any way of getting any.
We wadded a couple of satchels into the hole in the World Screen without trying to probe it. After a while it got warmer again in the cabin and the air a little less dusty. Presently it started to get too smoky from the cigarettes we were burning, but that came later.
We screwed off the walls the few storage bags we hadn’t inspected. They didn’t contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight.
I had one last go at the buttons, though there weren’t any left with nimbuses on them—the darker it got, the clearer that was. Even the Atla-Hi button wouldn’t push now that it had lost its violet halo. I tried the gunnery patterns, figuring to put in a little time taking pot shots at any mountains that turned up, but the buttons that had been responding so well a few minutes ago refused to budge. Alice suggested different patterns, but none of them worked. That console was really locked—maybe the shot from Savannah was partly responsible, though Atla-Hi remote-locking things was explanation enough.
“The buggers!” I said. “They didn’t have to tie us up this tight. Going east we at least had a choice—forward or back. Now we got none.”
“Maybe we’re just as well off,” Pop said. “If Atla-Hi had been able to do anything more for us—that is, if they hadn’t been sieged in, I mean—they’d sure as anything have pulled us in. Pull the plane in, I mean, and picked us out of it—with a big pair of tweezers, likely as not. And contrary to your flattering opinion of my preaching (which by the way none of the religious boys in my outfit share—they call me ‘that misguided old atheist’), I don’t think none of us would go over big at Atla-Hi.”
* * * *
We had to agree with him there. I couldn’t imagine Pop or Alice or even me cutting much of a figure (even if we weren’t murder-pariahs) with the pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Atla-Alamos crowd. The Double-A Republics, to give them a name, might have their small-brain types, but somehow I didn’t think so. There must be more than one Edison-Einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and all the wonders in this plane and the other things we’d gotten hints of. Also, Grayl had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us small mammals had cooked his goose. And none of the modern “countries” had more than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and that hardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of a memory I’d been reaching for the last hour—how when I was a kid I’d read about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks. I told Alice and Pop.
“And if that’s the average Atla-Alamoser’s idea of mental recreation,” I said, “well, you can see what I mean.”
“I’ll grant you they got a monopoly of brains,” Pop agreed. “Not sense, though,” he added doggedly.
“Intellectual snobs,” was Alice’s comment. “I know the type and I detest it.” (“You are sort of intellectual, aren’t you?” Pop told her, which fortunately didn’t start a riot.)
Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new slant we’d gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great “countries” of the modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn’t have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks.)
I said, “We’ve always figured in a general way that Alamos was the remains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know the same’s true of the Atla-Hi group. They’re the Brookhaven survivors.”
“Manhattan Project, don’t you mean?” Alice corrected.
“Nope, that was in Colorado Springs,” Pop said with finality.
* * * *
I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate for technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group picked for high I. Q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress. You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a wonder world in a couple of generations.
“They got their troubles though,” Pop reminded me and that led us to speculating about the war we’d dipped into. Savannah Fortress, we knew, was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river down that way, but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient than Atla-Alamos. Before we knew it we were, musing almost romantically about the plight of Atla-Hi, besieged by superior and (it was easy to suppose) barbaric forces, and maybe distant Los Alamos in a similar predicament—Alice reminded me how the voice had asked if they were still dying out there. For a moment I found myself fiercely proud that I had been able to strike a blow against evil aggressors. At once, of course, then, the revulsion came.
“This is a hell of a way,” I said, “for three so-called realists to be mooning about things.”
“Yes, especially when your heroes kicked us out,” Alice agreed.
Pop chuckled. “Yep,” he said, “they even took Ray’s artillery away from him.”
“You’re wrong there, Pop,” I said, sitting up. “I still got one of the grenades—the one the pilot had in his fist.” To tell the truth I’d forgotten all about it and it bothered me a little now to feel it snugged up in my pocket against my hip bone where the skin is thin.
“You believe what that ol
d Dutchman said about the steel cubes being atomic grenades?” Pop asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “He sure didn’t sound enthusiastic about telling us the truth about anything. But for that matter he sounded mean enough to tell the truth figuring we’d think it was a lie. Maybe this is some sort of baby A-bomb with a fuse timed like a grenade.” I got it out and hefted it. “How about I press the button and drop it out the door? Then we’ll know.” I really felt like doing it—restless, I guess.
“Don’t be a fool, Ray,” Alice said.
“Don’t tense up, I won’t,” I told her. At the same time I made myself the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and bad, I’d just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened—sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, you might say.
“What makes you so sure it’s a weapon?” Pop asked.
“What else would it be,” I asked him, “that they’d be so hot on getting them in the middle of a war?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Pop said. “I’ve made a guess, but I don’t want to tell it now. What I’m getting at, Ray, is that your first thought about anything you find—in the world outside or in your own mind—is that it’s a weapon.”
“Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!” Alice interjected with surprising intensity.
“You see?” Pop said. “That’s what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking’s been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock and right away asks himself, ‘Who can I brain with this?’ Doesn’t occur to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a hospital.”
“You know, Pop,” I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket, “you are sort of preachy at times.”
