Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

A whiff of strange odor that stung in his nostrils and tickled his windpipe harshly. Then his eyes began to smart as it grew rapidly stronger; the gas the buzzards had used to blanket the mesa was a dense one, designed to seek out the aero people in the depths of their underground fortress.

  Torcred halted, blinking, struggling with the growing need to cough. He recognized the odor after a moment—the same poison that the machines called skunks used against their enemies. He knew that enough of it was deadly. And a cold hand of terror clutched at his heart.

  HE flung caution from him and started to scramble recklessly, planlessly upward. Denser clouds of gas met him, and, half-blinded, he stumbled against sharp rocks and almost fell when fits of coughing shook him. His chest became a rasping furnace, and each deep panting breath was a flame. Bitterly he knew that his will could not drive him much longer into that torment . . .

  In the air something flew burning, and the light of its destruction fell bright as day into the canyon and threw shifting shadows. Torcred’s tear-filled eyes blurred the glare, but he glimpsed a small dark-clad figure huddled on the rocks not ten feet from him, across a black crevice that might be five or fifty feet deep.

  He crouched and sprang; weakened knees betrayed him, he landed clawing on the rounded lip of the chasm and barely managed to pull himself up to the girl’s side. But new strength steeled him as he gathered his feet under him and dragged both her and himself erect.

  Ladna was alive and conscious; she leaned against him, coughing weakly.

  “I was coming back,”, she gasped in his ear. “I’d have been up there . . . but I was coming back . . . to you . . .”

  Torcred hardly understood her. “Come on!” he croaked. “Down!”

  The way seemed immeasurably longer than the way up had been. It was really a little longer—the gas was settling fast—until, staggering, each half-supporting the other, they reached a level where the air was no longer choking poison. Ladna grew able to stand alone; swaying a little, she followed Torcred down the treacherous slides in the canyon’s mouth.

  On the soft wind-piled sand below the great rifted rock, where Torcred had last seen the visionary stranger, they sank down to rest by common consent. Torcred listened anxiously to the girl’s hoarse breathing.

  He moistened his lips and asked, “How do you feel?”

  Ladna stirred and sat up with an effort that set her coughing again. “I’ll be all right . . . We’ll go back into the desert, and live there somehow, as long—as long as we live.”

  “That’s right,” said Torcred. In the dark she couldn’t see how his face grew grim at the thought of how short their life together was likely to be.

  He raised his head, sniffing the air. A thin sharp taint, reminiscent of stifling agony, told him they must be up and moving soon. The gas was diffusing but still dangerous; up yonder on the plateau, where it had been concentrated, it must have left nothing save desolation and death . . .

  Only then did he become aware, with a start of amazement, of the great silence that enfolded mountain, sky, and desert.

  The air, at least, which had snarled with motors not twenty minutes earlier, should still have echoed to the sound of battle. But the sky was empty.

  No, not empty—abruptly landing lights cut a brilliant swathe far out on the desert. The buzzard pilot saw he had misjudged his altitude and tried to pull up, the huge ship stalled and its lights went out as it plowed into the ground Before the sound of its crash reached the mountain’s foot, a pillar of fire was mounting above the dunes, and they saw that the air was full of machines, attackers and defenders alike in one confused flitting swarm, wheeling, dipping and always drifting downward, unpowered.

  Ladna gasped, “What’s happened? The buzzards—”

  “I don’t know. Maybe your people—”

  “They’re not my people any more,” she interrupted swiftly. “Whatever you are, I am too . . . And anyway, all the engines are dead.”

  TORCRED got up stiffly. On the desert between them and the fire, an aero glided down, bounced and rolled to a shaky landing. Its pilot dropped to the ground and stood staring at his useless machine; he did not even look up as a buzzard passed low over him with a rush of wings, touched ground and slewed round a short way off with a broken landing gear. Small figures spilled out of it too, their movements expressing the same dazed lack of understanding. The enemies paid each other no heed.

