The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  “Bankruptcy, Chan!” I had gone to the silver tower of SPC, in Manhattan, to try to persuade my father to come home for the week end and rest He was leaning heavily on the big polished desk, staring down at a dusty blue bottle labeled “Hammond’s Lunar Oil.”

  His eyes looked up at me, hollow, dead. “I’ve kept this, Chan,” he said. “To remind myself that it all began with a little colored water. But I guess I forgot. All this doesn’t seem real. Not possible!” He ran a tired hand back through his thick white hair. “But I began by shining boots, Chan. And it looks as if you will, too.”

  It was then, when his troubles seemed to have reached the last extremity, that the thing came, the stunning revelation, that reduced them all, by comparison, to nothing.

  A strange space vessel was seen above New York. It landed on the great Long Island field of SPC. It was a long, sinister bolt of crimson. Its hull bore scars of battle, and it was black-lettered with the name Redlance.

  The port authorities were in a flurry of fear, but they soon discovered that the pirate designed no harm. A haggard, white-haired man stumbled out of the valve, and wildly demanded to be taken at once to my father.

  I was in the office when they met. My father was wearing a white laboratory apron, and his fingers were stained with chemicals. He smiled—and suddenly recklessly invincible as in the old days—and then seized Trent’s hand with evident warm emotion.

  “Well, Ared! So you are Redlance. After all, who else could have done it?” He stepped closer, earnestly. “Can we be friends again? I’ve made mistakes, Trent, and I’m sorry for them. The SPC is beaten. But now I’ve come on something new. If you will help me, together we—”

  The lean man had been staring at him with feverish, bloodshot eyes. And Trent’s voice rasped suddenly out, hoarse and desperate: “No, Hammond! There’s nothing left.” He licked his cracked lips. “Forget your schemes, man. We’re finished. Done!”

  My father quickly caught his arm. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been a damned fool, Hammond. Yes, I was the pirate. I hated you, Hammond. Because you wanted too much power. And . . . Nada—But forget all that. I built the ship—in Africa. I gathered a crew of human scum and Martian fanatics. Joined old Anak’s plotters. God help me, Hammond! “We took your two relief ships. And then, using the first Solarion to trick Cornwall, we took the Station. And then Anak, with his Martian devils, and his lovely, lying snake of a daughter, took it from me. I’d no idea what an awful thing they planned—believe me, Hammond!”

  My father caught his breath, stiffened, waited.

  “You can’t understand how desperate they are, how bitter,” came Trent’s hoarse voice. “The religious outrage, you know. And then the Falling Sickness . . . it would have wiped them out in fifty years, anyhow.”

  My father gulped.

  “My God, Trent!” His voice trembled. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “They’re going to load the Station with sunstone.” Trent’s red, hollow eyes stared unseeingly. “Four thousand tons of pure energy. Then sink it into the photosphere as far as the screens will hold.” His dead flat voice had no emphasis, as if his feeling were already killed. “And then blow it up.”

  Soundlessly, my father’s lips whispered, “What then?”

  “A new focus of disintegration, like that at the center of the Sun. A wave of matter-annihilating concussion. It will blow out, of course. Rip a hole in the photosphere. Expansion will kill it. Not that that matters.”

  My father was staring stupidly.

  “A minor nova outburst,” Trent amplified. “A quite insignificant flash among the stars. The safety mechanism of the Sun will adjust itself. Its radiation, within a week, will be back to normal.

  “But that shell of flaming gas will sweep all the planets, out to Jupiter.”

  “Old Anak!” whispered my father. “What was it he said? ‘Judgment of the Sun!’ ”

  And he burst suddenly into a roar of senseless laughter.

  V

  Any other man would have been unnerved by Trent’s revelation. Even the vague rumors that escaped a hurriedly applied censorship were enough to throw the world into panic. But Garth Hammond, when he had time to recover from the impact, displayed a curious equanimity.

  Would it be possible to reach the Sun before the explosion?

  “Possible, yes,” said Trent. “Possibly the Redlance could do it, though she’s crippled. I don’t know. But why?”

