The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  I went into a drug store and asked directions, keeping an eye out through the show window, and still I couldn’t spot my man. Armed with information, I went on and found my way to Videophone Central.

  I put in a long distance call, collect, to Johnson, the B.I.S. agent. It was time I was making a report. Johnson was out of town. I didn’t trouble to talk with anyone else, left my name and said I’d call later. I broke the connection, feeling the first assault of despair. As I stepped out of the booth, a man loitering nearby laid a heavy hand on my arm. “You’re Gilbert Bradley.”

  He was big, and he looked tough. I don’t tangle well when they come as big as that one. I started to back warily away, to disengage my arm from his grip. He hung on, flashed credentials. “Smith, Bureau of Internal Security. Come along.”

  I went. Johnson was doubtless behind this, and I began to have hope. I asked, but the big lug I was with wouldn’t open his mouth. Secrecy beyond the call of reason is the trouble with these security boys. They wouldn’t tell a blind man the right time of day.

  Johnson was behind it, all right, directing operations from a room in a second-rate hotel near the airport. He acted glad to see me. That is, he almost smiled.

  I said, “I tried to call you long distance.”

  “I was notified; I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “How’d you know we were out here?”

  “We keep tabs on Gregor.”

  “So Gregor’s around.”

  “If my man hadn’t picked you up, his would have. Any thanks?”

  “A million. For what?”

  “Remember Henderson?”

  “I’m remembering; I’m also thinking Gregor is a foreign agent, so why do you let him operate?”

  “He runs loose. We see he doesn’t operate. Do you think we’re asleep on our feet in the Bureau?”

  I had no answer for that question, so I told him about the fracas in my apartment and our sudden flight.

  He nodded, as if the news were old. “Your place was thoroughly messed up; your rental agent is still hopping. We got it from a routine police report. It may interest you to know we’ve slapped a hold order on Coleman’s theatrical equipment.”

  “His agent was supposed to pick it up.”

  “And destroy it. We’ve got him, too. He’s nobody, but he can’t talk where we’ve got him. Government experts are looking over the stuff.”

  “They won’t learn anything.”

  “Think not?”

  How could I tell Johnson about the gap that Willie had made me see so clearly? I unloaded the rest of my burden. I told him about Coleman’s alien origin, the interstellar war, Bilfax and the buried spaceship.

  He was frowning when I finished.

  “I don’t mind telling you—now,” he said. “We had Coleman cased for an extraterrestrial. Don’t ask me where the idea came from. We’ve got bright people in government service, too. In fact, we’re almost ready to hit the open road to space ourselves. Remember the rocket, with the magnesium flare, that reached the moon? But this interstellar warfare business sounds like romancing. Sure it’s straight?”

  “Honest to God! I’ve met Bilfax. He has a mission—to capture or destroy Coleman. Now that he knows where Coleman’s spaceship is hidden, he’s bound to try one or the other, soon.”

  Johnson was thoughtful, noisily sucking his yellow teeth. “Exactly where is the spaceship buried?”

  I told him.

  “We’ve got to prevent that takeoff, Bradley!”

  “Don’t include me, Johnson. I couldn’t stop that takeoff with an H-bomb. Nor anybody else—except, maybe, Bilfax. Coleman’s got it surrounded with a force shield nothing can penetrate. Nothing we have. Besides, I’m not interested in stopping Coleman’s flight.”

  “The United States Government is. We want what’s in that man’s head, and in his ship; you can’t buck the government.”

  “I’m not bucking. I’m as patriotic as you are. If I thought Coleman’s leaving a danger to our country, I’d be as anxious to stop him as you are. Patriotism doesn’t mean anything here, Johnson. Coleman’s different from us; he’s big. I’ve never seen his ship, but I think it could handle our entire Navy, the air fleet, and the Army thrown in. Including the Marines.

