The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  The quarrel happened after Roy returned—five years ago. Roy didn’t like Selene du Mars. She made matters worse by trying to flirt with him. He called her an unpleasant name, and stalked out of the penthouse suite. He had never come back.

  But Kellon had followed him, next day, to the great unitronics laboratory on the mesa. A silent crystal egg, his unitron glider sloped down toward the long, low, white-roofed building that stood between the commercial port and the militechnic reservation.

  Like an elongated silver bubble, a freighter was lifting from the Venus Docks, bright and strange in the shimmer of its drive field. Gray stevedores were trucking away the gleaming metal ingots and squared hardwood logs it had unloaded. A Martian liner lay in her cradle, spilling dark ore concentrate down a chute. A space-battered Jovian relief ship was loading mountains of crates and bales and drums—food and equipment and power for the miners on Callisto. The Mercury Docks were stacked with crated dynode batteries, freshly charged in the Sun plants. All the commerce of an interplanetary empire!

  But Kellon’s pride had a bitter taste. He could remember when the port was far busier, back in the days of the Corporation. Now half the yards were weed grown and abandoned. Dismantled ships were turning red with rust in the cradles at the disused Saturn Docks.

  His pilot landed the glider on the white roof. Kellon asked for his son, and a startled watchman guided him down through the laboratory. Space had really been conquered in this building, Kellon knew; all the great advances in unitronic flight had been made here. But most of the halls were deserted now, the old equipment dismantled or ruined.

  Kellon found Roy in a long, clean shop whose plastic walls were softly radiant with a clear blue-white. Huge windows looked out across the militechnic reservation, where the unitron cruisers of the Fleet lay like immense dead-black arrows.

  Roy was bronzed with spaceburn from his year on Mercury. He looked up, with his mother’s nervous quickness, from some gadget on a bench. Kellon was a little shocked to see the screwdriver in his hands —for an engineer of the higher ranks, any sort of manual work was considered degrading.

  Roy seemed glad to see him.

  “Sorry I lost my temper.” He smiled—his mother’s intense, grave smile. “I don’t like Selene. But she isn’t important.” His brown, quick fingers touched the gadget, and his gray eyes lit with eagerness. “I’m searching for a way to test the condensation hypothesis.”

  “Look, son.” Kellon gestured impatiently at the window, toward the row of mighty black cruisers. “You don’t have to play with abstractions. There’s the Fleet, waiting for you to take command as soon as you are qualified. Your experiments should be left to underlings.”

  “I’m sorry, boss.” Roy’s tanned face set with his mother’s unbreakable spirit. “I think my hypothesis is more important than the Fleet.”

  “Hypothesis?” Anger boomed in Kellon’s voice. “Important.” He tried to calm his tone. “Can you explain what is important about it?”

  “I tried to, before I went to Mercury,” Roy said. “You were too busy to listen. You see, I have a new idea about how the planets were formed. I went to Mercury to check it, with closer observations of the Sun. I believe I am right.”

  Kellon attempted to swallow his impatience.

  “I’m listening, now,” he said.

  “You see, the origin of solar systems has never been well explained,” Roy began in a careful voice. “The tidal theories of the twentieth century were all somewhat strained. There was a statistical difficulty. Only one star in a hundred thousand could possibly pass near enough to another to raise planet-forming tides. But the astronomers of the Outstation long ago convinced themselves that planetary systems are a lot more frequent than that.

  “The discovery of the unitron, a hundred years ago, caused a revolution in nearly every science. It was recognized as the ultimate matter-energy unit of the universe. For the first time, it fitted all the various phenomena of electromagnetics and gravitation into a single picture. But most engineers, in the era of the Corporation, were too busy conquering and exploring the planets to devote much time to abstract theories.”

  Kellon felt a brief amusement at his son’s simple lecture-room explanations, and then wondered uneasily if Roy knew that his degrees were forged. He frowned, trying to follow.

  “The twentieth-century cosmogonists had to deal with a confusing array of concepts,” Roy went on. “Electrons and protons, neutrons and mesotrons and barytrons, photons and light waves, electric fields and magnetic fields and momentum fields and gravity fields. Already they were beginning to grope for a unified-field theory, but they never quite perceived all those things as manifestations of the same ultimate unit. It’s no wonder they never quite understood the Sun, or how the planets came to be born from it!”

