The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  Cameron’s intent, elated eyes looked aside at me.

  “The safety-feature is what threw us, Chad, with our induction furnace experiments,” he told me. “Our gadget annihilated matter—degenerating iron atoms into sodium—and produced electric current. The increased output intensified the conversion field, and the intensified field increased the output. An excellent arrangement, if you want a matter-bomb —but highly unsafe for a power plant.

  “Your father solved that problem, Chad—very simply, too. Just a secondary solenoid, in series with the primary, which develops an opposing voltage as the equalizing field expands. It gives you a safe, guaranteed maximum voltage—the precise value determined by the way it’s wound.”

  Hudd’s deep-sunken eyes blinked skeptically.

  “You mean, you can generate electricity?” he rasped. “With Just a coil of wire?”

  “And a few stray ions to excite it,” Cameron told him. "A pound of copper solenoid would drive the cruiser, yonder, out to the Dark Star. Or iron, or silver—the metal doesn’t matter; it’s only the exact shape and alignment and spacing of the turns of wire.”

  Hudd shook his head, in massive unbelief.

  "Perpetual motion!” he scoffed.

  “Almost.” Cameron grinned. “Equalized mass is converted into electrical energy, according to the Einstein equation. The solenoid wastes away—but slowly. One pound of solenoid will generate ten billion kilowatt hours of electricity.”

  “If it’s all that simple," Hudd objected shrewdly, “somebody would have stumbled on it, by accident.”

  “Very likely, men did,” Cameron agreed. “Not many—the shape of the coils is not one you would want for anything else; and the turns must be very exactly formed and aligned, or else the regenerative effect is damped out. The few who

  did it must have been instantly electrocuted—because they didn’t also stumble on Barstow’s safety-winding.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” muttered Hudd.

  Cameron pointed up the edge of the ravine, to a shattered tree-stump.

  “Mr. Lord wanted a demonstration, yesterday,” he said. “I straightened part of the safety-coil on a small power unit from that machine, to step up the voltage, and tossed it into a green tree yonder.”

  “A rather reckless thing to do,” commented the lean man. Hudd said nothing. His black-haired, ham-sized hand tossed the red pebble, aimlessly, and caught it again. His troubled eyes peered at the stump, at the gaunt man’s weapon, at the enormous tower of the Great Director.

  “You have ten minutes to give up the killer, Mr. Hudd,” drawled Frank Enlow. “Otherwise you may see a better demonstration.”

  Hudd snorted: a blast of defiance.

  “I’ll wait for it," he gasped. “You can’t bluff me.”

  A shadow came over Cameron’s face. When his tired eyes closed for a moment, I saw the blue stains under them. He sat back on his heels, his emaciated body sagging as if from a punishing blow.

  “It’s no bluff, Mr. Hudd.” He paused as if to gather himself for a weary and yet vehement protest. “You just don’t grasp what the equalizer means. It ended the Atomic Age. The Directorate was part of that lost era. You can’t hope to restore it, now, any more than you could revive a fossil tyrannosaur. Perhaps you can cause some needless bloodshed and death.”

  Hudd’s wide mouth hardened with an unconvinced hostility.

  “Tyler spilt plenty of blood, building the first Directorate,” he commented coldly. “I may have to pay the same price again, but I expect to win. Perhaps Tyler’s garrisons mutinied when they heard about this equalizer. My men won’t hear about it.”

  “It wasn’t mutiny, Mr. Hudd,” Cameron insisted. “There was no fighting. The Directorate wasn’t overthrown—it simply ceased to exist. When the equalizer appeared, there was no more reason for Fort America than there is for arrow-makers. The officers recognized that, as well as the men. The garrison just packed up and came home.”

  “Home to what?” Hudd challenged him. “The people here were already deserting the cities, leaving nearly everything they owned. There must have been something else wrong— perhaps some biotoxin loose—to cause such panic.”

  “You still don’t get it.” Cameron shook his head with a tired impatience. “The equalizer freed the city-dwellers, just as it did the garrison. Because most people didn’t live in cities by choice. They were huddled into them by the old division of labor—specialized cogs in a social machine grown ruinously complex.

