Fire in the Heavens (1958)

by George O. Smith

  “Holy mackerel!”

  “To say the very least!” Jerry placed the typed tissues on the bench. “The story continues—still indirectly quoting our anonymous spokesman—that Phelps discovered the solar engine while investigating another unknown factor about two years ago—at the very time the sun’s disturbances were supposed to have started. Also, even before Professor Lasson made his first alarming observation, a pilot model of the Jet had been in operation. However, opines our masked voice of the unknown scientists, at that time the Jet’s influence on Sol was probably so small as to have been imperceptible.

  “This mysterious town-crier makes the point that every natural disaster the world has ever experienced—floods, fires, earthquakes, famines, heavy storms, everything—has been able to be remedied by man. To be sure, the cost in human life and money has been tremendous, but through his own ingenuity and courage, man has done a pretty good job in repairing such damage that often he himself has caused.

  “But what chance has man to repair the immeasurable devastation that even the tiniest hole in the sun’s core might bring forth—perhaps an infinitesimal puncture, and perhaps one caused by man, which increased in depth, size, and peril at an incalculably swift rate?

  “I now quote again,” said Jerry Woods, glancing down at the sheet, “and here is where our famous but reticent spokesman climbs on the soapbox and starts waving his arms.

  “Was there no defense? No recourse? Must we stand bound and helpless shackled by fear, incapable of the slightest action to show we still retain some small measure of human courage, even in the face of the approaching holocaust?”

  “And here,” commented Jerry, “our friend really throws it in the fan. Listen: ‘What penalty could be demanded of any individual or any group guilty of starting this avalanche which will soon shrivel us all in its fierce flaming breath? Surely, we are still men enough to exact some form of retribution, absurdly inadequate though it must be. Can’t you hear the billions of men and women of every nation, race and creed, demanding in one single voice:

  “‘Find the murderer who has condemned us and our children! Let us know, at least, the one final satisfaction of watching him die!”

  “But we must act at once! Our allotted minutes are running out. For us all, there may be no tomorrow!”

  Jerry Woods laughed sourly. “Nice example of well-balanced, objective news presentation, isn’t it? It starts out worse than the greenest cub’s first effort, and ends up like a radio pitchman warning you not to put off till tomorrow those you can hang today! Oh, nuts! If the Blade carries this, I’ll bet they’re on the street now, selling papers like crazy. Talk about a rabble-rousing—Hey!”

  For Jeff had suddenly lunged for the phone behind Jerry, nearly knocking him off balance. He dialed swiftly, glancing up as he waited for the connection. His lips were taut, colorless.

  “You’re so right, Jerry! This story could easily start a chain-reaction riot. And if a mob hits the Roman Lab, and they get their hands on Lucille—”

  He shook his head, his eyes haunted. “I wouldn’t want to know of any human being—good or bad—to have that kind of death!”

  A few hours earlier, two metropolitan newspapers received the Universal news release with varied but typical reactions.

  In the quiet, air-conditioned city room of the Herald, the city’s oldest sheet, where it was rumored that even a copy-boy must hold a Ph.D. degree, the story went its routine way from the telegraph desk to the day city editor—a standing order on anything touching the nova.

  The editor scanned it and his brow wrinkled in puzzlement. The story itself was fantastically bad, but there was something more to it than that Two questions immediately presented themselves to his trained newspaperman’s brain.

  The first was that Universal had gone completely berserk to allow this tale—amateurish, formless and without any real foundation or substance—to get on the wire at all. He’d check that at once.

  The second was that someone—perhaps this anonymous “spokesman” who fronted for the equally vague group of “eminent scientists,” wanted badly to grind an axe.

  Said axe, naturally, to be applied to the corporate neck of Roman Enterprises. And more specifically to that of Dr. Louis Phelps. And most probably to the charming and capable Lucille Roman, sometimes referred to as “The Pirate Princess of Finance.”