  “But you do?” Kellon was interested, in spite of himself.

  Roy nodded eagerly, and touched the gadget again.

  “I think I do,” he said. “It is hard to believe that the existence of planets depends on a freakish accident. In my theory, a star forms planets as normally as it radiates energy. Even now, the Sun is emitting unitron mass at the rate of about four million tons a second. I believe that planets have been condensed out of emitted unitron matter, by a combination of several processes, over periods as long as the life of the stars.”

  Roy’s gray eyes were shining.

  “That is my hypothesis—that every normal star has formed planets of its own. The tidal theories allowed only a handful of habitable planets in the entire galaxy. I believe there may be—millions!” His quick hand gestured, with the gadget. “Of course, it is still only a hypothesis—though the Outstation astronomers have found evidence of planets about several of the nearer single stars. But I’m going to find out!”

  He searched Kellon’s face.

  “Do you see it, father?”

  Heavily, Kellon shook his rugged white-wigged head.

  “Your argument sounds reasonable enough,” he admitted. “Once at the Outstation I saw a graph that had some little dips they said meant planets. But what of it? I don’t see anything to get excited about.”

  Tears of frustration came into Roy’s eager eyes.

  “I can’t understand it,” he whispered bitterly. “Nobody gets excited. Nobody cares.” His bronzed head lifted defiantly. “But the engineers of a hundred years ago would have been building ships to explore those planets!”

  “I don’t think so,” Kellon objected wearily. “It would be too far for commerce. The moons of Saturn haven’t been visited for sixty years. Right now, our Jovian outposts are losing money. Supplies and transportation cost more than we get back. If it wasn’t for Union prestige, I would abandon them today.”

  “Science has been slipping back, ever since the uranium process was lost.” Roy’s face was troubled. “I don’t know why.” His brown chin lifted. “But we can go on. The unitron drive can be improved. With time and money, I could build an interstellar ship!”

  “Maybe you could,” Kellon said. “If you are fool enough to want to die on some strange, barren world that men never even saw—when I have an interplanetary empire to give you!”

  “I guess I’m just that kind of fool,” Roy said quietly. “I don’t want an empire.”

  Kellon lost his temper, then.

  “I’m going to cut off your allowance,” he shouted at the white-lipped boy. “That will stop this nonsense. Come to me whenever you are ready to take up militechnics.”

  “You had better go back to Selene du Mars,” Roy told him, in a thin, low voice. “I don’t need the allowance.”

  And that was true. Within a few months, Kellon learned that Roy had designed a new type drive-field coil for the unitron transports in the Jovian service. It saved three days in the long run out to Jupiter, and increased the power recovery in deceleration nearly forty percent. For the first time in twenty years, the Callistonian mines showed a tiny profit. Roy’s fees, paid by the Union Transport Authority,
were a hundred times the cut-off allowance.

  In the five years since, Kellon hadn’t seen his son. Roy had ignored an invitation he made Selene send. But he knew, through the Goon Department, that Roy was still at the old unitronics laboratory, furiously busy with his research. Learning that his funds were running low, Kellon had ordered the Transport Authority to double the promised royalties. Roy had replied with a brief note of thanks.

  *

  Now, standing stunned and alone amid the whirling dancers under the green-glowing murals of the Neptune Room, Boss Kellon felt a crushing need to see that thin, determined face, that was so much like Ruth’s had been.

  But Roy had failed him. Under the burden of the tottering Union, he stood all alone. There was no other that he could trust completely. And Marquard’s thin, frightened whisper goaded him back to face the present grim emergency.

  “The Preacher’s in Sunport,” the distracted Goon chief repeated. “His followers already know. Mob gathering in Union Square.” His lean shoulders shrugged, in a helpless bewilderment. “Delicate situation, your genius.”

  “Delicate, hell!” Kellon caught his breath, and decision flashed in his shrewd blue eyes. He had fought alone before, and he could again. “Search the drainage levels,” he ordered crisply. “Arrest the Preacher.”

