The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  His ears rang, and the immense dark room was alive with screaming metal. He rose behind the desk, snatching a hidden automatic from under the seat. But the shooting had stopped. Light flowed back into the high luxion murals.

  Three men were lying still inside the closed archway. One made a thin, whimpering sob, and a frightened Goon fired a final shot into his head. The officer came running anxiously to Kellon.

  “Is your genius all right?”

  Kellon managed to grin.

  “Attempt No. 17.” He was glad of the rouge on his face. No other attempt had ever come quite so close, or made him feel so weak inside. He dragged his eyes away from the ruin at the end of the room, where the bomb had shattered a cragged lunar peak into dusty rubble. “Who were they?”

  Already the Goons were examining the three dead men. Their fingerprints were swiftly identified by telephore. One of them proved to be an hereditary engineer, who had failed in the examinations for a practical militechnic degree. The other two were members of the auxiliary white-collar class.

  “The engineer must have come with the guests,” the guard officer reported. “The others were among the musicians. They had guns and the bomb in instrument cases.” He caught his breath. “I regret this terribly, your genius. But let me congratulate your personal courage, with the bomb.”

  Courage! Kellon shrugged and turned quickly away from the still figures in their gay bloodstained rags. There was already an odor. Death made him ill. If he had been an instant slower—desperation wasn’t courage. His voice came harsh and loud:

  “Get them out and clean the floor.” Then he thought of Selene du Mars. Concern sharpened his tone. “There was fighting in the ballroom? Was anyone hurt? Find out if Miss Captain du Mars was hurt.”

  The safety door dropped again. Anxiety made him follow the questioning Goons. An ominous, hysterical tension met him in the vast green-glowing Neptune Room. Cold-eyed officers were grilling the frightened musicians. Half the guests were gone. The rest were gathered in pale-faced groups, chattering nervously.

  He couldn’t find Selene. The guards at the main entrance, off the public glider terrace, had not seen her among the departing guests. But she had vanished early in the evening.

  Apprehension seized him. In spite of her scheming ambition—or even because of it—he loved Selene. He knew that the Preacher’s followers hated her savagely, as the very symbol of all that was denied them. She might be abducted, perhaps even murdered.

  He hurried back to the telephore in the bomb-shattered Moon Room, and called her suite on the floor below. The dark Eurasian major-domo said she had not come in. But the red-haired operator told him:

  “Your genius, there’s a recorded message from Miss Captain du Mars. It was left two hours ago, to be delivered whenever you called for her. Will you receive it?”

  Kellon nodded, suddenly voiceless.

  Selene’s face came into the crystal block. The fire diamonds burned in her platinum hair. Their changing blaze went blue as her clear eyes, and redder than her lips. Her voice came, cool and hard and perfect.

  “Harvey, I am leaving you tonight. We shall not meet again. This is to thank you for all you have given me, and to tell you why I have gone. It isn’t because you are getting old, or because I think you are slipping—believe me, I wouldn’t go because of that. But I’m in love with Admiral Hurd. By the time you hear this, we shall be in space together. I’m sorry, Harvey.”

  Kellon sat for a long time at the telephore desk. He felt numb and cold. In a hoarse voice, he told the operator to run it over. Selene smiled again, and wiped away the same solitary jewel-bright tear, and spoke the same gem-hard words.

  She lied. Kellon stared blankly at the mural the bomb had shattered—his own life was darkened and broken, like the luxion panel. He clenched his fists in a sick and useless fury. Of course she lied!

  Maybe she did love Hurd. The traitor had looks and youth. That would be no wonder. But it wasn’t love that made her go with him. He knew Selene too well to accept that. She had gone with Hurd because she expected him to be the next master of the world.

  “Run it again,” he told the operator. “Without the sound.” And he greeted the silent image with a tired, bitter grin. “Good hunting, Selene,” he whispered. “After all, we’ve had our day. Good hunting —but you and your dashing admiral had better watch the Preacher!”

  The lone tear fell, and she vanished once more.

