Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  I guessed he had got that out of my mind too.

  “Obviously, however, the old, simple law cannot be applied between beings of two races so widely divergent as ours and yours. We must consider the relative value of the two.” That sounded ugly. “We have, by means of instruments which we believe to be infallible, measured carefully the intelligence of twelve members of your race, and discovered that the average is somewhat less than that of ours. Therefore,—since we believe intellectual scope to be the true measure of a being’s value to the universe—a greater number of your race must die in retribution for our deaths.

  “Since, though we are acquainted with your mental abilities and attainments, we do not know your concepts of universal law, we have awakened you from anesthetic sleep to inform us whether, in your estimation, this is just.”

  WELL, it was logic—cold-blooded, perfect, triumphant. And—Lord, it seemed a cheap method of getting rid of creatures with such frightful potentialities. I said I guessed it was, though I wondered if I was signing my own death warrant.

  The Dragon soon relieved my mind on that one, after a fashion. “You shall be allowed to live, in order that a record may survive of these proceedings. Perhaps your people may learn something of the lofty ideal of justice from the consideration of this incident. However,” he added dispassionately, “we will use you to make up the fractional difference.” That was where I really began to get the creeps. Not just because they were talking so cold-bloodedly about making a fraction of me, but because they referred so casually to their own total destruction as an “incident.” Because they spoke English and wore clothes, they had seemed somewhat human—but now I got a glimpse of just what a wide gulf lay between them and the human.

  Or perhaps there wasn’t so much difference after all. You know men will die for an ideal—but only if properly keyed up. It was the coldbloodedness of it that got me.

  “Fractional difference?” I asked, with my teeth chattering like dice. “Listen—if you’re planning to fractionate me, we Earthmen don’t come that way. We live whole or we die all over.”

  “We number seventy,” the Arcturian’s deep voice throbbed out. “By simple mathematics, based on the findings of our machines, justice requires that ninety-two and four-tenths Earthmen die to balance the equation.”

  This mixture of ideology and arithmetic got my goat worse than ever. “Look here,” I gulped. “You can’t kill four-tenths of a man.”

  “A light dose of the death ray will produce total and permanent paralysis,” boomed the Dragon. “Justice requires that you be paralyzed from the waist down.”

  I used to think a lot of justice, but now I began to think that if I heard it mentioned again I’d scream. I tried to make my voice steady, seeing I wouldn’t get anywhere by cracking up:

  “Listen, how about that guy whose hand was amputated because it got in your screen?” I stammered, my words tumbling over one another. “Don’t that count?”

  There was a faint ripple of attention, and my heart rose; the Arcturians conferred in their subsonic voices. It sounded like the room was full of swarming bees.

  From the confabulation, the Dragon emerged with the decision in his teeth.

  “It shall be so,” he thrummed. “The hand, which our study of your civilization has revealed to be of great value, shall count one-tenth of one Earthman. Your legs only shall be paralyzed.”

  I couldn’t think of any more arguments, so I let it stand. After all, I guessed I was a martyr to my country. Three-tenths of a martyr.

  “Your eleven captured companions, and eighty-one of the surrounding troops, will be destroyed to make up the tale,” went on the chairman, and I thought, strangely, that his voice was half-saddened, half-benign. The Arcturians were, after all, deciding on their own deaths that an ideal might be served. I actually felt—laugh if you like, but it’s true—I felt a little cheap to have struggled so against a little matter of partial paralysis for the sake of that same ideal. It was fantastic, monstrous to Earthly psychology. Earthmen would have fought back, wiped out thousands or millions of an alien race to save their own miserable lives. Yet to the Arcturians, the sacrifice was perfect, beautiful logic, logic worth dying for. In that moment, I could understand and—almost—sympathize.

  “WHEN, that is done,” went on the leader, “we shall lower our screens, release the imposed surface tension of our hull, and die.”

  In spite of my predicament, I found time to shudder and admire.

  An Arcturian slipped noiselessly forward, bent beside my glass bubble. A grotesque, oversize hand, wrinkled, black, deformed, slid out of the folds of his white robe; a knobby digit pressed a button on the side of my pedestal. From beneath, invisible gas rushed up into the dome around me; involuntarily I took a sharp breath, and I never felt it when I hit the floor.

  But I thought, later on, that I remembered being thrust into a humming, vibrating machine, in the midst of blinding glare and darkness, and hearing a chorus of mighty, throbbing voices, like a rhythmic thunder that blended with the crescendo of the machine, exclaiming all together: “Justice is served!”

  But that must have been an anesthetic dream. They wouldn’t have spoken in English.

  Here I am, anyway; you know the rest. The Arcturians died for the sake of a formula; but they were only what any race must finally become if it worships logic.

  “Have you any particular statement to make for the press, Corporal Clark?” inquired the reporter eagerly.