  “The equalizer abolished the division of labor—at least in military technology. Every man with a piece of wire became a complete military specialist, competent to defend himself. Using the new control of atomic and molecular processes, he could also provide for nearly all his own ordinary wants. Complexity was replaced with stark simplicity.

  “Take the couple who lived here.” He nodded regretfully at the empty house behind us. “They built their own home, made their own food and clothing. They were setting up this dam, when they were murdered, to save their own land from erosion. They weren’t slaves of any single skill, or prisoners of any class. They had no reason to hate or fear their neighbors—until we came along.”

  Hudd blinked, still doubtful.

  “Why were the cities so utterly abandoned?” he questioned. "Why was all that money left behind, as Lord reports? Why were signs posted, warning people out?”

  Cameron glanced up at the great frowning ship.

  “The cities were a product of the old technology, and they died with it,” he argued doggedly. “The day of the equalizer, workers walked out and services stopped. Therer was no food, no power, no water, no sewage disposal. City life was impossible, without division of labor.

  “As for money, paper dollars were merely shares in the extinct Atomic Age. Metal was still useful—but the equalizer must have made it easier to refine new metal than to wreck the cities. About the danger—I forgot to ask.”

  He turned inquiringly to Frank Enlow.

  “Criminals,” the lean man drawled. “A few men and women too stupid or too vicious to use the equalizer. They never left the cities. They stayed hidden, trying to exist by raiding and looting. They used the old military weapons. A few of them became very cunning and dangerous. The signs were posted during our campaigns to hunt them out.”

  “Don’t you have worse criminals?” Hudd demanded shrewdly. “Those who do use the equalizer?”

  Enlow shook his head.

  "The users of the equalizer have very little economic reason for crime,” he said. “And people armed with it aren’t very likely victims. It’s simply because crime has become so rare that the Hawkinses weren’t alert.”

  Hudd’s eyes dwelt on the lean man’s weapon.

  “This Brotherhood?” he asked shrewdly. “If it isn’t a government—what is it?”

  “A voluntary substitute.” The gaunt man glanced at me. “Your father’s last great project, Mr. Barstow. After he got back his health, he spent the rest of his years organizing the Brotherhood.”

  “Just what does it do?”

  “Runs schools and libraries and hospitals,” Enlow told him. “Supports laboratories. Builds irrigation projects. Anything for the public good. It, operates the post office and issues money against metal deposits.”

  Hudd nodded triumphantly.

  “If it can do all that, it can surrender to me.”

  “The Brotherhood has no authority.” Enlow shook his head, rawboned and resolute. “People may join or leave it, as they please. It is supported by voluntary contributions, and the elected officers serve without pay. They can’t surrender, Mr. Hudd—but they can organize the common defense.”

  “If you have no law,” Hudd demanded shrewdly, “then why do you want Mr. Lord?”

  Enlow stared back at him, brown and lean and angry. “In the Brotherhood, we enter a voluntary agreement to respect and defend the rights of others. I think your Mr. Lord has proved himself a public menace.”

 
Hudd pulled absently at his thick lower lip.

  “If you’ve got no government,” his harsh voice came, "then I think you’ve got a madhouse—and all the madmen armed with insane weapons.”

  Enlow shook his dark head with a lean dignity.

  "You’re living under a false philosophy, Mr. Hudd. You believe that men are evil, that they have to be driven. Fortunately, that philosophy is mistaken—because men with equalizers can’t be driven.”

  As Hudd made another derisive snort, Enlow looked at his watch.

  “Unfortunately, a few men are bad,” he added gently. “Your time is up. We want those killers.”

  Cameron turned back to Hudd, importunately.

  “Why don’t you give them up?” he urged. “And let me tell your men about the equalizer?”

  "I will not.” Hudd came laboriously to his feet, red and gasping from the effort. “I still think you’d have a hard time to silence Fort America—with all your equalizers. And my ultimatum still expires at noon.”