  And presently Kellon told the operator to try the Outstation again. Selene wasn’t everything. Tonight the world was at stake. His life, and hers. The Union, and Sunport. The game was being played, far out in the silent cold of space. Between an old man’s loyalty and a young one’s ruthless ambition. Between the old world he had conquered and one unknown. He could only wait for the issue. There was nothing else to do.

  But the Outstation didn’t answer.

  “Nothing, your genius,” the operator said. “There has been nothing from space since General Nordhorn was cut off.”

  Wearily restless, Kellon rose from the desk. The dead men had been taken away. But he thought that the faint, sickening smell of death still hung in the room. He felt cold, and his big body was haunched with tension. And he felt desperately alone.

  Then he thought of Melkart.

  The old philosopher-historian was one man who ought to know what was happening to Sunport. Often in the past his somewhat Machiavellian advice had been useful. Almost before Kellon knew it, his restless feet were taking him through the Saturn Room.

  That immense hall was his library. Books walled it, four galleries high. Vaults beneath held microfilm copies of all known literature. Kellon left his guards outside the historian’s office.

  Charles Melkart occupied a tiny alcove. The white-glowing walls were bare, but one huge window gave a spectacular view of the shining, night-cloaked city. A huge, ancient, wooden desk took up nearly half the room. It was piled untidily with books and stacks of manuscript.

  As if unaware of any trouble outside, Melkart sat behind the desk, writing swiftly with an old-fashioned pen. He was a small, stooped man. He wore a wrinkled lounging robe. A red wool skullcap covered his baldness. He blinked as Kellon entered and took off his spectacles. In his wizened, yellow face, his eyes looked strikingly young and alive.

  “Sit down, Wolfe.” Melkart never fawned. “I was expecting you.”

  Wolfe! That had been Kellon’s party name. He remembered secret meetings, down in the drainage levels, where the cold walls sweated and the air was alive with the throb of pumps. That was in the old, dangerous days, before they gave up the fight for the forbidden ideals of democracy.

  Suddenly Kellon wondered if Melkart and Ruth had really been in love. He dismissed the thought. That hadn’t mattered, for many years. The New Commonwealth was a forgotten dream. Melkart had left his idealism, with his health, in the carnotite mines of Mars. And the parole had settled whatever debt there might have been.

  But Melkart had given him a great deal—besides Roy’s mother. The lean, brilliant New Zealander had taught him the science of politics. His degrees had been forged at the party headquarters, to make him a more useful agent. When the Corporation shattered the underground organization, Kellon had managed to escape with most of the party funds.

  Kellon had attempted to repay him with some high position in the Union. But the sardonic ex-radical declined to accept anything more than the needs of his simple life, and use of the vast library in the Saturn Room.

  “You have made the solar system into a laboratory for the test of my politicotechnic theories,” he said, with his thin, yellow grin. “Now all I want is time to finish writing ‘Destiny.’”

  Now, when he came into the scholar’s narrow room, Kellon was too perturbed to take the single chair beside the cluttered desk. He walked to the great window. The rioters made a gray, uneasy sea below, flecked with the scarlet of fires. A distant explosion jarred the air; a machine gun rattled; the drone of voices lifted angrily. />
  Melkart picked up his pen to make some hurried note.

  Pale and tense, nails biting into his palms, Kellon turned back from the window. In a hoarse, desperate voice he asked the lean old man at the desk:

  “Charles—do you know what is happening to Sunport?”

  The red fez nodded.

  “I’ve known for thirty years,” Melkart grinned, with owlish assurance. “Old Giovanni Vico had a glimmer of it, with his ‘law of cycles,’ back in the seventeen hundreds. Spengler and Toynbee glimpsed it. Sprague, later, saw farther. But it remained for me to reduce the laws of the rise and fall of human cultures to the exact science that I call destiny “ His yellow, clawlike hand gestured quickly at a huge manuscript. “Here, in my last volume—”

  “Listen!” Kellon’s fist banged the desk in interruption. “I’ve no time for books. The gray class is rioting. The Fleet has mutinied. The Outstation is under attack—if it falls, we’ll be bombarded from space. Already assassins have attacked me once tonight.”

