Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  His hand gripping Faye’s, Dunn followed Gillis into a dim-lit hall. Gillis pointed toward one end.

  “The laboratory’s down there.”

  Faye said suddenly, “The studio! The laboratory will be guarded, but there’s a door opening into it from the studio. I don’t think they’ll be watching that.”

  “Just the thing!” Gillis said. “Quick, now!”

  They raced down the hall, turned a corner. Gillis slowed, pointing out a closed door and motioning for quiet. He opened the door slowly, keeping well to one side. Then he nodded and beckoned.

  With Faye close on his heels, Dunn slipped after Gillis into a small room containing expensive radio equipment. There was a door in an adjacent wall. Gillis slipped over to it, placed his ear against the panel. Then very slowly he turned the knob. He shook his head.

  Somewhere below in the mansion a sudden flurry of gunshots sounded. A man screamed. Then more gunshots, making a sustained staccato thunder.

  Gillis waved an imperative hand at Dunn. Joining the other, Dunn quickly saw his intention. They poised themselves several feet away from the locked door. Then, moving as one, they threw themselves at the panel in a hard lunge.

  The door crashed open. Beyond was a huge room crowded with workbenches, cabinets and machinery. Four men were present, three of them standing on opposite sides of the main doorway.

  One of the men was Borzeny,

  The group seemed to have been expecting something to happen, to have been eagerly awaiting it. But action had come from a totally unlooked for quarter. The men whirled in confused surprise.

  “Get your hands up, all of you!” Gillis called sharply, across the room.

  “Never, you swine!” Borzeny spat. He swung up his gun.

  Gillis was already triggering his automatic, very deliberately. Dunn held Otto’s revolver at arm’s length, moving the barrel to cover the group as he emptied the cylinder in a crashing roll of shots.

  Mingled thunder filled the laboratory.

  Borzeny managed to get off one shot before he staggered and slid down the wall to the floor, two dark holes in his shirt over the chest. A bullet from one of his two henchmen grazed Dunn’s side. Then this man stiffened, lifted a hand toward his face, dropped. The remaining man was turning toward the door, firing, when two shots caught him together, knocked him sprawling.

  DUNN SWUNG to the remaining man, but he was unarmed, his hands in the air. He was elderly and bespectacled, with a fringe of white hair around an otherwise bald head. He stood with his back to a tall complex apparatus that overflowed the whole of one workbench.

  Dunn hurried across the room. “This thing controls the planetoid, the Celestial Hammer?” he demanded.

  “Ja, so,” the other answered, his lifted hands quivering.

  “You know how to operate it?”

  “Ja, I know.”

  “Get busy, then,” Dunn said. “Your job is to send the planetoid away from Earth—so far away that it will never come back. Then you’re going to give me a hand in smashing this outfit to pieces. It’s caused enough trouble.” The old man bent over the apparatus, flipping switches, turning dials. A low hum filled the room.

  Beyond the door shots suddenly rose and were partly drowned in the crash of gunfire. Dunn glanced in despair at Gillis.

  The other listened a moment longer, then strangely grinned. “It’s the cops,” he said. “They finally got up here. I guess I forgot to mention I called them.”

  They looked at each other, then suddenly grinned. They were shaking hands when Faye joined them.

  DUNN SWUNG the coupe into the service station and braked to a stop, wincing a little as a twinge of pain rose from under the bandage against his side. Nestled against him, her blonde head against his shoulder, Faye stirred sleepily.

  Jerry Camp approached in the clear morning sunlight. He glanced casually at Dunn, did a double-take, then grinned. “Have any luck?” he asked.

  “I certainly did,” Dunn said. “I promised I’d let you know.”

