He didn’t feel alarmed, but he did know a lively curiosity. He tensed invisibly, waiting for the move that must come.
“Ever been on Venus, pal?”
Ah-ha, said Degnan to himself, and aloud, “You’re psychic, huh?”
“Nah,” said the driver. “You just got the look. I was there once, myself.”
Check, thought Degnan.
“Yeah,” said the other man. “I was a spaceman once, believe it or not. Back before gravities, too, when you sweat out most of every trip in free fall. I been to Venus and Mars and all them places out there. Advancing the cause of Man’s Glorious Empire—you know. Now I’m retired, on a pension a bedbug couldn’t live on.” He spat sidewise, out the window. “A guy gets a raw deal when they got no more use for him. Maybe you know something about that, yourself.”
“I’m thinking,” said Degnan coldly, “that you know more about me than you’re letting on.”
The man laughed shortly. “Okay. So you know all about me, and I know all about you, Mr. Degnan. Why not? We’re two of a kind.” Getting no answer, he went on rapidly, “We’ve got a lousy deal, and we know the system’s rotten. Don’t we? It all looks fine—” He gestured jerkily out the windows: they were back on a business street now, where even under the sinking sun the storefronts, the glittering beetle-cars, the walking people were luminous with life and color. “All pretty things and fun—but underneath it’s rotten, shot full of holes. People, crawling all over the world—there’s too many of them, and they’re stupid. We know it can’t last. Don’t we?”
“You mean Venus is going to win the war?”
The other flashed a scared, uncertain glance at him; crawling though the car was now through the traffic, his driving began to make Degnan nervous. “What do you think?”
“I’m no prophet. But I know this,” said Degnan bluntly, “that you’re human—but the thing that’s talking out of you has bug eyes and claws for hands, and breathes formaldehyde.”
He saw the man’s hands cramp on the wheel; a moment later, as if in instinctive flight, they swerved the car into a sheltering side street. The voice held a hysterical note that was a fusion of pleading and threat: “I’m giving it to you straight. You’re one of us. They got part of you, too, back there. They’ll never give it back, that part of us, until they win. So they’ve got to win!” The last words were a whine of fear.
Degnan ruthlessly suppressed the jelly-like quivering of a kindred fear inside him, and sank his voice to an icy tone of menace. “All right, I’ve heard enough. I’m an Intelligence agent, mister. Drive to NAMI headquarters. Don’t try anything; I’ve got a gun.”
That was a bad bluff, he realized as the other snapped on the brake, jerking them forward, and twisted, reaching, and snarling, “The hell you have!”
DEGNAN lunged across the seat; one flat hand caught the fellow under the chin and slammed his head back against the plastic cowl, the other chopped down with split-second timing on his wrist. Degnan scooped the pistol up and leveled it.
“Leastways, I’ve got a gun now,” he amended with a tight grin. He felt almost grateful to the Venusians’ slave for providing a splurge of violence to snap him out of his fruitless mental grubbings. And a new idea had struck him; he added, “But I don’t know whether it’s really worth while running you in. The likes of you’ll never damage the war effort much . . . Tell you what, rat. I’ll turn you loose, if you explain about that last line you were handing me.”
“What—line?” the man muttered dizzily.
“About the Venusians keeping part of you.”
The other tried to look defiantly jeering. “It’s not just me. It’s you too. They’ve got your soul on Venus, and you’ll never get it back unless you help them win!”
Degnan hesitated, then decided against further questioning. This bird evidently knew nothing, apart from what the Over Race for their own purposes had planted inside his skull.
He pronged open the door and thrust his hand with the gun into a pocket. “Okay, brother—you can go tell the other zombies to scratch my name off their list.”
He gazed after the swiftly receding car with a grim smile. That injunction wouldn’t be obeyed, he was sure—if he didn’t meet that one again, there would be more of the same kind looking for him. Which meant, he hoped, a chance to learn more about the thing that most vitally interested him now.
Without much difficulty, he got his bearings and caught a bus for a part of town he knew well, close to the Municipal Spaceport. His plans were simple: he’d rent a room—since he had to stay in Los Angeles anyway, waiting for instructions from headquarters—lie low, and wait few trouble to come to him.
En route, he went over what he’d learned. It wasn’t much. General Fleming had been right; there were Venusian agents, human ones, on Earth. And Degnan knew the outlines of one type of induced delusion that the Over Race used to bend minds to their will.
But what had they used on him?
