The Early Pohl

by Frederik Pohl

  He stared intently at Nolan, then said: "Why?"

  Nolan smiled easily. "A lot of reasons—all of them personal. Who are you?"

  Woller stood up. "I own this ship," he said coldly. "I didn't ask you aboard. Now that you're here, you'll answer my question or get off."

  The time for a showdown had arrived. Well, Nolan thought, it had to come some time. He was strangely relaxed.

  He shrugged. "You've got a point there," he admitted. "Well—"

  He frowned and raised his hand as though to scratch his head, changed the motion in mid-air. And with the speed of a hopped-up narcophene smoker, the thin-snouted pyro was in his fist, slowly traversing a lethal arc that covered both men.

  His voice was taut as he spoke. "It's your ship, Woller, but I'm taking it over. Woller—Alan Woller—look at me. Do you know who I am?"

  Woller stared deep into the icy eyes confronting him. The doubt flared again in his own. His jaw dropped slack. His brows lifted and he whispered, "Nolan!"

  Nolan didn't bother to nod. He said grimly, "Your hands—hold them where they are. You, too, Vincennes. I've come a long way for this and I don't mind killing. You taught me that, Woller. A man's life is nothing. Mine was nothing to you, when it endangered the dirty little treacheries you were working."

  The life seemed to have gone out of Woller and left only a hulking, pallid carcass, propped up by the internal pressure of its own fear. There was murky horror crawling in his eyes.

  Steve Nolan looked at him and his thin lips curled into a snarling grin. But those were only his lips. Strangely, there was no triumph in his heart, none of the fierce pleasure he'd dreamed of all those dreary years. There was only dull disgust, and the hint of a long-dead hope for rest again. Rest, and the common things of life on the Earth which was forbidden to him.

  Woller could die before him now, and he would be avenged. But Woller alive could say the words that would wipe out the banishment, would return him to the green star that was home. Woller could be made to confess—

  "I ought to blast you now," he said in a soft, chill tone that was like a whip to Woller, jerking him upright. "I ought to, and I will if I must. But you can live if you want to."

  Woller was licking his lips, his face a mask, only his panic-stricken eyes alive.

  "You can live," Nolan repeated. "A full statement about the Junta frame, in writing. Write it out and thumbprint it, and we'll telestat it to the nearest TPL station. Then you can have the lifeboat, Woller, and as much of a start as TPL gives you. Are you willing to pay that much for your life, Woller?"

  Woller's lips were stiff but he forced the words through. "Go to hell."

  Nolan nodded, and the deadly weariness settled down over him again. "I see your point, of course," he said slowly. "Tri-planet doesn't come out here much and a man is reasonably safe from them. But you, Woller—power's your life blood. And a man on the run can't have much power. I know."

  His finger curled on the trigger of the pyro and Woller, staring avidly, desperately, whitened at the mouth. His lips moved as though about to form words-Nolan's trigger-sharp senses caught a hint of movement behind him. Fool! he thought desperately. The door! He tried to hurl his body aside, out of the way of the door that opened behind him. But he couldn't do that and keep the pyro leveled on the two men at the desk. He saw Woller, exultant hatred leaping into his purpled face, plunging for a drawer of the desk; saw the door opening and someone stepping through. Then, just as he was leveling the gun on Woller again, he saw the flashing swing of the other man in the room. Forgotten Vincennes—with a heavy nightstone paperweight held bludgeon-like in his hand, leaping in at him! He had no chance even to try to turn. The weight was coming down on the side of his head. All he could do was try to roll with it.

  But the momentum was immense and the heavy weight struck him down to the floor, drove him headlong into unconsciousness. . . .

  Somebody was kicking him. Nolan groaned once, then compressed his lips as he remembered where he was.

  He opened his eyes and rolled over. The blubbery Venusian second was standing over him, face sullen but eyes glinting with perverse pleasure. He raised his heavy spaceman's boot again—

  "Hold it," said Woller from the desk. They were still in the cabin.

  Woller got up, came over, looking down at Nolan. His bearing was confident again; he exuded an aura of brutal power.