  Could any attack hope for success?

  Trent shook his haggard head.

  “I know the reputation of your Sun Patrol, Hammond,” he said. “I know your men would give their lives. And, given time, we could rig part of your fleet with shields for flight into the Sun. But it’s no use.”

  He shrugged hopelessly.

  “Don’t think of force. The Station is invincible. There’s no weapon that could even match the beating it is always getting from the Sun. We tricked Cornwall. We’d never have gotten aboard if he hadn’t thought there were friends on the Solarion.

  “But Anak has no friends.”

  Well, if they couldn’t get aboard, could they get even into telephone contact with the Station?

  “Just possible,” Trent admitted. “But that means a very close approach, even with a tight cosmo-beam. But what arguments would you use on Anak? What could you promise him, when his very race is doomed? No, Hammond, it’s no use,” Trent insisted bitterly. “Unless we send a ship or two out beyond Jupiter. So, a few might survive—”

  “No, Trent,” my father said abruptly. “We’re going to the Sun.”

  I would gladly have given my right hand to go with the Redlance, for it seemed that the expedition would probably be the last and most dramatic event in human history. But my father gruffly told me to go back to mother and wait with her.

  Hurt—it is queer how one could nurse an injured private vanity while such great things were at stake—I returned to the marble villa on the Aegean. The wild rumors of doom had reached my mother. She was pathetically glad to see me. She asked many questions about my father, whom she had not seen since I was a tiny child. I knew that she loved him still.

  For weary weeks, we waited. A trip by sail, down among the Cyclades, failed to ease the suspense. My mother fell ill with the strain—and I feared, for a dreadful hour, that she was a victim of the Falling Sickness then raging through the islands.

  No word came back from the Redlance. But fevered imagination pictured the details of the desperate voyage. The battered red hull shielded in the silver fog of deflection fields. The plunge into the Sun’s fiery ocean. The frightful dive in quest of the Station, menaced with an intensity of heat beyond conception, battered with incredible storms, crushed with the pressure of a gravitation twenty-eight times that of Earth.

  It was a period of sunspot maxima. Magnetic storms disturbed communication. One night was splendid with the cold flames of the aurora. I remember looking at the Sun through a dark glass, its round face pocked with a dozen angry vortices, each large enough to swallow an Earth. Dazzled, I went back to my mother, shuddering. If the power of the Sun could do all these things across 93,000,000 miles, what could it not do to men in its very flaming grasp?

  To quiet the rumors, desperate officials had finally announced the truth. Depression and despair ruled the Earth. As if it fed on fear, a fresh epidemic spread, until it seemed that the Falling Sickness raced with astronomical cataclysm to wipe out mankind.

  Then, to a stunned and incredulous planet, came the brief helio-graphic dispatch picked up and relayed from the colony on the Moon:

  TO EARTH:

  DANGER ENDED. ANAK SURRENDERED STATION INTACT. SPC RECOGNIZES INDEPENDENCE OF MARS. ANAK WILL BE RESTORED. STATION BACK IN OPERATION. REDLANCE BRINGING SUNSTONE TO EARTH.

  GARTH HAMMOND

  That was too good to believe. Many of us refused to believe it—until the Redlance landed on Long Island, thirty hours later. Trent left my father and two thousand tons of su
nstone, and went on to carry Anak back to Mars.

  But why had Anak, so grimly bent upon revenge—why had he surrendered?

  My father himself brought the answer to that. His private stratoplane landed unwarned in the lee of our island, and taxied shoreward. Garth Hammond leaped out and waded up the beach. The ruggedly handsome face beneath his thick white hair was smiling gayly as ever, but his gray eyes held a wistful tenderness that I had never seen.

  I ran to meet him, shouting incoherent questions.

  “Run this.” He thrust a visivox spool into my hand. “Where’s your mother, Chan?”

  I pointed, wondering briefly at the husky catch in his voice, and then ran to put the spool on a machine. The bright screen showed the Redlance landing, and then my father speaking to the tremendous crowd on the field in his old grand manner.

  “You wonder, perhaps, why Anak gave up his frightful plan and surrendered?”