  Camp noticed Faye for the first time. His eyebrows lifted. “I see what you mean.” He leaned an elbow in the window opening. “You get in to see Stonecrest? Only I heard over the radio a while ago that Stonecrest was really some other guy. There seems to have been a whale of a big fight out at his place last night. A regular army of cops showed up, and there was a lot of shooting. The cops found out that some former Nazi was making like Stonecrest, a guy the government had been hunting for years. And what do you know, but that Celestial Hammer hunk of rock acted up, too. It’s swinging away from Earth, the radio says. Pretty soon it’ll be gone.” Camp suddenly stared at Dunn. “Say, did you happen to have anything to do with all this?”

  Dunn shrugged. With Gillis and Faye, he had spent long, exhausting hours in explaining the whole affair to police authorities. He didn’t feel like rehashing it, even if briefly. The newspapers would print the story soon enough.

  “I saw a little of it,” Dunn said. “Right now, though, I’m on my way to get a marriage license.”

  “You got a good start, this early in the day,” Camp said. He sent another glance at Faye. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t lose any time!”

  NO MEDAL FOR CAPTAIN MANNING

  First published in the March 1951 issue of Amazing Stories.

  When the last two men on earth face each other across a battlefield will they be willing to admit that war is for fools?

  ON THE MORNING that contact with N sector was broken, Captain Manning was resting in his lead-walled cubicle about a mile beneath what was once Butte, Montana. He didn’t know then that N was out of contact, of course. He knew that K and L were gone—they’d been out of touch two months now—but he didn’t know about N.

  Captain Manning had been ten years old when the war started. Now he was thirty-six, a lean, graying man with tired eyes and unhealthy looking skin. The vitamins and sun lamps never seemed to help him much. He hadn’t been above ground, except for a few short plane trips, in more than twenty years and he sometimes felt that one breath of real air and a touch of sunlight would do more for him than all the artificial stimulants in the world.

  That was silly, of course. It was demonstrable by scientific tables that human beings thrived in an underground existence. Yet Captain Manning still yearned occasionally for a look at the sky and the smell of leaves. A psychiatrist once had told him that his feeling was natural and normal, and to stop worrying about it. Living underground was an adjustment to the facts of the war, and while adjustments were necessary and practical, one didn’t have to like them in toto. That was the way the psychiatrist had put it. Captain Manning had liked the psychiatrist, a bluff, capable man with the odd name of Blackapple. Dr. Blackapple had left several years ago, now, but his replacement had never arrived.

  The psychiatric corps was understaffed and overworked, of course, since life underground had precipitated all sorts of emotional and psychic disorders; but Captain Manning had never forgiven N sector for not sending some one to take Blackapple’s place. Psychiatrists weren’t the best-natured people in the world, in fact they were notoriously crabby and irritable, but it was oddly sustaining to know that they were around.

  Captain Manning got up from his bunk and prepared to shave, reflecting that the loss of sectors K and L had been an unexpected boon to their unit. It eased the strain enormously, since there were just two of them now, the colonel and himself, to handle a communications point that had once been staffed with twenty-three men.

  They weren’t sure of course that K and L were gone in the final sense of the word. It could be simply a mechanical breakdown, although that was a slim probability. K—the British Isles and parts of Europe—had taken a terrific blast about a year ago and it was common gossip that they were in a bad way. L—parts of China, Indonesia, and a few stations in the Pacific—had always been in one mess after another, so their present difficulties were not remarkable.

  However, in spite of the easier work schedule, Captain Man
ning missed the chap from K, a Major Blinn. Blinn had a deep hard voice with undercurrents of humor running through it like a bright thread in tweed cloth. Blinn was younger than Captain Manning, twenty-eight, and of course knew nothing at all of life above the ground. He asked endless questions and Manning told him all he could remember—of the look of the Earth’s curve from a height, of ships and water, traffic, trees, birds, and the feel of wind. The thought of wind fascinated Blinn. Wind, cold, capricious wind blowing hard, then soft, disappearing to return in a sudden swift blast; the inconsistency of it delighted the Englishman.

  CAPTAIN MANNING finished shaving, dressed and had breakfast—two red pills and one blue with a glass of water—and then walked along the solid steel tunnel to the communications center.