  "You should have killed me, Nolan," he said. "You only get the one chance, you see."

  Nolan silently pushed himself erect. His ribs were agonized where the second had booted them, and a blinding throb in the skull reminded him of the captain's blow. He was conscious that his armpit holster hung light. The pyro was gone.

  Vincennes had left. Only Woller and the Venusian second were in the cabin with him. "My only doubt," Woller was saying, "is whether to blast you now or save you for a little later, when I'll have more time."

  "Sure," said Nolan tonelessly. "If you want my vote, it's for now. Get it over with."

  Woller nodded. "That would be much pleasanter for you. I think I'll save you." He nodded slowly. Then, to the mate, "Take him below!"

  Back down the corridor, the mocking stars still bright through the crystal underfoot. Back and down, till they came to the grav room, where the pulsing, whining generators spun their web of antigravitational power.

  "We don't have a brig," the mate apologized. "But I think this will hold you in."

  Eyes warily on Nolan, he circled him and opened a round metal door. It was an unused storeroom, bare except for rows of vacant metal shelves.

  "In you go," said the Venusian, and Nolan complied. The door slammed behind him and was bolted.

  There was a whine in the air, he noticed. The singing of the grav-generators. It was not unpleasant . . . at least, not unbearable, he corrected himself. But how it persisted! It was constant as the keening of a jammed frequency-modulator, high as the wail of a banshee.

  He let his aching body slip to the floor, lay there without even trying to think. He raised his head for a searching second, but there was nothing to see. Bare walls, bare shelves.

  He was helpless. His chance might come when the second let him out. Till then, he would sleep.

  When had he slept last? Save for the few minutes of unconsciousness, it was easily thirty hours. He pillowed his head on his arm. . . .

  He moved his head uncomfortably, burrowed his ear deeper into his biceps. That damned keening! He shifted restlessly, stopped his exposed ear with his other hand. That movement racked the beaten ribs, but the shrilling, soft and remorseless, kept on. It was enough to drive a man mad! It was—

  He sat bolt upright, eyes flaring angrily. That was what Woller had planned!

  It was torture—subtle, undramatic, simple. But pure, horrid torture.

  Nolan's face was gray with strain. It was incredible that a sound, a noise, could become a threat. He'd heard the same sound a million times before, though never at such close range, or from such titanic generators. But now—

  He began trying to fill his mind with other things, but there was no room for thought in a brain that was brimming with naked sound. Snatches of school-days poetry, long columns of multiplication tables—They jumbled in his brain. The lines ran together and muddled, were drowned out by the wail of the generators. He gave up and sat there, forcing himself to be still, while the sound hovered in the atmosphere all around him, his jaw muscles taut enough to bite through steel, a great pulse pounding in his temples. . . .

  Flesh could stand only so much. After a while—he didn't know when—he was mercifully unconscious.

  A volcano erupted under him and awoke. His whole body was a mass of flame now, head throbbing like the jets of a twenty-ton freight skid, chest and ribs as sore as though they were flayed. A sickening weight held him crushed against the metal floor.

  The roaring from without was the sound of the rockets, loud enough to drown out the whine that had nearly killed him. The ship was landing. And at once
there was a gentle jar, then a dizzying vertigo as the grav-web was cut off abruptly. The rockets died down and were silent.

  Everything was silent. The change was fantastic, a dream. Nolan, lying there, thought the silence was the finest thing he had ever heard.

  It didn't last. There were footsteps outside, and the Venusian second mate entered. "On your feet," he said curtly. "The boss is ready for you."

  Nolan stood up cautiously. His feet were shaky, but he could use them. He stepped over the rounded sill and followed the Venusian's directions. There were men in the corridor, some of them in heat suits. Nolan wondered where they were. Neptune was on the other side of the sun—could they be as far in as Uranus? How long had he been unconscious!

  "Get moving," repeated the second, and Nolan moved.

  The blessed stillness! He was grinning to himself as he walked along the corridor, listening for the lethal whine that wasn't there any more. When they got to where Woller, space-suited and bloated, was directing a crew of men in the moving of a bulky object, Woller noted the grin. He was not pleased.