  But that wasn’t what put the steely glint in the eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles. It was simply the idea that any individual would dream of using the columns of his newspaper to advance his personal purpose.

  He summoned his top reporter. “This thing may be a joke,” he said, “or it may be a pipe-dream. Let’s see if any of these nameless people really exist. Track it down. Find out who’s after Roman’s scalp and why. And it’s just a hunch, but you’d better start out out at Roman Lab itself—and take a couple of photographers with you.’ Something may pop there, if the Blade gives this a play.”

  As Jerry Woods had predicted, that strangely vague but threatening news release was meat for the tabloid Blade.

  An aggressive newspaper, which knew that a photograph of a shapely blonde trunk-murderess would sell more papers than news of the latest French cabinet crisis, it was geared for just such items.

  No sooner had the dispatch come from the teletype than it traveled like flame on the wind to the office of the publisher himself.

  Within five minutes, he had gotten legal clearance from his libel expert, and for the next half hour he was occupied with a small forest of telephones at one comer of his desk.

  The circulation department was alerted. Editorial, and Art were told just how to play it up so that the Roman Jet edition, as it was called, would sell more copies in less time than any paper in the city’s history.

  In the city room, thin young men chain-smoked while their forefingers, flying on typewriter keys, set up their machine-gun clatter. Copy-readers, ties loosened to their midriffs, shirt-sleeves rolled above elbows, wore out pencil after pencil. Everywhere wheels speeded up, and soon the great presses were rolling out the fat, black scareheaded papers, which were quickly loaded on waiting trucks.

  Nor was that all. After the first steam was up, the publisher was whisked to the top floor that quartered the Blade radio and TV station.

  There, the head news commentator, a cadaverous middle-aged man who publicized himself as ‘‘The Voice of the City,” listened as the publisher outlined the way he wanted the story handled.

  Mr. Voice of the City was well qualified for his job. An ex-carnival barker, plus a hitch as a shouting, salvation-selling evangelist, he owned both lung power and an invective eloquence gauged to play upon the elementary emotions of the thoughtless. He had a rasping, ear-tearing nasal voice that could be clearly heard in the busiest boiler factory.

  He was at his most formidable in verbal attack, Over the microphone, in the space of three minutes flat, he could rip to shreds the characters of those who hitherto had been sacrosanct. His technique made full use of the Big Lie, the unanswerable, loaded question, the barbed and baited innuendo. And backed by the Blades powerful legal battery, he was practically libel-proof.

  The tabloid’s public relished his every word. He was the tough kid with the frozen snowball whose unerring aim sent the high hats of the dignified sailing in the gutter. He was Saint George—as the Blade’s editorial cartoons frequently pointed out—courageously charging the ferocious dragon variously labeled “Vested Interests,” “Corporate Power,” or whatever political party happened to hold sway at the time.

  So the Universal news release was made to order for both the Blade and its Voice.

  The vast majority of people sweated out each minute in a clammy paralysis of fear. In the face of the almost unimaginable calamity threatening them, they were helpless. And the realization of their utterly hopeless position set their fear and their anger desperately seeking any outlet.

  If nothing could be done to combat or forestall the nova, then they needed
the reassurance of knowledge. What had caused it?

  Better, who had caused it? Who could be held responsible for the earth’s annihilation? Whoever it was, though the world might be in its death-throes tomorrow or the day after, fear-stricken multitudes clamored for “justice.”

  Thus the fuel was ready and waiting. It needed only the spark to turn it into a consuming holocaust of hatred and violence.

  In the southwest quarter of the city, where lived most of the industrial workers, the Blade’s trucks slewed to the curb, flung out their baled packages of newspapers and drove on.

  The sides of each truck carried boldly-lettered signs: “Blade Exclusive! Roman Blamed for Nova!”

  Meanwhile, the penetrating, nasal tones of the Voice of the City came from thousands of radios, peddling its hysteria, pounding the drum for the scarehead that blazed on the Blades page one.