  Having delivered that ominous blast, Hudd turned back to Jane Enlow. She had been listening to her radiophone, absorbed. Now, as she became aware of Hudd’s hungry eyes, she started, a rich color darkened her tan. Hudd made her a bow, ponderously graceful, in the manner he must have learned while he was Tyler’s Director-General of Europe.

  “I deeply regret the awkward circumstances of this first meeting, Miss Enlow.” He smiled with a genial admiration. “But I hope soon to offer you an introduction to the best society of the New Directorate.”

  Flushing deeply, she said nothing.

  Hudd bowed again. After a moment, he stalked heavily back toward his life-craft.

  Little Victor Lord, watching from the other craft, must have misunderstood that bow. I can imagine his sweating consternation when he saw the apparently friendly ending of the little conference and decided, no doubt, that Hudd had abandoned him.

  The crewmen, evidently, opposed his flight.

  The sudden crash of guns made a muffled booming in the thin bright hull. Two spacemen jumped wildly out of the open valve, which slammed immediately behind them. One of them stumbled on his knees, pressing red, agonized hands against his wounds. The other tried to drag him out of danger—until the incandescent blast of the jets flattened and hid them both.

  X

  The fugitive life-craft lifted on that column of thundering fire, at first very slowly and jerkily—Lord was not an expert pilot. It leaned drunkenly from the upright, so that I thought it was going to crash. But the roar was suddenly louder. It lifted, swept above our heads, hurtled northward up the valley. Behind it, when the dust and smoke had cleared, the blackened forms of the two spacemen moved no longer.

  The tall man turned, with his gaunt face grimly angular, and watched the life-craft go. It became a vanishing point of bright metal and violet fire. Its thunder rolled away.

  His clumsy-seeming weapon lifted, at last, and clicked.

  “Down, BarstowP the girl screamed at me. “Cover your eyes.”

  Astonished to find that I was left standing alone, I dropped. The flash of heat stung my skin. I looked, afterward, in time to see the small bright cloud of iridescent metal vapor fading in the blue northward sky, turning into a white tuft of rising cumulus. The crash came a whole minute later, like one loud peal of thunder.

  Enlow shook his lean head, regretfully.

  “Too bad it happened that way,” he said. “The two guards were only obeying orders. The equalizer might have made them very good members of the Brotherhood.”

  Calmly, as he spoke, he slipped another little self-propelled missile out of a case at his belt, pulled a safety-key out of it, and pushed it down the muzzle of his launcher. Shaped very much like the huge guided missiles of Fort America, it was only six inches long.

  Halfway to his own craft, Mr. Julian Hudd stood peering back toward us. He was shading his eyes, dazedly shaking his dark shaggy head, as if the flash had nearly blinded him.

  “Your demonstration, Mr. Hudd!” Cameron shouted after him, urgently. “Now will you give up your New Directorate?”

  “Jim, this is an act of war,” his great bellow came back defiantly. “Your damned Brotherhood will feel the consequences.”

  He went on at a stumbling, laborious run, toward his waiting craft. Frank Enlow was beckoning us imperatively back toward the gully.

  “Wait!” Jane Enlow called out, eagerly. “Mr. Doyle is getting through.”

  She listened again. The gaunt man looked warily back at the enormous bright nose of the cruiser which still loomed, high above the ravine’s rim, and speculatively hefted his launcher. I turned to Cameron, puzzled.

  “So you've seen Doyle?”

  “Last night.” He watched the girl’s shining eyes, anxious for the news. “The Enlows live just over the ridge—the first place I found. Their phone began ringing while I was there. It was Rory Doyle. I told him about the equalizer, and he came over to help us stop Mr. Hudd.”

  Awed, I glanced up at the appalling pillar of the Great Director. “How?”

  “The first two landing parties had already got in touch with the Brotherhood,” Cameron explained. “They were being indoctrinated with the equalizer. The plan was to send them back to spread the word among the crews. But Hudd pushed his own scheme too fast for that to succeed.”

  Anxiously, he watched the intent girl.

