The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  Underhill tried to speak, and his dry throat stuck. He felt ill. The world turned dim and gray. The humanoids were perfect—no question of that. They had even learned to be, to secure the contentment of men.

  He knew they had lied. That was no tumor they had removed from Sledge's brain, but the memory, the scientific knowledge, and the bitter disillusion of their own creator. But it was true that Sledge was happy now.

  He tried to stop his own convulsive quivering.

  "A wonderful operation!" His voice came forced and faint. "You know, Aurora has had a lot of funny tenants, but that old man was the absolute limit. The very idea that he had made the humanoids, and he knew how to stop them! I always knew he must be lying!"

  Stiff with terror, he made a weak and hollow laugh.

  "What is the matter, Mr. Underhill?" The alert mechanical must have perceived his shuddering illness. "Are you unwell?"

  "No, there's nothing the matter with me," he gasped desperately. "I've just found out that I'm perfectly happy, under the Prime Directive. Everything is absolutely wonderful." His voice came dry and hoarse and wild. "You won't have to operate on me."

  The car turned off the shining avenue, taking him back to the quiet splendor of his home. His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees. There was nothing left to do.

  The Equalizer

  • • •

  I

  Interstellar Task Force One was earthward bound, from twenty years at space. Operation Tyler was complete. We had circled Barstow’s Dark Star, nearly a light-year from the Sun. The six enormous cruisers were burdened, now, with a precious and deadly cargo—on the frigid planets of the Dark Star we had toiled eight years, mining raw uranium, building atomic plants, filling the cadmium safety-drums with terrible plutonium.

  We had left earth In a blare of hands and party oratory. Heroes of the people, we were selling out to trade our youth for the scarce fuel-metals thnt were the life-blood of the Squaredeal Machine. We were decelerating toward the Dark Star when Jim Cameron happened upon the somehow uncensored fact that both uranium and thorium are actually fairly plentiful on the planets at homo, and concluded that we are not expected to return.

  Allowed to test the cadmium safety-drums that we had brought to contain our refined plutonium, he found that some of them were not safe. One in each hundred—plated to look exactly like the rest—was a useless alloy that absorbed no neutrons. Stacked together in our hold, those dummy drums would have made each loaded ship a director-sized atomic bomb, fused with an unshielded critical mass of plutonium.

  If Jim had been a Squaredealer, he might have got a medal. As a civilian feather merchant, he was allowed to scrap the deadly drums. Under party supervision, he was permitted to serve as safety inspector until the last tested drum was loaded in our holds. He was even granted limited laboratory privileges, under Squaredeal surveillance, until we were nearly home.

  But he and I, aboard the Great Director, spent the last months of our homeward flight in the ship’s prison. Held on charges never clearly stated, we somehow survived that efficient, antiseptic SBI equivalent of torture called “intensive interrogation.” Our release, like the arrest, was stunningly unexpected.

  “Okay, you guys.” In the prison hospital, a bored guard shook us out of exhausted sleep. “Come alive, now. You’re sprung. Get yourselves cleaned up—Hudd wants to see you.”

  Returning our clean laboratory whites, he unlocked the shower room. The prison barber shaved us. We signed a receipt for our personal belongings and finally stumbled out of the sound-proof cell-block where I had expected to die. There were no explanations and no regrets—the Special Bureau of Investigation was not emotional.

  An MP sergeant was waiting.

  “Come along, you guys.” He pointed his stick at the officers’ elevator. “Mr. Hudd wants to see you.”

  "Surprising,” murmured Cameron.

  Mr. Julian Hudd was not an officer. He had no formal connection with either the SBI or the Atomic Service. He was merely a special secretary to the Squaredeal Machine. As such, however, he gave orders to the admiral-generals. Hudd, the rumors said, was the bastard son of Director Tyler, who had sent him out to the Dark Star because he was becoming too dangerous at home. The imitation safety-drums, the rumors added, had been intended to keep him from returning. But Hudd, enjoying himself in a secret harem installed on his private deck, the rumors went on, meant to be hard to kill.