  “Our technology doesn’t equip us to deal with people like Coleman. If he can get that ship out of here before Bilfax moves to stop him, more power to him, I say. If Bilfax beats Coleman to the punch, I hate to think what will be going on up there in the hills—and me in the middle of it. Besides, Cleo Parker’s up there. I’d like to get her out before the fireworks start.”

  “If you’re interested in the Parker woman,” Johnson said bleakly, “she’s your lookout. We’ll let Washington decide what we do.”

  I didn’t like the way he tossed off that “Parker woman” business.

  “She’s an American national, Johnson!”

  “So is everybody else in this part of the country. We don’t want lives endangered, Bradley, and we do want what Coleman knows. Knowing he’s an alien, illegally entered in the country, we can arrest him; that’s why we’ve got to stop that takeoff.”

  “You’d turn Coleman over to Bilfax!” I accused.

  “Maybe, after we’re through with him—if it would keep an interstellar war off our doorstep.”

  “So now you believe in the interstellar war?”

  “That’s up to Washington. You say Coleman is about ready?”

  “Willie is picking up the last shipment of stuff Coleman needs.”

  “Get on that ship, Bradley! Prevent takeoff if you have to throw a monkey wrench into something.”

  “Suppose I can’t?”

  “We’ll do the worrying. Smith will take you back to the ’copter park; that’s to keep Gregor from snatching you and fouling things up. I’m putting out a pickup order for him and his crowd. He’s no good to us any more.” He showed a yellow-toothed grin and handed me a pistol, butt first.

  “Take care of yourself, Bradley!”

  I took the pistol, wondering what earthly use it could be to me. But I knew what it meant. Johnson had washed his hands of me; I was on my own. If I did what he wanted, so much the better. If not, he had other plans that didn’t include me.

  As for Cleo, she was my lookout, then. All right. I had betrayed Coleman for a purpose, and the purpose had backfired into my own lap. I had thought maybe Johnson would cooperate—I didn’t know just how. He might have walked in, slapped a restraining order, or something, on Coleman. That part of it didn’t matter. But he could have claimed me and Cleo as nationals. I didn’t want Cleo to leave Earth with Coleman.

  All I wanted for Coleman was to see him headed safely for Aldebaran, or Sirius, or wherever he came from. Coleman was great, but he wasn’t a man—not as I knew men. Whereas, Cleo was a woman, as I wanted with heart and soul to know women.

  CHAPTER 6

  I guess Gregor’s organization was almost as good as Johnson’s, because the B.I.S. man didn’t get to follow through on his pickup order.

  The strange ’copter intercepted us, Willie and me, about five miles from town and followed at a respectable distance. The two crewmen with us pointed it out.

  I said, “It seems to be following us.”

  Willie shrugged. “I reported it to Roy; he pays no attention.”

  I wondered if it could be Johnson, falling in with my plans. Willie was tight-lipped and silent all the way back. When we landed, I knew the truth.

  It wasn’t Johnson’s ’copter; it was Gregor’s. He came down with us and settled on the park. Then it was all up with Gregor. Four or five of Coleman’s boys charged up, opened the ’copter and yanked Gregor out.

  I walked over with Willie.

  “Well, well!” I said smugly. “Willie,
do you know this chap?”

  “Slightly,” Willie replied crisply. He tipped his head, and the group holding Gregor started off with him.

  “Wait!” shouted Gregor. His fat face was damp and shiny with sweat. He was heavy and hard to handle, and he flailed his arms free. “I got to see Coleman!”

  “You’ll see him,” Willie promised coldly.

  They dragged him away, protesting. I said, “He can cause trouble.”

  “Not any more; I was hoping it was Johnson.”

  I pretended ignorance. Willie favored me with a glance as cold as the one he had bent upon Gregor. He reached under the lapel of my jacket and plucked forth a tiny, button-shaped object on a pin. He showed it to me before putting it in his pocket.

  “An audio-pickup, Gil; I’ve got the receiver here.” He tapped the same pocket. “We know all about your conference with the American agent.”