  He paused for silence and effect.

  “It is because I traded him something. For the Station, I traded him life. And the life of his race. The life of Mars I And I bring the same boon, a free gift to you and to all the Earth.”

  Another dramatic halt.

  “I have conquered the Falling Sickness.” There was a sound like a sob from all that multitude. A burst of clapping, quickly hushed. A breathless quiet. “It was the cure for that disease that I gave Anak and his men. And that I give the Earth.”

  There was an utter, queerly painful stillness. A great choking lump rose in my own throat. My father, on that tiny screen, made an oddly diffident little smile.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Free clinics will be opened at once by the Hammond Foundation. A harmless chemical renders the body proteins insensitive to the virus. Immunization is complete. There will be no more Falling Sickness!”

  I found my father and my mother sitting side by side in her quiet, fragrant room. Her face was stained with tears, and her smile was very happy. My father had been telling her what I had learned from the spool. His great laugh boomed out softly.

  “Funny thing!” he told her. “That chemical was formed in an old bottle of the Lunar OiL The cheap, impure stuff we used at the last. I happened to hold it against the light, and saw the change in color. When I analyzed it—”

  I turned back, silently, and left them alone.

  Breakdown

  • • •

  Officially, Boss Kellon was merely executive secretary of the Union of Spacemen, Managers & Engineers. But boss, now in 2145, was equivalent to caesar. From the unitron converters on Mercury to the lonely mining outposts scattered across the Jovian moons, the Union dominated mankind.

  And Harvey Kellon was the Union.

  He was a big man. His shrewd, deep-set, deliberate eyes could be chill as blue Callistonian fire diamonds, but a bland professional smile warmed his cragged red face. He wore a flowing white toupee, and few of Sunport’s millions suspected that the boss was bald as the first caesar of old Rome.

  Sunport was his capital. For a hundred years the monopoly of interplanetary commerce had fed its power, until even New York was now only a quaint provincial suburb. The towers of the megalopolis stood like a forest of bright monoliths for a hundred miles about the high Colorado mesa that had become the port of space. Forever the tiny moonlet of the Outstation rode at the city’s meridian, a man-made star of its fortune.

  Boss Kellon lived in the crown of the lofty Union Tower. The huge, luxurious halls of his penthouse suite were named for the worlds of the Sun. Tonight there was a ball in the Neptune Room, and he was dancing with Selene du Mars.

  The boss was short of breath, and dark perspiration spotted the shoulders of his purple dress pajamas. His feet ached. Perhaps, at sixty, he was too old to be dancing; certainly he had too much weight about the middle. But Selene du Mars could make men seek to banish such uncomfortable thoughts.

  She was tall and supple and green-eyed. She had been a famous teleview dancer. He thought she was the most costly and glittering thing in all Sunport. Tonight her hair was platinum, and she was dazzling with fire diamonds. He thought those favorite stones were like herself—cold and bright and hard. But he could admire even her calculating ambition, because it was so akin to his own.

  Selene claimed a hereditary degree in militechnic engineering. Once Kellon had ordered a quiet investigation, and the Goon Department reported evidence of forgery. Her father had been merely the servant of a militechnic officer, on Jupiter Station. But Kellon suppressed the report, with not a word to Selene. He knew how hard was the climb up from the gray.

  Now, and not for the first time, she was wheedling him to crown himself. Her voice was cool and perfect as her long body, and she used the flattering address that she herself had first suggested:

  “Your genius, can we have the coronation soon? Everything is planned. Your historian friend Melkart has dug out the old ceremonials for me. My jewelers are working on a fire-diamond crown.”

  “For me to pay for,” Kellon chuckled, and drew her pantherine body close against him. “Darling, I know you want to be Empress of the Sun, but your pretty head is in danger enough, without a coronet.”

  Kellon frowned, sobered by the thought. He had climbed to the perilous apex of a human pyramid. He was first of the million hereditary engineers, who, with their families and the various grades of their retainers, occupied nearly all the upper-level towers of Sunport.