  Colonel Hewitt, a short, stocky man with thin gray hair and irritable eyes, was staring at sector N’s message panel when Captain Manning entered. He nodded abruptly and pointed to the panel which was dark. “What do you make of that?” he asked in a far too casual voice.

  Captain Manning stared at the dark panel for a few seconds without comprehension. The implications were too enormous to grasp. Finally, he said, “When did it happen?”

  “About two hours ago.”

  “Is our equipment all right?”

  “Yes, yes, of course it’s all right,” the colonel answered, and glared at him. “N is out—gone. That’s all.” All I Sector N was merely Headquarters for the United States and South America. It also controlled Canada and Hawaii before those areas were eliminated. It was located near

  Guatemala. But N couldn’t be in trouble. It just couldn’t. Commands from Sector N had arranged Captain Manning’s life since he was a boy. The planning for all sectors was done at N, and Congress and Parliament had convened there until their decisions and arguments became so patently pointless that they adjourned for the duration.

  “They had trouble there a few months ago, remember?” Colonel Hewitt said, and glared at Manning again as if he were responsible for it.

  Captain Manning thought, K, L, and now N! That left only two sectors remaining—Y and M. Y was a chain of islands in the Pacific with a central base at Australia. He glanced at Y’s panel quickly, saw that it was dark.

  “Yes, it’s gone too,” the colonel said, intercepting his look. “It’s faded with N. That leaves M.”

  M sector. There were no personnel there. M was a gigantic man-made island in the Atlantic, operated by remote control. It was totally self-sufficient. It made fuel, bombs, missiles; and its launching sites operated around the clock, needing only the firing data from sector N for directional purposes.

  Captain Manning remembered that when M had been put into operation everyone thought there might be a chance for an armistice, peace. But the enemy developed M sectors, too, and the stalemate continued.

  Now only M was left. Pure function, independent of cause and effect, had outlasted everything else.

  “Have you checked N with the detector?” Manning asked suddenly.

  “No, no, I forgot,” the colonel said, relief in his voice.

  They went into an adjoining room and Manning snapped on an overhead light. On one wall was a circular screen and attached to its face was an indicator needle, resting now in the vertical position.

  Colonel Hewitt snapped a switch on an instrument panel at the base of the screen, and watched hopefully as the indicator needle moved toward the quadrant in which sector N lay.

  Based on the principle of radar, the detector reacted to the electrical impulses of the human mind, and was employed in artillery and bombing computations to determine maximum enemy density at given points. Manning realized that they hadn’t used it since their unit had been used as a training section. That was several years back.

  He glanced over the colonel’s shoulder and saw that the response from N was feeble and erratic.

  “Damn it!” the colonel cried, swinging on him angrily. “This can’t be right, Manning.”

  “Try the enemy sectors,” Manning suggested.

  The indicator needle described a one hundred and eighty degree arc to reach the region of the enemy. There the response was lively and firm.

  The colonel rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “It—it just doesn’t seem possible,” he muttered.

  There was little point in arguing with the evidence, Manning felt. It was quite plain that sector N was done for. And it was equally plain that the enemy was in excellent shape.

  THEY RETURNED to the communications center where the colonel stood frowning at N’s dark panel. “What do you think happened?” he said, in a strangely weak voice.

  “We had trouble a few months ago,” Manning said. “It must have been worse than we thought.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” the colonel said, shaking his head.

  Captain Manning shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing we can do now. Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll call you if anything happens.”

  When the colonel had gone, Manning checked the equipment, noted that the regular signal was being beamed to all sectors, and then sat down and wondered how to pass the time.

  Once they had been busy here, transmitting weather data, scrambling and unscrambling, data between various sectors, but their operations had become more limited each year and now their only job was to wait for orders which never came.

