Jim grinned starkly. ‘You’re a hard man. You might be too ruthless as Attorney General; I’ll have to rethink that, possibly.’
‘It’s signed and sealed,’ Cravelli said. ‘You can’t get out of it. Good luck up on the satellite.’ He rang off, then.
Leaving the phone booth, Jim Briskin walked along the half-deserted sidewalk until he came to a parked, empty jet-hopper.
‘Take me to the Golden Door satellite,’ he said, opening the door and getting in.
‘The Golden Door is closed down,’ the ‘hopper driver said languidly. ‘No more girls up there. Just some goof broadcasting that he’s king of the world or some crazy thing like that.’ He turned to face Jim. ‘However, I know a gnuvvy doggone place in the north west side of town that I can …’
‘The satellite,’ Jim said. ‘Okay? Just drive the ‘hopper and let me decide where I want to go.’
‘You Cols,’ the driver muttered as he started the ‘hopper up. ‘You sure always got a chip on your shoulder. All right, buddy, have it your way. But you’re going to be disappointed when you get up there.’
Silently, Jim leaned back against the seat and sat waiting as the ‘hopper rose into the sky.
At the landing field on the satellite, George Walt personally met him, hand outstretched. ‘This is George,’ the head said, as Jim shook hands with whichever of them it was. ‘I knew they’d want to talk terms, but I didn’t expect them to send you, Briskin.’
‘This is Walt,’ the head said then, belligerently. ‘I certainly have no desire to do business with you, Briskin. Go back and tell them …’ The mouth struggled as both brothers sought to make use of it simultaneously.
‘What does it matter who they send?’ the head - no doubt George, now - said at last. ‘Come below to the office, Briskin, where we can make ourselves comfortable. I have a hunch this darn business might take quite a while.’
It was extraordinary how much George Walt had aged. They had a wrinkled, brittle, almost frail quality about them, and when they walked they moved slowly, hesitantly, as if afraid of falling, as if they were terribly infirm. What would account for this? Jim wondered. And then he understood. George Walt were now jerries. One hundred years had passed for them since he had last seen them. He wondered how much longer they could keep going. Certainly not for too great a period. But their mental energies were undimmed. He could still sense the enormous alertness emanating from them; they remained as formidable as ever.
In George Walt’s office sat the huge, white-haired old Sinanthropus; he watched warily from beneath his beetling brows as Jim Briskin entered, obviously suspicious at once. It would be no easy task, Jim realized, to come to terms with this man. Mistrust was profoundly written on his massive-jawed, sloping face.
‘We’ve got them where we want them,’ George Walt said expansively to the Sinanthropus. ‘This man’s coming up here - Jim Briskin is his name - verifies it.’ Both eyes flamed with gloating.
In a hoarse voice, the Sinanthropus said, ‘What will you offer us if we abandon your world?’
Jim Briskin said, ‘That which we prize beyond everything else. Our most valued possession.’
The Sinanthropus and George Walt watched him fixedly.
‘The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,’ Jim said.
‘Wait a minute’ / ‘We’re not interested in that!’ George Walt said together. ‘That won’t do; that’s out of the question. We want political and economic priority over the North American land mass - otherwise the invasion continues. What kind of offer is the Smithsonian? That’s nothing but a museum.’ / ‘Who wants a museum? This is ridiculous!’ Both eyes blazed with outraged and uneasy anger.
The Sinanthropus, however, said slowly and distinctly, ‘I am reading Mr Briskin’s mind, and I am interested. Please be silent. Wind God, it goes without saying that your opinion is valuable, but it is I who must make the actual decision.’
‘The conference is over!’ / ‘I’ve heard enough,’ George Walt said. ‘Go back below to Terra, Briskin; you’re not wanted here.’ / ‘Let’s call this off.’
‘There is, in the back of your mind,’ the Sinanthropus said to Jim, ‘the thought that you will, if pressed, add in the Library of Congress. I will consider that offer as well.’
‘We’d prefer not to add that,’ Jim said, ‘but if we have to, we have to.’ He felt resigned.