  “Is your genius sure—” Marquard blinked uncertainly. “He has terrific influence. Before he came, it might have been safe. Now his followers will make trouble.”

  “I’ll handle trouble when it happens.” Kellon stiffened his big shoulders, and managed to smile again. He must hide the black panic that swept him. “Don’t kill him,” he added. “Just bring him in. Martyrs are dangerous.”

  “Your genius commands.”

  The thin man turned nervously away, the frown of worry cut deeper in his dark face. The orchestra throbbed on—playing from a high platform whose glowing plastic decorations represented an ice cave on Triton, Neptune’s once-visited moon. Kellon started back to Selene du Mars.

  She was waiting, slim and tall in the flashing green sequins. Even her smile was hard and bright and beautiful. Kellon felt an eager little quickening of his pulse, for he still loved Selene. Then he saw that she was smiling for another man.

  Admiral Hurd came striding across the crowded floor. Black-and-orange pajamas were cut to emphasize the broad triangle of his shoulders. He was young and tall and dark. His toothy smile flashed, and he greeted Selene by the militechnic title she claimed:

  “May I, Miss Captain?” Then he saw that Kellon was approaching. A kind of wary alertness tensed his face, and the smile that erased it was a little too broad. “If your genius will allow?”

  “Darling, you look tired.”

  Selene turned the white dazzle of her smile on him, and slipped into the dashing admiral’s arms before he could respond. Left alone on the floor, Kellon felt a tired envy for Hurd’s youth and looks and vigor. Really, he was getting old.

  He watched Hurd and Selene, dancing cheek to cheek. Her eyes were closed; her restless face seemed relaxed for once, and happy. But he caught a covert glance from Hurd’s dark eyes, watchful, oddly hostile.

  Turning wearily away, Kellon felt another surge of black regret for his son. If they had not quarreled, Roy might now have been in command of the Fleet, instead of Hurd. The new admiral was brilliant, and his record was clear, but Kellon didn’t like him.

  Kellon left the ballroom, escorted unobtrusively by his Goon bodyguards. He crossed the vast, silent Moon Room, to a terrace that looked down over Union Square.

  It was night, and Sunport after dark was a view that had always stirred him. The towers were wide apart. Façades of luxion plastics turned them to tapering, graceful pylons of soft and many-colored fire. Their changing splendor lit the broad parks between, and stood inverted in a hundred pleasure lakes. The surface ways were broad curving ribbons of light, alive with the glowing cars of joy-riding engineers. A few pleasure gliders floated above the landing terraces, colored eggs of crystal light.

  Sometimes, with an ache of longing, Kellon recalled his first rare glimpses of this bright and magical scene. For his childhood had been lived in the lower levels. It was only on infrequent holidays that he was allowed to come up into the parks, where he could see this forbidden, shining paradise of the engineers.

  How mad his dreams had been! Ten million others must have dreamed them, but only he had come up to take the city for his own. Sometimes even yet the hard-won victory seemed altogether incredible. Nor ever had it been the pure untroubled delight he had dreamed of. Heavily, he sighed.

  “Your genius!” The husky officer of the bodyguard stopped him in the wide arch of the terrace doorway, where drafts were checked only by a film of moving air. “The terrace may be dangerous—there’s an ugly mob below.”

  “Thanks, major.” He shrugged, and pushed on. He couldn’t afford to yield to the fear in him. Confidence was his safest armor. “You know this is my favorite view.”

  But tonight the picture was grimly different.

  The long rectangle of Union Square, below him, was gray with pressing crowds. From this elevation, the surging masses looked like some strange vermin, crawling about the bases of these mighty, shining, clean-lined towers that he loved.

  Scores of bonfires glared, points of angry red. His nostrils stung to a whiff of paper burning. Faint with distance, the angry buzz of voices came up to him. Evangelists were screaming hoarsely, and shrill voices sang. He caught a snatch from the “Battle Hymn of God”:

  “Burn the books and break the gears!

  Kill Antichrist and engineers!”

  Kellon stood there a long time, until his sweaty hands set cold upon the shining rail. He was sick with a fear that all these glowing towers would crumble into that gray ocean of blind destruction. But Melkart said there was nothing left that he could do.