  Julian, Hudd rose to receive us in the huge mahogany-and-gold office beyond. At fifty, he was still handsome; he still bore a shaggy, dark-haired magnificence. Yet the enormous animal vitality of his heavy frame was visibly ailing. He was paunchy; his blue cheeks sagged into jowls; dark pouches hung under his bloodshot eyes.

  “Jim! And Chad!” We were not his friends—a Squaredealer had no friends; but he made a fetish of informality. He shook our hands, seated us, offered the first cigars I had seen in many years. “How are you?”

  Cameron’s lean face turned sardonic.

  “We have no scars or mutilations, thank you.”

  Hudd nodded, beaming as genially as if he hadn’t hoard the sarcasm. Relaxed behind his opulent desk, he begnn tapping its sleek top with a paperweight, a small gold bust of Tyler.

  “You two men are pariahs.” He kept his smile of bland good-nature, but his voice became taut, violent. "Civilian scientists! Your own mutinous indiscretions got you into tbo cells of the SBI. Except for this present emergency, I should gladly let you rot there. Now, however, I’m going to let you exonerate yourselves—if you can.”

  The sagging, furrowed mask of his face gave me no hint about the nature or extent of this present emergency, and we had been incommunicado in the prison. By now, I thought, we must be near the earth. I recalled the booby drums. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he intended to take over the Directorate from Tyler or his heirs.

  Hudd’s gray, bloodshot eyes looked at me, disconcertingly.

  “I know you, Chad Barstow.” His fixed smile had no meaning, and his loud voice was a slashing denunciation. "Perhaps your own record is clean enough, but you are damned by a traitor’s name.”

  I wanted to protest that my father had been no traitor, but a patriot. For Dr. Dane Barstow had been Secretary of Atomics, in Tyler’s first cabinet—when Tyler was only President of the United States. He had organized the Atomic Service, from the older armed services, to defend democracy. When he learned Tyler’s dreams of conquest and autocratic power, he angrily resigned. That was the beginning of his treason.

  In political disgrace, my father returned to pure science. He went out, with his bride, to found Letronne Observatory on the moon. Spending the war years there together, they discovered the Dark Star—my father first inferred the existence of some massive nonluminous body from minute perturbations of Pluto’s orbit, and my mother aided him in the long task of determining its position and parallax with infrared photography.

  Eagerly, Dane Barstow planned a voyage of his own to the Dark Star—he wanted, no doubt, to escape the oppressive intellectual atmosphere of the Directorate. He spent two years designing an improved ion-drive, and then tried to find aid to launch his expedition.

  Tyler, meantime, had betrayed democracy and destroyed his rival dictators. From Americania, his splendid new capital, he domineered mankind. He was pouring billions into Fort America, on the moon, to secure his uneasy Directorate. He was not interested in the advancement of science.

  Curtly, Tyler refused to finance or even to approve the Dark Star Expedition. He wanted the ion-drive, however, for the robot-guided atomic missiles of Fort America. My father quarreled with him, unwisely, and vanished into the labor camps of the SBI. My mother died in the care of a Squaredeal doctor.

  Though I was only a little child, there are things I shall never forget. The sadness of my father’s hollow-cheeked face. The intense, electric vitality of his eyes. The futile efforts of my mother to hide her fear and grief from me. The terror of the SBI, that haunted my
sleep.

  Five years old, I was taken into the Tyler Scouts.

  Task Force One, which put to space three years later, was not the supreme scientific effort of my father’s planning. The great expedition, as Jim Cameron once commented, was merely a moral equivalent of war.

  “Dictators need an outside interest, to divert rebellion.” A tall man, brown and spare, Cameron had looked thoughtfully at me across his little induction furnace—we were working together then in his shipboard laboratory. “War’s the best thing—but Tyler had run out of enemies. That’s why he had to conquer interstellar space.”

  I looked uneasily about for possible eavesdroppers, for such talk was not healthy.

  “I wonder how it worked.” Cameron gave me his likeable, quizzical grin. “Since we have failed to find any interstellar enemies, the essential factor was missing—there was no common danger, to make oppression seem the lesser evil. Perhaps it failed!”