  I couldn’t say anything. Like many a rat caught at conniving, I felt indescribably ashamed. I wondered what all I had said to Johnson, if Coleman could have read my motive from my words.

  We walked across the field. “Sometimes it helps,” Willie said, “to have a cultural lineage that reaches far back.”

  I dared to look at him.

  “You learn tolerance, forgiveness. Roy doesn’t blame you, Gil; neither do I. What you did was natural.”

  “Cleo…” I croaked.

  “I passed your conversation to Roy. I left out that part of it.”

  I had been demoted from my status as child to the man. I was the gibbering ape again.

  I learned later from Cleo that Gregor had come to offer money for the scientific information he wanted. He didn’t know about the ship. He though the surface installation was all there was, and Roy was some kind of an inventor. He wanted Roy’s inventions for his country.

  I mulled that over. Gregor was a patriot, too, in his way. Where do you draw the line between patriot and spy? At the national boundary, of course. Johnson was the patriot, I the spy.

  “He offered more than ever before,” she said. “Roy said no, of course.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Gregor?” She nodded toward our living quarters. “Roy had him locked up. We’ll keep him there until the ship is ready to leave to keep him from being a nuisance.”

  I told her Gregor had offered me money to work for him. I was checking to see if she had heard about me and Johnson. She hadn’t.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I told Roy we could trust you.”

  If I needed anything more to drive me down to the height of my shoetops, that did it.

  There was a great deal of scurry all afternoon, moving things from the surface, down the tunnel. Roy was breaking camp in earnest. I became more and more anxious as time went by.

  About nine in the evening, I was sitting with Cleo in the rec room. The air felt strained, tense. That was partly caused by the force shield. It wasn’t a thin film surrounding us. It was a solid field, around and through us. The nervous system responded to it.

  Willie prowled nervously. Often he cocked his head to one side, in a listening attitude, communicating with Coleman in the ship. Work was drawing to a speedy close. And other things were brewing…

  Willie flat-footed across to us. “Roy says for you two to go to the ship.”

  I gaped. “Me, too?” I was haunted by my betrayal. Did Willie know there was nothing I could do to sabotage the ship?

  He looked at me with indifference. “You don’t have to go, but Roy thinks Cleo will be safer.” He struck a thumb upward. “Bilfax is up there.”

  He turned and strode rapidly outside, an urgency in his demeanor. I took Cleo outside. A strong wind was blowing off the mountain, and it was cold. The dark firs sighed in the night. A big moon was up in the east, flooding the valley with molten silver. The air was filled with reflected snow-shine. I looked up and saw Bilfax’s strategy.

  He didn’t come souring in, slashing with the super-powered weapons of his battleship; he did as military strategists have done since time was. He sent in shock troops—the only power there is that can take a position impregnable to heavy weapons.

  The air was filled with dark dots, dropping from the stars. They had no parachutes, but I knew they had something else that was better. They came down swiftly, in controlled fall.

  Men rushed about the ’copter field. The shacks around the perimeter had fallen apart, and I saw now that they had contained weapons, of what type or power I could only guess.

  A humming rose over the wilderness, and some of the dark dots in the air blossomed into fiery flower with a dull booming sound that rolled back and forth between the peaks hemming the valley.

  Bilfax’s men came down in a steady rain, purposeful, relentless. Most of them landed, disappearing on the slope below the ’copter field. There must have been two hundred or more of them, and there were scarcely two dozen of our own to man the defenses.

  Bright lances of flame darted from the dropping dots and spent their energy on the outer skin of the force barrier. From the forested slope, too, bright flashes winked where the first corners were consolidating their gain.

  Bulky parcels dropped with the dots—heavy weapons—and soon flame gushed in streams from the woods. Lightnings played across the field, dazzling the eyes.

  I hustled Cleo up the path toward the “mine” entrance. We reached it, and I handed her onto the elevator stage.