  Suddenly his cold body jerked to a brittle clatter of automatic gunfire. A mile from him, at the end of the square, gray mankind was flowing like a queer, viscid liquid over the bright-lit surface way: Cars were seized and capsized in that live flood, like small, glowing beetles.

  Tiny screams reached him. Black Goon cars appeared on the shining pavement, and guns crackled again. It was too far to distinguish individual human forms, moving or dying. But the mass of the gray wave drew reluctantly back. The stream of traffic halted, and the light went out of the luxion pavement.

  Anxiously, Kellon went back through the archway in the softly glowing wall—it was pulsating tonight with soft and slowly changing hues of violet and rose. He wondered briefly if quieter colors and a slower beat would seem more confident.

  In the silent, cyclopean Moon Room, he hurried to the telephore desk. He dropped impatiently on his seat in the U-shaped slot, with the stereo prisms standing in a half circle before him. In the center screen, the bright image of the red-haired operator was a little smaller than life.

  “Get me Marquard,” he rapped. The girl nodded silently, and the dark, thin features of the Goon chief sprang into the next crystal oblong. Kellon couldn’t keep the rasping tension out of his voice. “Have you got the Preacher?”

  “Not yet, your genius,” Marquard replied in his habitual jerky, nervous whisper. “Mob is getting ugly. Looted the park library and made fires of the books. Started smashing pleasure cars on Union Way. Had to kill a few of them, to rescue an engineer and his girl. Diverted traffic.” His worried eyes blinked uneasily. “Maybe we ought to clean the square?”

  “No,” Kellon told him—it was good to be able to make one more sure and instant decision. “The dead ones are martyrs. Leave them alone. They’ll howl themselves exhausted and go back to their warrens.”

  “I hope so,” Marquard whispered faintly.

  “Just catch the Preacher, and send him to me.” Kellon nodded at the operator, and the Goon chief vanished from the prism. “Reference Department.” He spoke to a dyspeptic-looking female. “Show me the latest Goon report on the Preacher.” The document wa
s projected in the next screen.

  Special Report No. 45-H-198

  Union Goon Office, Sunport, E.

  February 30, 2145

  BY: Goon Operative GK-89 (R. A. Meyer, Politicotechnic

  Engineer).

  SUBJECT: Eli Catlaw, alias the Preacher of the Revelation, alias

  the Word of God, alias the King of Kings. Labor No. G-496-HN-009. Escaped convict, Mars Penal Reservation, No. 45-V-18. Wanted for murder of guard. Believed now in America, but whereabouts unknown. Note: Catlaw is a dangerous character. Liquidation recommended.

  Tapping a key to change the pages, Kellon skimmed significant passages. “Catlaw was born in the Ozark District, of labor-class parents. . . . Mother’s claim to illegitimate technical blood probably false. . . . Transported to Mars for assault on engineer. . . . Guard murdered, in escape. . . . Catlaw reached Venus Commonwealth on ore ship. . . . Became ‘swamp walker’ and successful herb trader. . . . ‘Conversion’ and preaching dates from recovery from attack of jungle fever. . . . Returned to Earth about nine years ago, to lead underground ‘Crusade’ against Union. . . . Enabled to evade many Goon raids by vast popular support. . . . Treason charges against Union factions. . . . Catlaw has incited assassination and sabotage. . . His program implies total destruction of technical civilization.”

  Kellon finished the report. He sat staring into the empty prism, as gravely as if he could read there the end of Sunport and all his world. He had scarcely moved, an hour later, when Marquard brought in the Preacher.

  *

  Eli Catlaw seemed almost unaware of the burly Goons who gripped his arms. He was lank and tall in faded gray overalls, and he stood erect and defiant. His dark, hollow eyes stared arrogantly past Kellon, at the lofty luxion murals that illuminated the room. Kellon’s shrewd eyes studied the man, against the background in the Goon report. Thick lips and high cheeks and stiff black hair showed Negro and Indian blood. The yellow face was long and angular and stern. At last the sullen, hostile eyes came back to Kellon’s face, but obviously the Preacher didn’t intend to speak first.