  "Enjoying yourself, Nolan?" he asked, unsmiling. "That will have to stop."

  A grin stayed on Nolan's face, but it was not the same one. It was a savage threat. Woller looked at it, and looked hastily away.

  "Stand him over in the corner," he said to the Venusian second. "I'll attend to him right away. Business first."

  The second jerked a thumb at the corner formed by the airlock door and the wall of the corridor. Nolan looked in the direction indicated, and a sudden tic in his brows showed a thought that had come to him. The red signal light winked out as he watched; the inner door had closed.

  He stared through the transparency at what was beyond. Darkness was all he could see—darkness, and the light-dotted outline of buildings in the distance. Just beyond the lock was something that looked like a skid, with men's figures around it. His forehead puckered, and his eyes returned to the signal light, now dark—

  The Venusian second watched Nolan limp slowly over to the indicated position. His eyes narrowed. "Hey, what's the matter?" he asked surlily.

  Nolan shook his head. "Something in my shoe," he said. He halted and balanced himself on one foot, poking into the offending footgear. "A button, I guess," he said as he drew out, concealed, something that he knew quite well was not a button.

  He breathed a silent prayer, and it was answered. The Venusian grunted and turned away. Nolan walked quickly over to the wall, by the lock light, turned and stood surveying the scene without interest. His hands apparently were linked idly behind him—but behind his back they were moving swiftly, dexterously. A clink of glass sounded, and Nolan winced as a sharp sliver cut his thumb. Then he stood motionless, waiting.

  The men were shock-wrapping a long, casket-like object. To judge by the care they were using, the contents were delicate and the handling would be rough, Nolan noted absently. Explosives, perhaps?

  The last loop of elastic webbing went around it, and the Venusian second pulled it taut. "All right," he grunted. "Take it away."

  "Lock!" bawled Woller as the men picked up the bundle. That was Nolan's signal.

  As slowly as he could manage he stepped idly away from the lock, away from the signal light, hugging the wall.

  A deckhand, not troubling to look at the warning light across the corridor—Nolan mentally thanked his gods—touched the release that opened the lock door. And—

  Ravenous flame lashed out from the wall.

  IV

  Nolan was in motion before the incandescent gases had died. The half-dozen men who had been in the corridor were either down on the floor or blindly reeling about. Even without a proton-reflector behind it to focus its fierce energies, a pyro charge exploded on unarmored men can do a lot of damage.

  Nolan blessed the hunch that had warned of trouble, the remembrance of an old spacer's trick that had led him to hide a pyro charge in his shoe, back there in the stateroom. Still it had been luck, pure and simple, that gave him the chance to open the signal light socket, take out the lume and put the pyro pellet between the contacts. When he'd got out of range and the automatic warning as the lock opened had touched it off—Catastrophe. He'd known when to close his eyes, where to stand for safety. The others hadn't. And so the others were blind.

  He grabbed a pyro from a writhing wretch on the floor—there was horror in him as he saw the seared face that had once been that of the Venusian second. He picked a heat suit out of the cubby, and was into it and in the lock before the blinded men who had escaped the full flare could recover themselves.

  The lock doors took an eternity to work, but at last he was out in the cold, black open. A hasty glance at the landscape told him nothing. Uranus or Pluto—it had to be one of them. That was all.

  A man was just coming out of the skid, perhaps twenty feet away. Nolan clicked on his radio, waited for the inevitable question—but it didn't come. The man's transparent faceplate merely turned incuriously to Nolan for a second, then bent to examination of the fastenings of the skid's lock. Nolan turned calmly and strode off along the side of the ship. When he rounded the stern he broke into a run, heading straight out across charred earth to a chain of hummocks that promised shelter.

  How long would pursuit be delayed? Late or soon, it would come. Nolan realized that he had no plan. But he had life, and freedom.

  He topped the first of the hummocks, scrambled down into the trough behind it. He was relatively safe there, as he cautiously elevated his head to examine the ship and what lay behind it.