‘Goodbye, Briskin,’ George Walt said. ‘See you some time. It’s evident that you’re trying to make a side deal, here, trying to cut my brother and me out. But we won’t be cut out’ The head added emphatically, ‘I agree. You’re completely wasting your time, Briskin.’ One of George Walt’s four arms was extended, then, ‘Until next time.’
‘Until next time,’ Jim said, shaking hands. Taking a deep, unsteady breath he all at once yanked with every dyne of strength which he could muster; the hand and arm came loose from the artificial body and he was left holding them.
Bewildered, the Sinanthropus said, ‘Wind God, it seems strange to me that your arm is detachable.’
‘This is no Wind God,’ Jim Briskin said. ‘You’ve been misled. Our people were, too, for a good long time. This is an ordinary man with an extra, artificial body.’ He pointed to the wiring visible within the gaping shoulder.
‘A Homo sapiens, you mean?’ the stooped old Sinanthropus said. ‘Like yourself?’ Slow but exact comprehension began to form in his reddish eyes.
‘Not only is he not a Wind God,’ Jim said, ‘but he’s been for decades the owner of a … I dislike naming it outright.’
‘Name it!’
‘Let’s simply call it a house of pleasure. He’s a businessman. No more, no less.’
‘I can think of nothing more obnoxious to the mores of my people,’ the Sinanthropus said to George Walt, ‘than a hoax of this stripe. You swore to us that you were our Wind God. And in fulfillment of many myths, your unusual anatomy seemed to prove it.’ He panted slowly, raggedly.
‘ “Unusual”,’ George Walt echoed. ‘You mean unique. In all of the parallel Earths - and God knows exactly how many there may be - you won’t find anyone, anyone at all, like me.’ He amended quickly, ‘Like us, rather. And consider this satellite. What do you think keeps it up? The wind, of course; how else could it stay up here, month after month? Obviously I control the wind, as I told you. Otherwise this satellite would…’
‘I could destroy you,’ the old Sinanthropus said. He no longer seemed much impressed by George Walt’s line of argument. ‘But I am frankly too disappointed to care one way or another. It’s clear to me, and I will soon see that it’s equally clear to my people, that you Homo sapiens are a treacherous lot. Probably best avoided.’ To Jim he said, ‘Is that so?’
‘We’re known for that,’ Jim agreed.
‘And that’s how you triumphed originally over our ancestors on this parallel world?’
‘You’re damn right,’ Jim said. He added, ‘And we’d do it again, given half a chance.’
‘Probably you would not genuinely have delivered that museum of yours to us,’ the Sinanthropus said, ‘the name of which I have already forgotten. Well, no matter. Obviously it’s impossible to do business with you Homo sapiens; you’re adept, polished liars. Nothing we agreed on would remain truly binding in such a milieu. My people lack even a name for such conduct.’
‘No wonder we had so little trouble wiping you out,’ Jim said.
‘In view of your dedication to fraud,’ the Sinanthropus said, ‘I see no real point in my remaining here; the longer I go on, the more immersed I become. Personally, I regret this whole encounter; my people have suffered by it already. God knows what would become of us if we were so naive as to try to continue.’ An unhappy expression on his face, the aged, white-haired Sinanthropus turned his back and walked away from Jim Briskin and George Walt. ‘It would be unnatural for people of our race to seek to participate in an exclusively destructive relationship,’ he said, over his shoulder. And vanished. One moment he stoo
d there, the next he had gone. Even George Walt seemed taken aback; both eyes blinked. The Sinanthropus, by means of his so called magic, had returned to his own world.
‘Smart,’ George Walt said, presently. ‘You handled that extremely well, Briskin. I never saw it coming. One hundred years of work gone down the drain. Give me my arm back and we’ll call it quits; I’m too old to go through this kind of thing any more.’ The head added, ‘You’re probably right. After all, politically speaking, Briskin is a professional; he can run rings around us. What happened here just now demonstrates that.’
‘Honesty generally wins out,’ Jim said.