  Groups of men and women, many of whom had existed for weeks in a vacuum of fear, now appeared on street-comers, their eyes wild as they clutched the tabloids, listening to the frenetic bleats of hate yammering its accusations of Roman Enterprises as the agent of their destruction, as “the murderer of the world.”

  From time to time their faces turned to the southwest where each night they could see the huge electric sign over the laboratories, visible for miles, advertising Roman Enterprises.

  Small groups of men, and a few women, faces grim, papers clenched in their fists, started in that direction.

  In half an hour, a mob numbering thousands, was marching in silent determination toward the object of their vengeful wrath.

  In the eyes of each man was a bestial hunger to destroy, to rip asunder, to murder.

  They boiled up the slight rise that held the buildings of the Roman Laboratory. They paused, uncertain, before the tall, electrically-charged fence. The uniformed armed guards fell back, closing the gate and shouting for Security Chief O’Boise,

  O’Boise came on the run. The thundering rumble of the mob was far too loud for a single voice, even that of O’Boise. He took to the microphone, though he knew that an unaided voice would do far more toward quelling them than the sight of a man gesticulating soundlessly into a transmitter, while his voice came out like thunder from loudspeakers mounted on towers behind him.

  “Halt!” he shouted at last.

  The roar of the mob increased.

  “Halt, or we fire!”

  “Go to hell!” screamed several in the, crowd. The phrase caught on, and the entire mob began to chant the three words until the noise became a wordless animal roar of defiance.

  One bold man in a checked shirt broke from the mob and crashed against the gates, flailing them with a club. The sentry looked at O’Boise. O’Boise nodded and there was the flat crack of a rifle. The man screamed and fell, blood pouring from his thigh. The mob roared and surged forward. Rifles cracked four times more and from the nearby guards’ shelter three more sentries rushed, carrying a machine gun, which they mounted oh the sidewalk that led from the gate to the front portal. They fired a brief burst above the heads of the mob. It slowed but did not stop the forward surge.

  Then came a flash of fire from the mob and one guard dropped. Stones and clubs flew through the air and another guard was felled. His buddy ran forward and dodged the barrage of thrown missiles until he was standing beside the fallen one. Then from his hip pocket he took a grenade and hurled it over the wire fence. He stooped to pick up his fallen friend.

  The grenade arched up, over, and down into the waiting hands of a man with a quick arm. He hurled it back and it burst above the fence, halfway between the guards and the mob. It spattered them with pellets and a cloud of gas erupted in midair. The gas drifted down slowly and made both guards and mob cough.

  Another tear-gas grenade went hurtling over the fence to burst among the mob.

  “Down and dig in!” yelled O’Boise.

  A brief volley of shots rang out and chips flew from the sidewalk by the machine gun.

  “Fire!”

  The machine gun chattered and a half dozen of the mob dropped, howling. One guard fell, clutching his stomach, another stumbled, clipped on the kneecap by a thrown brickbat. The guard first downed by thrown missiles aimed and fired, dropping one mobster. The machine gun chattered again and dropped another seven.

  Then, from the mob came spinning over the fence a length of hydraulic pipe about eighteen inches long and two inches in diameter. It was capped on both ends, and from one end protruded a few inches of sputtering fuse.

  The homemade bomb burst over the heads of the machine gun crew, spattered them with jagged shards of metal pipe and stunned them with its blast. The smoke and noise covered more gunfire, which dropped another guard.

  The crowd surged forward against the fence, and started climbing. Madmen they were, a hundred of them climbing the loose-mesh wire of the fence like monkeys.

  “Stop!” screamed O’Boise.

  The first man that reached the top touched the charged wire and dropped backward upon his fellows like a stone. Then there was an electric flash as one man at the top threw a length of chain over the charged wire and grounded it.