  Clark gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll be given a pension, since I’m certainly unfit for further service; but, you know, I don’t mind being out of the running as much as I thought I would. Since coming in contact with the philosophy of the Arcturians, I’ve sort of lost my curiosity about life. . . . No, I haven’t been converted. Far from it—but I can watch the rest of humanity scurrying madly around, chasing their desires and beliefs and ideals, without much desire to participate. You see, I know where it’s all heading. . . . Well, boys, here’s the medico. Thanks for listening.”

  THE END

  [1] Note.—This is no doubt the copywriter’s error; a meteorologist is not a scientist devoted to the study of meteors.

  [2] “Military terminology deleted by request of the Ladies’ Aid Society of Marceline.

  1944

  SABOTEUR OF SPACE

  Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy which would bring life to a dying planet. Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen of fate—and even the winner would lose.

  RYD RANDL stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The shuttered glow of Burshis’ Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a ship about to ground in the onetime Port of Ten Thousand Ships.

  Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted up—draining the last reserves of the city’s stored power, but draining them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819, relief was in sight.

  Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis’ dive.

  The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis’ which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen, these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had been built to be the power center of North America.

  The rocket blasts crescendoe
d and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with surprising friendliness at Ryd’s pinched, old-young face.

  Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was heartened.

  “Say, Burshis,” he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so that his jowls quivered.

  “No loans,” he said flatly. “But just one on the house, Ryd.”

  The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd’s hand. Clutching it convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, “What you setting ’em up for, Burshis? It’s the first time since—”

  Burshis’ smile stayed put. He said affably, “Didn’t you hear that ship that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power’s coming in again.” He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: “You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you.”

  He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he’d show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man—no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl.

  They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply.

  The man on Ryd’s immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: “So you’re Ryd Randl.”

  RYD HAD a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn’t that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn’t belong to anybody he had ever known—an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis’.

  “Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What’s the idea?” demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage floated to the top by alcohol.

  The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself. He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and distinctly. “Would you care to make some money, my friend?”

  “Huh? Why, yeh—I guess so—”

  “Then come with me.” The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out, past the blue-and-gold-lit meloderge that was softly pouring out its endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.

  Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on them. They kept walking—so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath, long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.

  “So you’re Ryd Randl,” repeated the stranger after a moment’s silence. “I might have known you. But I’d almost given up finding you tonight.”

  Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. “Look,” he gasped. “If you’re a cop, say so!”

  The other laughed shortly. “No. I’m just a man about to offer you a chance. For a come-back, Ryd—a chance to live again. . . . My name—you can call me Mury.”

  Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis’ with his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.

  “How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?”

  “Nine . . . ten years. Say, what’s it to you?”

  “And why, Ryd?”

  “Why . . .? Look, mister, I was a helio operator.” He hunched his narrow shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. “Damn good one, too—I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don’t have the physique for Mars—I might just have made it then, but I thought the plant was going to open again and—”

  And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the heliodynamic engine. And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its full economic independence—and domination. For power is—power; and there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two in ten could live healthily on the outer world.

  “Ten years ago,” Mury nodded as if satisfied. “That must have been the Power Company of North America—the main plant by Dynamopolis itself, that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down outside the military bases in the Kun Lun.”

  Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few men who talked his language. He burst out: “They wouldn’t take me, damn them! Said my record wasn’t good enough for them. That is, I didn’t have a drag with any of the Poligerents.”

  “I know all about your record,” said Mury softly.

  Ryd’s suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old kicked-dog manner. “How do you know? And what’s it to you?”

  ALL AT ONCE, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile twisted Mury’s thin lips.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Ryd—you mean nothing at all to me as an individual. But you’re one of a vast mass of men for whom I am working—the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after they’ve borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor capitulate frankly to him.”

  Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. “Are you talking about the power cylinder?” he demanded blurrily.

  Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said simply, “Yes.”

  “I don’t get it,” mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: “The power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It’s a shot in the arm—no, tight in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis. It will turn the wheels and light the cities and—”

  “To hell with that!” snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. “Don’t you know you’re repeating damnable lies?

  Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a passion shocking after his smooth calm:

  “The power shell is aid, yes—but with what a price! It’s the thirty pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and vision to retool Earth’s plants and factories for the inescapable conflict, they’re selling us out—making Earth, the first home of man, a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great Martian land-owners? Do you?” He paused out of breath; then finished venomously, “Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper than robots—cheap as slaves!”

  “What about it?” gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. “What you want me to do about it?”

  Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulde
rs. His face was once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. “We’re going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now.”

  Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly, “What’s that mean?”

  “The power shell—isn’t coming in as planned.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “We can,” said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. “And there are fifty thousand credits itr it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?”

  Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd’s mind. And he knew one thing certainly—if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as We never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing, desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm—that was We.

  The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, “Sure.” A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, “I got nothing to lose, see?” It was, he realized, the cold truth.

  “You won’t lose,” said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come.

  Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever happened. . . .

  After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and whined, “Where . . . where we going now?”

  Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he pointed as Ryd had known he would—toward where a pale man-made dawn seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.

  II

  “ONE BLOW for freedom!” said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had killed the guard.