  But, here in Sunport alone, nearly eighty million more wore the gray of labor. They dwelt and toiled in the subsurface levels, and the Goon Department bound their lives with iron restrictions. Kellon knew how they lived—because he had been one of them.

  Most of them hated the technician nobility of the Union. That was the dangerous flaw in the pyramid. Kellon had once tried to mend it, with reforms and concessions. But Melkart warned that he was three generations too late. Yielding to that hatred, he was merely paying out the rope to hang himself.

  “We’re dancing on a volcano, darling,” he told Selene. “Better not poke the fire!”

  Selene’s bare shoulders tossed, and her eyes flashed dark as her emerald-sequined gown* But she curbed her displeasure. She knew that a hundred other women in the long, green-lit hall would have murdered gladly for her place in Kellon’s arms. Her frown turned to a pretty pout.

  “Please, your genius.” Her perfect face winced slightly. Kellon knew that he had stepped on her silver slipper. But she smiled again, shrugging off his apology. “It wasn’t caution that conquered the planets for you,” she chided. “Your genius isn’t getting old?”

  That was his vulnerable point, and Selene knew it. Perhaps he was. The details of administration were increasingly burdensome. It was hard to find trustworthy subordinates. Sometimes he felt that the Union itself was slipping into decadence, as he grew older.

  “The coronation—” her coaxing voice went on.

  But Kellon stopped listening. He let her dance out of his arms. He watched the thin man threading toward him through the press of bright-clad engineering aristocracy wheeling about the dance floor.

  The thin man was Chief Marquard of the Goon Department. He wore wine-colored formal pajamas and a jeweled Union star. But he had no partner, and his harassed expression meant bad news. Kellon braced himself for trouble.

  “Your genius, it’s the Preacher!” The whisper was hoarse with strain. “He’s here in Sunport.” Marquard gulped and wet his lips. “Still in hiding—somewhere down in the drainage levels.”

  This was more than merely trouble. Kellon swayed. The lofty shining murals blurred. He saw instead the dark, dripping tunnels, a thousand feet beneath the pavements of Sunport. Once he had hidden there himself, a hunted man in gray. The syncopated drone of the orchestra was suddenly the throb of drainage pumps.

  Kellon’s thick, pink hands made a desperate clutching gesture. He had watched the spread of the Gray Crusade, a poison that attacked the Union and rotted the very fabric of civilization. For years the Goon Department had sou
ght the Preacher, in vain. But it was hard to believe that the fanatic had dared to enter Sunport.

  He was getting old, indeed. Old and alone. He felt helpless against the demands of this grim moment. Suddenly he was almost ill with a desperate regret for the quarrel with his son. Family loyalty, in this cynical metropolis, was almost the only dependable bond. Now he needed Roy, terribly.

  Dazed by the impact of this emergency, his mind slipped back into the past. To Roy, and Roy’s mother. It had been Melkart who first introduced the slender, gray-eyed girl. They were at a secret meeting, down in the drainage ways. Melkart said proudly, “Ruth is going to be the Joan d’Arc of the New Commonwealth.”

  Perhaps Ruth had loved Melkart. Kellon was never sure. For the secret police of the Corporation raided the party headquarters, a few months later. Melkart was captured and transported to Mars. It was only after she had received a false report of Melkart’s death, that she would marry Kellon.

  Kellon was responsible for that report. He had tried to atone for it, however, with the parole he secured for Melkart as soon as he had sufficient influence.

  Ruth had never abandoned her dream of the New Commonwealth. She had not approved the methods of Kellon’s rise to power, and she was deeply hurt when he ordered the Union Goons to hunt down the few surviving members of the party. Roy was twelve years old when she died.

  Roy was like his mother—lean, intense, idealistic. Kellon was delighted when the boy wanted to take practical degrees in unitronic engineering—it helped him forget that his own hereditary titles were forgeries.

  But Roy had been a bitter disappointment. He failed to show any interest in Union politics. He refused to enter the Militechnic College, to prepare for command and promotion in the Fleet. Instead, at twenty, he had gone to waste a year with some meaningless research at the solar power plants on Mercury.