‘You call that trash you peddled to that half-animal just now - you call that honesty? I never heard such a mass of twisted …’ George Walt broke off, then. ‘Like everybody else. I more or less trusted you, Briskin. It never occurred to me you’d trade on such techniques to win an issue. Your integrity’s just a myth! Probably dreamed up by your campaign manager.’
‘You mean you actually are their Wind God?’
‘Pragmatically speaking, yes. Every one of us, in relation to them, are gods … speaking in terms of the evolutionary hierarchy, anyhow, in the broadest possible sense.’
Jim said, ‘Was it you who enabled them to shoot apart the QB observation satellite?’
Nodding, George Walt said, ‘Yes, it was. By my magic.’
‘What you mean,’ Jim said, ‘is that you ferried a ground-to-air guided missile over to them. Magic, my foot.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘I have to get back down to Earth; I’ve got a major speech to record. You care to accompany me back to my ‘hopper?’
‘I’m busy,’ George Walt said curtly. ‘I have to fit my arm back on. This whole business makes me sick, and not only that, terribly angry; I’m going to initiate beamed broadcasts twenty-four hours a day on all frequencies denouncing you, as soon as I can get the satellite’s transmitter started up again. I look forward to your losing in November, Briskin; that’s the one nice thing I can count on.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Jim said, shrugging. He left the office, made his way to the elevator. Behind him, George Walt brought a tool kit out from their desk and began the task of repairing the damage to the artificial body which Jim Briskin had purposefully accomplished. The expression on George Walt’s face was one of great gloom.
In his entrenched position, along with other company personnel, on the outskirts of the flank of the TD administration building in Washington, D.C., Don Stanley noted all at once, and to his complete surprise, a sudden lull in the fierce racket from the Pekes within.
‘Some darn thing has happened,’ Howard conjectured, also aware of the unexpected silence. ‘We better get set for another rush; they’re probably determined to overwhelm us this time. Before that idiot Schwarz can get army…’
‘Wait,’ Stanley said, listening. ‘You know what I think? I think the fliegemer Pekes are gone.’
Puzzled, Howard said, ‘Gone where?’
Rising to his haunches Stanley peered at the administration building, at the shattered windows on the nearest side, and the conviction came to him stronger than ever that the building was now, for some totally obscure and merciful reason, deserted. With caution, aware of the acute risk he was taking, he began to walk slowly step by step toward the front entrance.
‘They’ll pop you out of existence,’ Howard called to him warningly, ‘with those funny little weapons of theirs; better get back down, you half-wit.’ But he, too, stood up. So did a number of armed company police.
Opening the familiar front door of the building, Stanley peeped inside.
He saw no sign of Pekes anywhere. The halls were empty and silent. The invasion by the chinless dawn men from the parallel Earth had ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and somewhat more mysteriously.
Howard, joining him, said, ‘Um, we scared them off.’
‘Scared them off nothing. They changed their collective minds.’ Stanley started in the direction of the elevator leading to the floor one subsurface labs. ‘I have an intuition,’ he said over his shoulder to Howard. ‘And I want to verify it as soon as I can.’
When he and Howard reached the labs, Stanley discovered that he was right … and a good thing, too. The nexus joining the two parallel Earths had vanished.
‘They … closed it down,’ Howard said, wonderingly craning his neck, as if expecting to see it crop up once more in a remote comer.
‘So now,’ Stanley murmured, ‘our problem is to reopen our own earlier nexus. The original one. And make the try to relocate our colonists before the moment in which they’re wiped out.’ The chances of success struck him as being not very good, and yet of course the attempt had to be made.
‘Why do you think they called their invasion off?’ Howard asked.
Stanley gestured emptily. ‘Maybe they didn’t like it here after all.’ Who knew? Certainly he did not. Perhaps they would never know. In any case they had their work cut out for them; several thousand men and women on the other side were wholly dependent on them for their lives. For their safe return to this world. Remembering the human skeletons which had been dredged up from the swamp a hundred years hence. Stanley felt deep forebodings. At best we can only save some of them, he realized. But that’s better than nothing. Even if we save only one life, it’s worth it.
‘How long do you think it’ll take to make contact with our people stranded over there?’ Howard asked him. ‘A day? As long as a week?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Stanley said shortly, and started at once in the direction of the power supply of Dar Pethel’s defective Jiffi-scuttler.