  The smell of gas was stronger. The desert would be littered with aircraft, but they shouldn’t have much trouble slipping through . . . Still Torcred frowned, hesitating. He turned with sudden resolution to the girl.

  “Wait here. There’s something I have to find out; but it won’t take long.”

  “No!” Ladna struggled to her feet. “I’ll go with you.”

  Torcred started to protest, then changed his mind. He turned silently toward the cliff whose blank stone face was lit redly by the dying fire, its great fissure a dark gulf of mystery.

  Inside the cleft it was pitchblack, but the footing was smooth, packed sand. Torcred felt his way between rock walls. At first he heard only the scufflings the girl made, groping behind him, and then he was conscious of a faint all-pervading hum. Something was humming deep in the rock, and Torcred felt sure now that he was going to find the meaning of the visions and of the battle’s uncanny end.

  He was hardly surprised when white light shone in the fissure ahead and a man appeared, black against it. The figure’s outline was familiar. The stranger spoke—his first word in a strange tongue, but the rest intelligible enough though oddly pronounced.

  “Ahoy, there! We’d almost given you up.”

  Torcred advanced warily. The stranger did not flicker nor vanish. A door was open, and the white light poured out from a chamber that must have been a natural hollow, laboriously enlarged in the stone. Torcred’s hand shot out and gripped the man’s arm above the elbow; the stranger started, then relaxed, and Torcred caught a flash of the grin he had seen before.

  “I’m real,” said the stranger. “I wasn’t the other times we’ve met—but that’s one of the things Captain Relez will explain to you. Now come inside, before the air out here gets any thicker.”

  Cautiously Torcred edged into the brightly-lit room, keeping in front of Ladna. He saw in the cramped space a glittering confusion of unfamiliar devices—it was the flimsiness of most of the apparatus that was most surprising; the terrapins and other races built mostly machinery designed to withstand heavy mechanical forces, but a blow of the hand would shatter most of those things of wire and glass tubes. A young man, hunched over a complex control panel beside a glass screen on which a darkly indistinct image floated, glanced up with narrowed eyes, and an older one with a small pointed beard met Torcred’s suspicious gaze benignly, over a small table on which a map was spread, studded with colored pins.

  Then Torcred heard the door click, and whirled, hand on his knife.

  “It’s not locked,” the bearded man said calmly. “You can leave if you like—but we’ve gone to a good deal of trouble to persuade you here for a talk.”

  TORCRED faced him again, still tensely ready. The setup here didn’t look dangerous, only incomprehensible. But he sensed power in this little room; the deep potent hum he had heard in the fissure was at home here, though he could not locate its source.

  “My name is Relez.” The bearded man rose from behind his table, “Dunu, you can take care of the chart.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said the young man they had seen as a phantom in the desert, and Torcred bristled again at the alien jargon. But Relez’ casual manner was reassuring.

  He gestured at a shelf cut into the stone. “Have a seat.” Torcred obeyed mechanically, and Ladna huddled beside him. Torcred stared fascinated at the screen. A scene had resolved itself there—one of incredible, nostalgic familiarity. It was the twice-ringed camp of the terrapins, unmistakable to Torcred though he saw it now from a strange angle from above. All the machines were in place, as was normal after
nightfall. Torcred half started to his feet.

  Then he saw what was not normal for that or any hour in a terrapin camp. A confusion of bobbing lights among the cars; the shop area in the midst was almost deserted, but against the reddening fires of the forges tiny black figures scurried to and fro like distracted ants. He could almost hear the cries of alarm and exasperation over the discovery that not a functioning engine was left in the whole troop.

  Torcred turned and caught Relez smiling in his beard.

  “You did that!”

  Relez nodded. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get the antiionization field into operation in time to prevent the buzzards’ gas attack. But there won’t be any more fighting tonight, unless they do it with knives. It’s a bit of luck that none of these people seem to have any notion of portable firearms. No more mechanized warfare, though, as long as that unit is working.” He gestured at a thing of massive coils and bus bars and fragile glowing tubes, from which, Torcred perceived now, the humming came.