  The mob surged up and over, the guns chattered and dropped them by ones and twos—but not enough of them. The machine gun went into action as the foremost of the mob dropped to the ground inside of the fence.

  Some of them headed for the gate.

  “Stop them!” yelled O’Boise to the machine-gun operator. He grabbed his revolver and fired again and again at the rest of the insiders, who were charging the guards’ position.

  The machine gunner dropped first one and then another, his misses going through the wire fence and into the crowd.

  Then the gate swung open and the mad mob surged in. They washed through the gate and across the lawn, an inexorable living tide, hungering for its human sacrifice. In they went, in and past the guards. In and past—and over—and when they had passed, they left them lying there.

  O’Boise groaned once, lifted a feeble fist, then fell back rolling convulsively onto his face.

  The mob surged up to the building and broke in. They found Lucille Homan at the telephone with Doctor Phelps beside her,

  Lucille saw them and dropped the phone. Phelps turned and held up his hands.

  “We’re not—” he started to say. They grabbed him, overpowered him, hurled him to the floor. More of them went for Lucille Roman. She fled through the door at the back of the office, slammed it and shoved a desk against it. She went through that office and up the fire-stairwell to the roof with the mob howling after her.

  At the top, Lucille toppled a metal cabinet filled with fire-fighting equipment, down the stairs. It carried the foremost of them back. Those behind the leaders hurled their casualties and cabinet alike over the center wall of the boxshaped staircase and continued on to the top.

  Panting with fear and excitement, Lucille Roman raced across the roof and leaped into the spacelock of the ship parked there. She struggled with the heavy door, hoping to move the servo-motor faster. The door closed slowly, ponderously, and not fast enough.

  Hands appeared, and Lucille hit at them with her heels. They dropped and more came to take their place. The door finally closed with a sickening crunch leaving the ends of several fingers on the floor inside,

  Lucille retched and was sick there in the spacelock. She trembled, frantic with fear and completely unnerved. Then she went up to the viewport. She heard the spatter of bullets against the aluminum hull. Some of them came through and ricocheted inside like angry hornets. Revolvers could not penetrate the skin of the ship but the heavier bullets from the rifles could—and did.

  From the viewport she saw them haul Doctor Phelps out of the laboratory. He was still protesting weakly that the Roman Jet was not solar power.

  They hung him from a limb of the tree in the front yard of the Roman Laboratories. Thus Doctor Phelps died, believing that his jet did not tap the sun. It was unjust, and swift, hot anger surged up in Lucille.
She fired up the driving gear, and the spacecraft rose from the roof.

  The men on the roof died like flies under the backsplash of that solar jet. Then Lucille Roman dropped the spacecraft into the yard and eight long lancets of sheer-energy rayed down to sear the ground beneath the ship. She swept the ship in a spiraling circle and danced it up and down.

  The eight jets left a swathe of black and flaming death however briefly they touched.

  Sickened at what she saw, Lucille lifted the ship again and went up and up until the cabin whistled with the air screaming through the bullet holes in the hull. She was without plan, without hope.

  She knew she must think this out. So, to give herself breathing time, she headed the ship toward the Rockies and landed it in a remote, desolate canyon where no man lived. There she might exist for a time, while she planned her next moves.

  Slowly Jeff Benson put the receiver back on the hook. “The yelling’s died,” he said in a barely audible voice. “The last thing I heard were Phelps’s shouts that his Jet had not tapped the sun at all.”

  “How about Roman herself?” Jerry Woods asked.

  “She left when they grabbed Phelps, 1 imagine. Hurled the phone at them and took off. I hope she got away.”

  Jerry nodded. Then; “There’s some more to this news report-some diagrams along with the article. They came over the wires, too. Maybe you can do something with some of them.”

  Jeff squinted at the cloudy reproductions that Jerry handed him. He grunted. “None too clear.”

  “But they’re some help?”

  “I don’t know, Jerry. Maybe.”