  He made a harsh, mirthless laugh.

  “Books! Can you sit here writing a book, when the Preacher’s fanatics are burning libraries in the park? They are murdering every engineer they can lay hands on. Who will be left to read your precious book?”

  Melkart’s fleshless, yellow visage grinned.

  “Nobody, I’m afraid,” he said slowly. “It is tragic that cultures must reach the point of breakdown before they can breed men able to understand them. But lack of understanding does not change the truth. Every fact you mention is inevitable. Because now Sunport is dead—a petrifact.”

  “Petrifact—you’re insane!” Kellon slammed the desk again. “This is no time for your pessimistic theories. I want to know something to do.” His voice sank, pleading. “You have helped me before. There must be—something.”

  Melkart closed a big book, and Kellon saw that the yellow fingers trembled.

  “You and I are finished, Wolfe.” His voice was slow and regretful. “Because the soul of Sunport is dead. You see, a city or a nation or a culture is something more than the sum of the individuals that make it up. Sunport was born, back in 1978, when the first rocket blasted off Toltec Mesa. It was created to conquer space. It did, and that supreme victory made it the greatest megalopolis the world has seen.”

  “That’s history,” Kellon muttered impatiently. “What’s the matter today?”

  “Space is conquered,” Melkart told him, “and that great idea is dead. Because life doesn’t stand still. Disused functions are lost. After the victory was won, Sunport failed to discover a new purpose to keep her alive. Therefore, she died. It makes no difference that ninety million new barbarians live on in these dead towers.”

  Kellon had moved to speak, but Melkart added sardonically:

  “That’s as true of you, Wolfe, as it is of the city. You aren’t a tenth the man you were thirty years ago, when you set out to smash what was left of the Corporation. You might have been a match for Eli Catlaw—then.”

  Kellon smoothed a frown of displeasure from his face.

  “Please, Charles,” he begged. “I know I’m getting old, but the Union is mine. Maybe I got it by arbitrary methods, but it is a trust. I’ve got to save it from the Preacher and his rabble, because the Union has created everything we call civilization.”

  “True.” Melkart’s red-capped skull nodded gravely. “The engineers were a creative minority—a hundred years ago. A small group of experts conquered space—and thereby created more wealth than mankind had ever owned before.

  “Inevitably, the creative power of the engineers resulted in political dominance. Unfortunately, however, they have ceased to create. Now their spendthrift children merely loot the wealth their fathers earned, and play their silly game of hereditary degrees. And Sunport is as much a petrifact as the pyramids of old Egypt.”

  Kellon leaned over the untidy desk.

  “Sunport is mine.” His rugged face was pale under the rouge, and his low voice trembled. “I paid for it, with brains and toil and years. I worked and schemed and bribed and robbed and lied and killed. I lived in dread of assassination. I fought like a jungle animal for the city.” He gulped a rasping breath. “I won’t give it up.”

  “You said that,” Melkart smiled his wry, yellow smile, “but you help establish my proposition. Because you completely fail to share the magnificent aspiration that created Sunport. Out of these restless millions of new nomads, you merely had superior cunning and audacity and luck.

  “But men want to merge themselves in things greater than their individual lives. Destiny is the word I use, for those supernal living forces that exalt and give purpose to the lives of myriads.

  “Sunport has fulfilled her destiny, and thereby lost it. But the Preacher has offered these new barbarians another destiny—a fresh, common purpose—that is on their own savage plane. That means that our world has ended, Wolfe.”

  Kellon stared at him silently.

  “You’re lost, Melkart,” he said at last. “You will still be sitting here, when the Preacher’s fanatics come along to burn your book and cut your throat. I think that is the best criticism of your philosophy” —he swung aggressively toward the door—”but I’m not done.”

  Kellon went back to the bomb-torn Moon Room. Perhaps Melkart was right. Perhaps Sunport was doomed. But he wasn’t ready to die. He sat down anxiously at the telephore desk, and told the operator to call the Outstation once more.