  “The only way left was to try a broadcast. Not quite so good, but I think the signal crews will mostly recognize and trust Rory Doyle. It took a little time to improvise a net of short wave stations strong enough to reach out through the ionosphere to the other ships and the moon.”

  Suddenly, the eager-faced girl slipped off her single headphone. She held it up between us, twisted a volume-control, gestured for us to listen.

  “—specifications of the equalizer.” Thinned and small, hoarse with a weary tension, it was the voice of Rory Doyle. “The absolute dimensions, remember, may be varied at will.

  It is the proportionate dimensions, and the shape and alignment of the turns, which must be precisely true.

  “The safety-coil, remember, must always have a greater number of turns than the primary—otherwise you have a matter-bomb, instead of a power plant. The number and spacing of the secondary turns control the maximum voltage, according to the rule I gave you.

  “Now, pass the word along!”

  His tiny-seeming voice held a tired elation.

  “Membership in the Brotherhood is open to every man of you. Now you are welcome on earth. Mr. Hudd’s ill-advised threats will be forgotten. You have nothing to fear—so long as you respect the rights of others. The officers of the Brotherhood wish me to say that you are welcome home.”

  His voice ceased. The girl took back the headphone, and her father led us up the floor of the rocky little gorge. We stopped, presently, to climb a fem-grown slope and look back across the valley.

  The interstellar cruiser still towered out of the smoking forest, incredibly enormous. Nearer, the tiny pencil of Hudd’s life-craft stood mirror-bright upon a blackened island in the green. Between the fins of it, I saw a doll-like figure—hammering with frantic fists upon the shining valve.

  “Mr. Julian Hudd,” murmured Cameron, almost with pity.

  We hurried on. We were crossing the low ridge into the next valley, when the ground quivered. The jets of the cruiser made a deafening, crushing reverberation. The bright immensity of it lifted, on a pillar of terrible fire.

  Jane Enlow was listening again, as the thunder faded.

  “They are going to the shore of the new Sahara Sea,” she told us. “A new irrigation project—the crews can take up land, there.”

  An immense quiet fell upon us, after that thunder had died. I stood apart, staring into the sky, long after the living blue spark of the jets was gone. For the meaning of the equalizer was breaking slowly over me. A wave of deep emotion left me awed and changed and lifted, somehow strong and free.

  “What happened to Mr
. Hudd?” Cameron was asking.

  “I don’t know.” Twisting at the knobs, Jane Enlow looked pale with concern for him. “The crews wouldn’t let him come back on the ship. I’m afraid he was killed in the blast.”

  Many months had passed, however, before I learned the actual and somewhat surprising fate of Mr. Julian Hudd— who had been Director-General of Europe and Special Secretary of the Squaredeal Machine, and who was still an adaptive and resourceful man.

  The following summer, after we had all been inducted into the Brotherhood and taught the equalizer, I came hack in answer to a hospitable invitation to visit the home of Frank Enlow. Already I had claimed a small homestead beside a new western sea, and friendly neighbors had helped me build the first rooms of a house there. I wanted to see Jane Enlow.

  She wasn’t at home, however, when I arrived.

  Frank Enlow, the lean ex-janitor and the last friend of Tyler, met me at the door of his pleasant home. He began to talk of Mr. Julian Hudd, who had survived unhurt by the ion-jets of the departing cruiser. He had established himself in the vacant house that had belonged to the murdered Hawkins couple. Frank Enlow took me to see him, there.

  Now a simple brother of the Brotherhood, we found Hudd plowing his young orchard. Walking behind a small equalizer-tractor, he was bare to the waist and brown with sun. Sweat ran in rivulets down his dusty flanks, but his paunch and his jowls and his several chins were no longer the burdens they had been. I scarcely recognized him.

  “Glad to see you, Chad.” He used my first name, as always, but now his hard handclasp had a genuine cordiality. His great booming voice seemed mellowed, happy. With an air of simple, equalitarian friendship, he invited us into his home.

  “Come along, Chad,” he urged genially. “You’ll want to see the wife. I think you’ll remember her—the former Miss Jane Enlow.”

  The Peddler’s Nose

  • • •