  The shaft was a black hole in the black of night, under the waving, black silhouettes of the firs.

  We could still see the battle, and it seemed to me that the flashes from the lower slope were drawing closer to the defending group.

  All of a sudden, I knew that I had no right to go down to that ship buried in the rubble. Whatever I had committed against Coleman had been very small indeed; and whatever I could do for him was even smaller, but I must do it. I had tried to take Cleo away from him—God knows, I had. There was no use trying any more. Now was the time to acknowledge my failure, my mistakes. I capitulated to the man from outer space.

  I thrust Cleo from me. “Go to your husband!” I said curtly. “He’s waiting.”

  I strode back the way we had come. The air crackled, like the air in a forest fire. Intolerable heat washed up from the conflict, the residue of dissipated charges fired against the protecting field of force. The ’copter park was bright as day, laced and interlaced with a hissing craze of energy.

  The enemy was concentrating fire on a single point of the barrier, and the air glowed white hot there. The air reeked of ozone, stinging my nostrils and burning my lungs.

  I slipped down the steep slope, grasping shrubs, crouching low to avoid becoming a target. I reached the edge of the field and stumbled over a body.

  He lay dead on his face, both arms outflung; half his midsection was gone. The screen wasn’t entirely impervious, then. I turned the man over. It was Willie. A spasm of sorrow wrenched me.

  The glare crackled and blinded. The defenders milled in the midst of lashing energy streaks, steadily losing ground. The installation was on fire. Flames towered from the machine shop, whipped in the wind and engulfed the living quarters. Sick, I thought of Gregor imprisoned there, perishing, another ape paying the price for having jousted with men.

  The crackling hiss of a stray needle-bolt brought my senses back. A thought occurred to me. I bent low, groped at Willie’s ear. My fingers found the little button of the telepathor. I slipped it into my ear.

  “Hold out a little longer…” I recognized Coleman’s…personality. There was no voice. A strong thought engulfed me, and it had meaning. I was unskillfully a part of the telepathor hookup.

  I felt strange, big-headed, thinking with many minds at once. Alien thoughts crawled in my brain, sidled through my understanding. I couldn’t gr
asp them. I was still an ape, playing with a videophone, punching numbers at random.

  What seemed like a voice said, “Is that you, Gil? What happened to Willie?”

  I told him what had happened to Willie. I didn’t know how to direct the message to Coleman alone. Everybody on the ship and on the field got it. There was sadness in my being from Willie’s shipmates.

  Coleman said, “Where is Cleo?”

  “Coming down the tunnel. I sent her in.”

  I felt a wave of what I can only call friendliness sweep over me.

  “Get out, Gil! Climb up the mountain and wait for our takeoff. When the shield goes down, get over the ridge. You can’t help. Don’t try.”

  Then a medley of alien thoughts replaced the clear-cut communication and I knew Coleman had turned his attention to more immediate problems.

  The defenders were still pulling back on the field. They were fewer than they had been. Dark dots of the enemy moved at the far side.

  I cuddled my useless pistol in a sweating palm and retreated.

  “Gil!” Cleo ran toward me along the path. We collided. I gripped her, held her close. I was too winded to speak. Already, the defense had collapsed, and Coleman’s men were racing toward the tunnel.

  I gripped Cleo’s arm, forced her with me, straight up the slope, through ripping underbrush.

  “Gil!”

  “Keep moving!”

  “The ship, Gil! The ship…”

  Suddenly, the electric tension was gone from the air. I looked back. Helmeted enemy troops were streaming after the retreating defenders. Needle-bolts crackled both ways and men dropped.

  “Too late!” I wheezed.

  The ship was ready, warming its generators. I got that through the telepathor. The dark pool of the enemy swirled, seemed to suck upward in response to some unheard command. Black dots shot into the air and disappeared against the spangled sky that was like sapphires in a sea of milk. And the moon shone with a bright, unwavering radiance.