The depressing task of bringing the colonists back from alter-Earth had begun.
FOURTEEN
In November, despite the abusive broadcasts from the Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite, or because of them, Jim Briskin succeeded in nosing out the incumbent Bill Schwarz and thereby won the presidential election.
So now, at long last, Salisbury Heim said to himself, we have a Negro President of the United States. A new epoch in human understanding has arrived.
At least, let’s hope so.
‘What we need,’ Patricia said meditatively, ‘is a party, so we can celebrate.’
‘I’m too tired to celebrate,’ Sal said. It had been a tough haul from the nominating convention to this; he remembered clearly every inch of it. The worst part, it went without saying, had been the collapse of the abortive emigration program announced in Jim’s Chicago speech; why that had not put a permanent end to Jim’s election chances, Sal Heim did not know even at this late date. Perhaps it was because Bill Schwarz had managed to move so adroitly, had embroiled himself - deliberately - in the situation; hence much, if not most, of the ultimate blame had fallen on him, not on Jim.
‘But we deserve to take a little time off to relax,’ Pat pointed out. ‘We’ve been working for months; if we go on this way …’
‘One beer at one small bar,’ Sal decided. ‘And then bed. I’ll compromise at that.’ He did not especially enjoy going out in public, these days; inevitably he rubbed up against some individual who had been a part of the colonizing effort on alter-Earth or who, anyhow, had a brother-in-law who had gone trustingly over there. Such encounters had been rather unpleasant; he always found himself trying to answer questions which simply could not be answered. Why’d you get us into that? had been the primary inquiry, asked in a variety of ways, but still always amounting to the same thing. And yet, despite this, they had won.
‘I think we should get together with a few people,’ Pat disagreed. ‘Certainly with Jim; that goes without saying. And then Leon Turpin, if he’ll join us, because after all it was Mr Turpin who got us off the hook by bringing those people back to our world - or anyhow his engineers did. Someone at TD did. It was TD that saved us, Sal; let’s finally face it and give credit where credit is due.’
‘All right,’ Sal said. ‘Just so long as that little Kansas City businessman who showed up with that defective ‘scut
tler isn’t along; that’s all I insist on.’ The man on account of whom all the trouble had broken out in the first place. At the moment, Sal could not even recall his name, an obvious Freudian block.
‘The one I blame,’ Pat said, ‘is Lurton Sands.’
‘Then don’t invite him either,’ Sal said. But there was hardly much chance of that; Sands was in prison, right now, for his crime against the sleeping bibs and his ridiculous attempt on Jim’s life. As was Cally Vale for having lasered the ‘scuttler repairman. That whole business had been excessively melancholy, both intrinsically and as a conspicuous harbinger of the difficulties which it had ushered into their collective lives, difficulties which by no means were over.
‘You know,’ Pat said fretfully, ‘there’s one thing that still, right now, I can’t quite get out of my mind. I keep having this sneaking, nervous anxiety that….’ She smiled at him uneasily, her jessamine lips twitching. ‘I hope I don’t pass it on to you, but…’
‘But deep down inside,’ Sal finished for her, ‘you’re afraid a few of those Pekes have stayed on this side.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded.
Sal said, ‘I get the same damn intimation, now and then. Late at night, I keep looking out of the comer of my eye, especially on the street when I see someone furtive looking hurrying away around a comer to get out of sight. And the funny thing is that from what Jim tells me, I know he feels exactly the same way. Maybe we all have a residual sense of guilt connected with the Pekes … after all, we did invade their world first. It’s our consciences bothering us.’
Shivering, as she was wearing only a weightless Tafek-web negligee, his wife said, ‘I hope that’s all it is. Because I’d really hate to run into a Peke some dark night; I’d think right away that they’d opened a nexus again into our world at some point and were very carefully, secretly, ferrying a wide stream of their cousins and aunts across.’
As if we’re not desperately overcrowded as it is, Sal thought, without having to cope with that any more.
The Crack in Space (1966) Page 18