  Our arrest must have come from such reckless remarks as that. Cameron had always been unwisely free of speech, and it turned out that one of our laboratory assistants had been a Squaredealer, reporting every unguarded word to the SBI.

  Now, in that richly paneled office, Julian Hudd kept drumming nervously on his sleek mahogany desk. Through that bland and mask-like smile, he watched me with red, troubled eyes.

  Hoarsely, I answered him.

  “I know my father was a traitor, Mr. Hudd.” I had learned to utter those bitter words while I was still a child in the Tyler Scouts, for they had been the high price of survival. “But I’ve been loyal,” I protested. “The SBI have nothing on me.”

  “You’re lucky, Barstow.” His voice was flat and merciless. “One word of real evidence would have drummed you through the execution valve. Now, I’m giving you a chance to redeem your father’s evil qame.”

  Then he turned upon Jim Cameron, accusingly. A sharp unease took hold of me, for Cameron had never been broken to mute obedience, as I had been. Now, emaciated and weary as he was from the prison, he still stood proud and straight. His fine blue eyes met Hudd’s—sardonic, amused, and unafraid.

  Jim Cameron had always been that way—meeting the iron might of regimented society with a cool, critical intelligence; yielding, sometimes, an ironic show of respect, but never surrendering his proud independence.

  He had been my best friend since we came aboard the Great Director—two, among the thousands of Tyler Scouts who were sent to provide youthful replacements for the crews. He was fourteen then, the leader of our troop. He found me lying on my back, sick with acceleration-pressure, homesick, too, dazed and hopeless.

  “Hello, Scout.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder and gave me his wry, invincible grin. “Let’s get our gear policed up for inspection.”

  We arranged our equipment. He sent me for a brush to sweep under our bunks. I showed him the treasures in my pocket—three model-planet marbles, a broken gyroscope top, and a real oak-acorn—and even let him see the contraband snapshot of my parents. We went to chow together. We were friends.

  Now, under the provocation of Hudd’s shaggy-browed, glaring vehemence, I was afraid that Cameron’s stubborn self-respect would once again get the better of his judgment.

  “As for you, Jim—” Hudd’s blue-jowled smile was wide, his voice harsh and violent—“your record is bad. You were broken from the Tyler Scouts, for insubordination. You were blackballed from the Machine, for doubtful loyalty. You were even rejected for the Atomic Service.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Hudd.” Cameron grinned, cool and aloof.

  “Feather merchant!” Hudd’s' red eyes glared through his mechanical smile. “The execution valve is waiting for you, Jim. Never forget that. I’ve saved your life a dozen times—just because you’ve been useful to me. Now I’m giving you a chance to earn one more reprieve. But the valve’s still waiting, if you fail. Understand?”

  “Perfectly.” Cameron grinned. "What’s the job, this time?"

  He must have been thinking of those dummy drums that he had found in time to save all our lives. Perhaps he was thinking of other services, too. On the cold worlds of the Dark Star, he had been a very useful man. He had invented sensitive new detectors to find the uranium hidden under glaciers of frozen air. He had solved a hundred deadly riddles for Hudd, before the last lethal cylinder of newly made plutonium was loaded safely aboard.

  “One question, first" Hudd’s big mouth still smiled, but his red eyes were narrowed and dangerous. “The boys have brought me a rather disturbing report about some gadget you called an induction furnace. What’s the truth about it?"

  “That’s easy, Mr. Hudd.” Cameron’s low voice seemed relieved. “Until our arrest, we were running routine assays of our metallurgical specimens from the Dark Star system. I built that little furnace just for convenience in fusing samples."

  “So?” Hudd forgot to smile. His heavy, mottled face stiffened into a bleak mask of ruthless purpose. “The boys report that your assays were only a blind, intended to cover some secret experiment."

  Hudd paused, but Cameron said nothing. He merely stood waiting, his lean face grave enough, but an alarming hint of impersonal amusement in his eyes. Hudd went on:

  “I believe it was a most peculiar furnace.” Hudd’s voice was harsh with accusation. “The boys report that it consumed no current. They say it changed the metals fused in it—that buttons of pure iron, on spectrographic analysis, began to show yellow sodium lines.”