  Manning wondered if the war was coming to an end. Maybe it was over, the enemy victorious. That seemed a likely conclusion with K, L, Y and N gone. His interest was casual since the war had not concerned him very much for the past fifteen or twenty years. That was true with most people, of course. The war was like the wind or rain, a thing that existed arbitrarily, beyond the will or control of those exposed to it.

  Dr. Blackapple had once told him that the indifference of the people to the war was the most grave phenomenon he had observed.

  “The unique attribute of men is that they care about things,” Dr. Blackapple had said, but that made no sense to Captain Manning.

  Now he thought about the enemy, believing suddenly that the war was over. He knew who the enemy was, by name at least, but the enemy had changed a dozen times since the start of the war, and he had long since stopped following their torturous alignments, realignments, divisions and subdivisions.

  Captain Manning’s father had talked a lot about the enemy before the war, predicting trouble of a horrendous nature, and yet, when the trouble did come, it came from an unlikely and unexpected source. His father had come home one night with a paper that announced in black, screaming headlines that an atomic bomb had been used in an otherwise insignificant border squabble in South America.

  That had set off an emotional chain reaction in America. People with money had shelters built in their back yards or in inaccessible areas which were thought at that time to be more safe than densely populated regions.

  Real estate combines constructed hotels hundreds of feet under the ground, complete with night clubs, swimming pools and tennis courts, and to these subterranean palaces the rich came in hysterically gay droves. However, human safety became an explosive issue overnight and the underground retreats of the rich were bitterly criticized. Certain groups defended them, asserting that privately owned atom shelters were a symbol of free American enterprise, while the opposition maintained that the welfare of all the people came first, even though that meant abrogating traditional constitutional rights.

  It was an academic point after the first bomb hit America. Then it became obvious that the job of getting a nation underground couldn’t be done without subordinating every ounce of industrial and human power to a master blueprint enforced by the government. Rich and poor wanted something over their heads, and they didn’t care who did the job, as long as it was done fast.

  CAPTAIN MANNING got up from his chair, looked over the equipment again, initialed the report chart and then sat down and stared at sector N’s dark panel.

  He thought: now there’s no one left but the enemy. And the colonel, of cour
se. Involuntarily, he glanced to the short wave sets. He could get in touch with the enemy quite easily. But what would be the point? Captain Manning didn’t care about the enemy. He didn’t care about anything.

  After all, how was it possible to care about a war whose very nature was inconclusive, pointless? At the outbreak, he recalled, there had been slogans and speeches and martial music, and everybody was tremendously excited and interested. News, news, news! That was all one could get on television or radio.

  When cities were smashed to powder the news was screamed and flashed into every home. Casualties were estimated, damages evaluated and the significance of the destruction was analyzed by experts. Captain Manning remembered the tension he felt when London was eliminated, and then the shocking news about New York. But as the years passed and events repeated themselves, the news fell into a gray, predictable pattern. Things happened, and caused other things to happen, and so op. People lost interest as New York was followed by Lima, Stalingrad, Quebec, Chicago, Brussels, Hawaii, Detroit, Butte, Shanghai, Melbourne, San Francisco—the litany was endless. The war lost its element of tension and surprise. As the years dragged on it became a flat, stale affair, and people tried to live around it anyway they could.

  Colonel Hewitt appeared in the doorway, his white hair rumpled and his tunic collar open. He glanced at the dark panels and said unnecessarily, “No change, eh?”

  Manning shook his head. He and the colonel had never gotten on well, and he decided now it was because the old man was a fool. He had never adjusted to the war, but still rambled on about what things had been like before it started. About his wife, and the job he had had with an insurance company, and his teen-aged boy and married daughter. The colonel was frequently irritable, inconsistent, querulous and tumultuous. He had to be concerned and involved with life. Manning perceived with some charity that the old man was conditioned by events before the war in a society that had not quite surrendered to mindless routine.

  Now the colonel glared at him and said, “What the devil does this mean, Manning? Are the people on all our sectors dead? If they’re not dead, why don’t they answer our signals? Are the signals strong enough?”