  “I’ll try, your genius.” The girl was pale and jittery. “But I’ve been trying. They don’t answer.” Her voice was near hysteria. “The whole telephore system is breaking down. They have been smashing equipment and murdering operators.”

  “Get the Outstation!”

  His voice was harsh with strain. He sat watching the busy girl. Unrest held him tense, but there was nothing he could do. The minutes dragged. There was no reply from space, until a terrible screaming came out of the sky.

  The tower shuddered. A monstrous, bellowing vibration drowned all thought. The floor pitched. Concussion jarred Kellon’s bones. The high luxion murals flickered and went dim. The plastic mosaic of a moon city turned black and came crashing down. The air was filled with choking dust.

  The bombardment had begun.

  No need to get the Outstation now. That first terrible projectile from space was enough to tell him that Hurd and the Preacher were victorious. The Outstation had been taken or destroyed.

  Sunport was defenseless. True, there were huge batteries on the militechnic reservation, beside the spaceport. But, hampered by Earth’s gravitation and the atmosphere, they were almost useless against attack from space—even if the plotters had failed to put them out of commission already.

  Kellon shivered to something colder than personal fear. For he knew that Melkart was right. This was the end of Sunport. The Union was finished. The engineering class was doomed. Ahead he could see only ruin and chaos, ignorance and savage cruelty, darkness and despair.

  “Get me Marquard!” he shouted at the frightened operator.

  Now the Goon Department was the last feeble defense of civilization. But Sunport must be blacked out. The people must be warned to leave the city or take refuge on the lower levels. And he wanted to know where that first projectile had struck.

  The Goon chief’s head came into the crystal block. But it was sagging wearily back. Marquard’s apprehensive frown was at last relaxed. There was a little dark hole at his temple. The operator made a tiny, stifled scream, and the peaceful face vanished.

  “He’s dead!” She listened, and began a tight-voiced explanation. “The office says he shot himself, when he learned—”

  The second projectile cut her off.

  The Union Tower shuddered again, like a giant live thing struck with some deadly harpoon. Concussion flung Kellon out of the seat. He was deafened, and the salt sweet of blood was on his lips.

  He climbed back to the desk. But the operator’s prism was blank. The dial lights were out.
Frantically he jiggled the call key, but there was no response. The instrument was dead.

  His ears ceased to ring. Suddenly he felt that the huge shattered room was queerly still. He shouted anxiously for his guards, but there was no reply. Peering into the dust, he saw that the officer lay motionless under a pile of rubble, in the broken archway. The others had fled.

  He was alone.

  Alone! That realization was appalling. Now the breakdown was complete. No longer was he boss of the Union. He was merely one among millions of frightened and bewildered human beings. The only order left was the organization of his enemies.

  In his dazed aloneness, he was scarcely aware when the third projectile fell. But the light flickered, in all the luxion walls, and went out. He cried out, in the smothering dark. An ultimate purpose was awakened in him—the blind instinct for survival.

  A dim glow from without guided him to the terrace. He saw that half the city’s towers were still pulsating with the changing radiance of their luxion facades. The bombardment soon would black them out, he thought bitterly, forever.

  Union Square was almost empty. A few stragglers of the gray mob still fled across the darkened ways. Near the base of the Tower, dust and smoke drifted out of an immense dark crater.

  So near! Kellon shivered to a cold realization. The Union Tower was the target. The space bombardment was aimed at him! Because, by now, he was almost the last symbol of the Union’s shattered power.

  He ran back through the archway, to the roof elevator. Its luxion walls still glowed, and it shot upward when he pressed the controls. He stumbled out into a chill night wind, on the penthouse roof.

  “Here!” he shouted, across the glider terrace. “Quick—haul out the Ruth!”

  Then he saw that the terrace was deserted. The hangar yawned black and empty. The long crystal bubble of his unitron glider was gone. The crew must have fled with it when the bombardment began.

  Kellon stood bewildered in the cold dark. He sobbed, and his fists were clenched impotently. The world had crumbled under him, and there was nothing he could do. Civilization had dissolved.