  Ladna’s blue eyes were wide. “That little device—has stopped all the machines?”

  “It broadcasts a wave form that affects the molecules of air, of all gases, inhibiting their ionization. So no spark can jump, and motors are stopped when their electric ignition fails. The only machines that can move now, inside its range, are the moles, with their battery-driven electric motors for underground travel—which is lucky for them, or they’d be trapped under the earth.

  “Everything else—terrapins, trailers, aeros, buzzards, and all the rest—are paralyzed. Our field’s range blankets five hundred thousand square miles. Beyond that area, others are responsible for administering the same treatment; it already began a month ago on the coast—”

  “What are you?” Torcred burst out. “What do you want?”

  “We three—Dunu, Rhenu, and I—are the Continental Demilitarization Commission for this area. As to what we are trying to do, that will take some explaining—”

  “I meant,” Torcred scowled, dissatisfied, “what is your race?”

  Relez regarded him strangely. “The same as yours. The race of man.”

  IX

  THEY CAME OF PEOPLES which had no history, only legend and tradition. And they learned—

  That there was such a thing as history, recorded in books; Relez showed them such a book, which they could not read, because neither of them could understand more than the code markings on mechanical parts.

  That the storied ancients, whose powers were marvelous and whose end was terrible, had really existed and had left their record in writing.

  How after the great wars that had almost seared his life from the Earth’s surface, when man’s weapons—and his medical science—had wiped out every creature save the indestructible destroyer himself, the machine races had risen from the shreds of technical knowledge hoarded by the scattered groups of survivors and crystallized by their descendants in the rigid mold of tradition. And how that last war had never ended, but had passed into the nature of things in the unending war of the predatory machines against the feeders on sunlight, and of the races of land and air and sea for mastery of their habitats.

  “But no matter who wins, no man is master; the machine is the ruler, and man is its slave. It is against that we have begun to fight, now, after all the long dark ages . . .”

  For one place on all the harried Earth had provided the relative security and permanence needed to keep alive a spark of the ancients’ culture. That was aboard the great ships at sea, that had been built and armed to resist every hellish technique of destruction known to the dead age of their building, and were wholly invulnerable to today’s weapons. Those were floating cities in truth, with atomic power plants, machine shops, dwellings, hospitals, storehouses, recreation space, libraries—and in the later times, when their first purpose as warships had been almost forgotten, classrooms and laboratories where the knowledge of the past was dredged up from the memories of men and from the books, and even added to in some ways.

  “We have built up the nucleus of a new civilization on the sea,” said Relez solemnly. “Now the time has come for it to take root on the dry land. But first the continents must be pacified. The world must be taken from the warring machines and given back to man.

  “We possess some of the old ones’ weapons, and we could try to use them to enforce our will, as they did. And I think our end would be like theirs. But we have invested some new devices to serve the cause of peace. The anti-ionization field is chief among those. I myself had some share in developing it—my title of ‘captain’ means leader of a group of scientists, not master of a ship.”

  “Is there no defense against the field?” asked Torcred shrewdly.

  RELEZ eyed him thoughtfully. “There are ways of avoiding the effect,” he admitted, “but they are not likely to occur to these custom-bound people. And once they are liberated from the tyranny of the machine—”

  “Your method of liberation,” said Torcred, “is to reduce everyone to an equal helplessness, and let them fight it out among themselves?”

  “You might put it that way. I’m afraid there will be some bloodshed. The predatory peoples, naturally, will have the hardest time at first. But—Suppose you tell me what you think will happen, for example, when the terrapin come in contact, under the new conditions, with their old enemies and prey, the trailer people.”