  Already—it had been scant minutes since the carnage in the lock corridor—the search for him had begun. He saw a perfectly round spot of brilliance fall on the side of the ship, then dance away. Through the ice-clear Plutonian night he could make out the figure of a man with a hand light scanning the belly of the ship, looking to see if Nolan had hidden himself there. They would quickly learn the answer to that—and know what he had done.

  Beyond the ship were a few dim lights, distorted by a crystal dome.

  It was another city—or not quite a city, but a domed settlement out here in the wilderness.

  Without warning a sun blossomed on the side of the ship. Nolan stood frozen for a split second, then dropped, cursing. They'd seen him, somehow, had turned the ship's powerful landing beam on him. But how?

  A soundless bolt of lightning that splashed against a higher hill behind him drove speculation out of his mind. Nolan frowned. The ship was armed—he hadn't known that. Installation of pyros in interplanetary craft was the most forbidden thing of the starways. But there was no time for wonder.

  As another blast sheared off the crest of a hill, Nolan, keeping low, scuttled away behind the shelter of the hummocks. His only safety was in flight. Armor he had none. The frozen gases that comprised the hummocks would never stop the dread thrust of a properly-aimed pyro.

  He fled a hundred yards, then waited. Silence. He risked a quick look, saw nothing, retired behind the shelter of the hill to consider. They'd suspended fire—did they think him dead? Did they know he had escaped?

  Or was there a hidden danger in this? It might be a ruse. They could be waiting for him to move, to show himself. . . .

  Nolan shivered, and absently turned up the heat control of his suit. He felt suddenly hopeless. One man against—what? His thoughts, unbidden, reverted to the girl he had left in Avalon, and to the sordid fear that she might be what she seemed. Nolan's cheek muscles drew tight, and his face hardened. Woller, partly protected by his heat suit, undoubtedly had lived through the instant inferno when the pyro charge went off. That was one more thing against him—the girl. Nolan sighed.

  And a faint reverberation on the soles of his feet brought him stark upright, staring frantically over the sheltering mound of ice. A skid was racing down on him.

  Before he could move its light flared out, spotted him.

  And a tiny voice within his helmet said, "Don't move, Nolan. You can't get away now. You'll die
if you try. Next time you play hide-and-seek with me, Nolan—don't leave your helmet radio on!"

  If Woller had burned with rage before, now he was frozen. He was a blind man there before Nolan, his eyes swathed in thick white bandages, But the hulking Earthman with the pyro who stood by his side, and lean black Captain Vincennes at the controls, were eyes enough for him.

  "But I wish I could see you myself," Woller said softly, his fingers drumming idly against the wide fabric arm of his cushioned passenger's chair. "The ship's surgeon says it may be weeks before I see again. If I could afford to keep you alive that long—" He sighed regretfully. "No, I can't afford it," he concluded. "There are more important things, though nothing—" his voice shook but kept its chill calm—"that would give me more pleasure than to see you die."

  "We could save him, Woller," Vincennes said. "Pickle him in a sleep-box like—"

  "Be still, Vincennes!" Woller's voice was sharp. "I'll ask for advice when I want it!"

  A sleep-box—Nolan remembered suddenly what they were. Small coffins, large enough for a man, equipped with an atomic-powered generator that kept the occupant in a sort of half-death, not breathing or able to move, but capable of existing almost indefinitely without food.

  Nolan wondered absently what they were doing with sleep-boxes, then gave it up. It didn't matter. He cursed the carelessness that had led him to leave the radio on in his suit. It had been simple for the Dragonfly's radio-man to tune in on its carrier wave, get a radio fix on his position.

  The skid swerved abruptly in a sloppy turn, and the surly Earthman at the controls halted it and looked around. "Okay," he grunted. "Here we are."

  Woller nodded. "Take me out," he ordered. "Nolan, too."

  Nolan peered out the window. Absorbed in self-recrimination, he hadn't paid attention to their trip. He was surprised to find gleaming metal all around the skid. They were in a heat lock—they had come to the domed settlement.