  Hudd’s great body heaved forward against the desk, ominously.

  “What about that?”

  Cameron nodded easily. Then fear dropped like a staggering burden upon me. For he grinned across the gleaming mahogany, and told Hudd more than he had ever admitted to the SBI, in all our months of intensive interrogation.

  “I was looking for something.”

  For a moment, as he spoke, Cameron let down the shield of reserved and sardonic amusement that he carried against a world of totalitarian compulsion. For a moment his voice had a hard elation, terrible in its honesty.

  “I was looking for—freedom.” His thin shoulders lifted, almost defiantly. “I thought I had found a new and simple technique for manipulating the cosmic stuff that sometimes we call matter and sometimes energy. I thought I had found the way out of the Atomic Age.”

  His blue and deep-set eyes, for just that moment, held a stem radiance. Then his brief elation flowed away. His tall, emaciated frame bent to a burden of failure, and I saw the gray sickness of the prison on his haggard face.

  “I was mistaken.” His voice went flat, with the dull admission of defeat. “The accidental contamination of pure specimens with spectroscopic traces of sodium is notoriously easy. I had already abandoned the experiment, before we were arrested.”

  Hudd nodded his great shaggy head, unsurprised.

  “You’re smart to tell the truth—and lucky that you failed.” His broad, blue-jowled face recovered its habitual political smile. “Now, I think you’ve had a lesson, Jim, and I’m going to give you another chance." His voice turned savage again. “I don’t mean another chance at treason—for you’ll be watched, every minute."

  Cameron stood waiting. The defeated look was gone. His lean face was properly grave, but his keen blue eyes had a glint of amused expectancy.

  “What's your trouble, Mr. Hudd?”

  Hudd pushed the little golden head of Tyler away from him, across the opulent desk. Slowly shifting his great bulk, he leaned back in his wide chair, knitting his fingers so that his huge, black-haired hands cradled his paunch. Under the dark thick brows, his small eyes were red with fatigue and trouble.

  “I suppose you noticed when we went from acceleration thrust to centrifugal, three days ago?” His rasping voice was dry and hurried. “Anyhow, were back—on a temporary orbit twenty thousand miles from the moon.”

  “And something’s wrong?” Cameron’s voice, it seemed to me, had some faint undertone of malicious anticipation. But Hudd didn’t seem to notice, for
he was stating gravely:

  “Something has happened to the Directorate!”

  “Eh?” Cameron’s veiled amusement vanished. “What?”

  “Here are the facts.” Heavily, Hudd lurched forward against the desk again; his voice had a brittle snap. “We began calling Fort America weeks ago, from millions of miles at space. Our signals weren’t answered. So far as we can determine, the moon has been abandoned.”

  His bloodshot eyes looked haunted.

  “We haven’t tried to signal the earth—I want to keep the advantage of surprise, until we know the situation. But things have happened, even there.”

  He reached, with a huge and hairy paw, for the little golden bust of Tyler and resumed his nervous drumming.

  “But we’ve been listening, on every possible wave band. Of course, out here, we couldn’t expect to get much. But we are in range of the great television propaganda stations of the Applied Semantics Authority—and they are dead. All we have picked up are feeble clicks and squeals—scrambled radiophone signals, apparently, which our engineers can't unscramble.”

  His lowered voice echoed a baffled unease.

  “The telescopes give us several puzzling hints. The forests have grown, since we left—the spread of green into the deserts might almost indicate a general climatic change. The haze of smoke is gone from the old industrial areas. Where several cities used to be, in the tropics, we can find only green jungle.”

  “Very interesting,” Cameron murmured.

  “Two landing parties were sent to earth in life-craft,” Hudd nodded grimly. “One was to land in Europe and the other in North America. Nothing has been heard from either, since they entered the ionosphere. They are twenty-four hours overdue.” '

  The solemn, baffled hush of his voice gave me an uncomfortable chill. It would be a terrible and ironic thing I thought, if we had come back from our long exile to find our own human kind somehow destroyed.