  “Why—at first they will be afraid to venture out of the camp. Then, when the food supply runs low, they will begin to think of attacking the stalled trailer herd on foot. A quick raid, by determined men with knives and clubs, might work once or twice, but not after that, because the trailer people are much more numerous, and, once recovered from the first confusion and organized, they could defend themselves . . .”

  “But if you were chief of the terrapins, what would you do?”

  Torcred thought hard, intrigued in spite of himself. “I think—I would try to get some of the sun-machines the trailers use. In order to have an independent supply of food and power, you understand. That lightning raid, perhaps—but it would be hard to dismantle the screens and escape with them. No, I think I would try to bargain with the trailers. They have no radar scanners; if their suspicions could be allayed, they’d be willing to trade a few of their sun-screens for some terrapin sighting devices.”

  “Not realizing that those have lost their value, now that all aircraft are grounded,” said Relez with a smile. “It might work. And overcoming the suspicions may prove easier than you think, when men begin to meet each other under the open sky, and realize that their hates never belonged to them, but to the machines they served . . .”

  “I don’t know about the buzzards,” murmured Ladna dubiously.

  Relez disregarded that. “What we need now is helpers. The anti-ionization field is the catalyst of peace, but if it is to work quickly, the confused peoples must have guidance.

  “We’ve done a little advance missionary work among the more civilized and approachable tribes, both in the flesh, and by teleprojection, as Dunu appeared to you in the wilderness. The televiewer, incidentally, is another of our new developments; the old machines of that type used both a transmitter and receiver, but this one works on the principle you can see once in a while in nature, when atmospheric refraction is just right to reassemble the light from a distant object and project its picture in the air. Only very recently we perfected the reverse application of the effect, so that under good conditions we can project a three-dimensional image—mirage—over large distances.

  “But those methods are inadequate for working directly on the minds of the peoples. Few as we are, we can’t appear openly as authors of the change; for the time being, let them think it a natural phenomenon. However,” his eyes met Torcred’s and held them in a challenging gaze, “very much could be done to smooth a people’s way toward civilization by an agent who belongs by birth to it . . .”

  “I was a terrapin once,” said Torcred steadily. “Now I am a man of the race of man. An
d in the eyes of the terrapins I am an outcast, accursed.”

  “I know. But your very return, when they think you dead, may help the breakdown of the old habits and customs . . . I don’t say it will be easy. But I believe the desert has sharpened your wits.”

  TORCRED considered. The mark on his forehead burned, but he remembered how there had been compassion in Vazcled’s face even as he wielded the knife, and that his worst enemy was discreditably dead in the desert. “Perhaps,” he muttered.

  “If you go back,” said Ladna quietly, “I go too.”

  Relez stroked his beard. “That might make trouble.”

  The girl turned on him, electric fire in her look. “None of your business!” Relez smiled. “On the other hand, maybe it will be for the best—a step forward in contact between the peoples.”

  Torcred felt a new strength and confidence born of Ladna’s loyalty. He said, “Your scheme is good, if it will work. I will—we will help you make it work.”

  The older man’s face lit. “Good!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “You already have some sound ideas. I suggest—”

  “Captain!” broke in a low, taut voice. “What do you make of this?”

  Relez wheeled. The young technician who had been operating the controls of the televiewer was pointing at the screen in horror.

  The scene was a sweep of desert, silvered by the risen moon. There were indistinct dark shapes that might be a tribe of dragons, stalled, of course. But around and among them red flashes leaped and black towers of smoke-sprang up to drift down the quiet night wind.

  It was a scene of death and destruction whose silence made it unreal. But as the five people in the rock chamber held their breath, they heard and felt, telegraphed from far away through the ground, the dull heavy concussions of exploding bombs.

  “Scan the sky, Rhenu,” gulped the captain.

  The view shifted as Rhenu’s trembling fingers made adjustments, and they glimpsed a black squadron drifting across the moonlit sky. Cruising with a leisurely consciousness of invulnerability, in the knowledge that the victims were helpless to maneuver, sitting ducks to be blasted at will.