The business of captive souls, he snorted at. But the fact remained that he had lost, if not his soul, twelve days on Venus . . . Perhaps a psychiatrist would be able to straighten the tangled threads and ravel out his memories, when they got round to his case. But he sensed unreasoningly that something was going to happen before then, something terrible and irreversible, something that he alone must prevent . . .
IT WAS almost midnight when he finally found a lodging, for the city was overcrowded with the soldiers of the Fleet. The streets were full of them too, even at that late hour, wandering in groups and with girls, carefree as boys on an outing. Earth had known no war in their memory or in their fathers’, and their brief military training had given them scant sense of what it might mean.
Degnan went to bed in a fog of depression compounded of his sense of impending disaster, memory of the quarrel with Athalie, and sheer physical weariness.
When he woke at two p.m. the last cause, at least, had been removed, and he felt more equal to the struggle—if only he knew what he was struggling against.
As he ate afternoon breakfast in a second-rate, uniform packed restaurant, his attention was snared by the modulated tones of a news commentator, rolling from the place’s wide-open radio:
“Monitors on the Moon report that Radio Venus has broadcast something like an ultimatum to Earth. Receivers here didn’t pick it up, of course, because of the all-wave scrambling by our defense barrage. But I’m authorized to pass on some of the juicier parts; they may give you a laugh, particularly when you remember the news we got a few hours ago—about how the Gharukh, the one first-class battleship Venus bad under the Armament Limitation Treaty, was caught off base and blasted out of space by the North American battleship Alaska and the Chinese Yang Tse.
“But now the high spots of the Venusian pronouncements. The Over Race announces as its war aims the extermination of humanity and conversion of Earth, according to a prepared ‘planetary engineering blueprint’, into a Venus-type world, with a cloud blanket and formaldehyde-carbon-dioxide atmosphere.
“The alternative to unconditional surrender—destruction by a mysterious ‘final weapon’, which is ready to strike at any moment, but which the Venusians hesitate to use, they explain, because it might damage the planet Earth itself and put difficulties in the way of their conversion plan. So they call on us to surrender, offering as bait the promise that a ‘chosen few’ of the human race will be spared and allowed to migrate to Mars—‘a suitable home for the coldblooded poison-breathers who now inhabit Earth’.
“Surely no more evidence is needed that the war lords of Venus are completely out of touch with reality . . .”
Somebody in the cafe did laugh at that crack. But Degnan sat staring at the radio, and the glitter of its chromium recalled the gleam of great inhuman eyes, alive with intelligence and a coolly calculating consciousness of power.
Disgust crystallized in him, for the shallow humans who scoffed at the Venusians because they had never conquered space and had shamelessly borrowe
d and stolen the achievements of Earth science in that field. But the scoffers did not realize that Venus had a science of its own. Their science was not so much quantitatively as qualitatively different from Earth’s, and its most basic tenets seemed sheer nonsense to an Earthly mind . . . The Over Race had liberated atomic energy, for example, before the coming of the Earthmen; but no human scientist had ever fathomed the workings of a Venusian atomic engine. They seemed to regard the subatomic particles as possessed in some fashion of will and purpose, and they coaxed atoms apart with gentle persuasion instead of smashing projectiles.
That much Degnan knew—and he was very far from laughing at the Venusian ultimatum.
He realized with a chill start how close his thinking was coming to the propaganda line he had heard yesterday evening, about the decadence and stupidity of mankind. Had he too soaked up some of that mental virus? And what touchstone would serve to distinguish the ideas native to your mind from those deftly inset by a monstrous psychologist?
WHEN HE got back to his room, the green light on the phone recorder was aglow. From headquarters, a summons to come in for further examination, he thought with an odd stirring of rebellion, and flipped on the speaker.
A woman’s voice, hauntingly known to him. “Colonel Degnan—this is Margaret Lusk, who was with you on the Sheneb.
“I have to warn you. Something is about to happen—will begin happening very soon, that will be tremendously important to you and through you to—everybody. You must be ready.”
The voice changed, became somehow more emotional, more human, and still more familiar. “If you’ll meet me this evening at seven, in front of the City Museum—maybe I can tell you something more. I can’t promise, because I don’t know how I know what I said before . . . But please come. You’ve got to come!”
That was all. The recorder hummed unnoticed for a time; finally Degnan spun it back and ran the message off again.
Whatever the quirk in his head was—delusion, premonition—he wasn’t alone with it. He had company, and the knowledge was a straw to cling to.
Warmly, though he thought impersonally, he remembered the darkhaired girl called Margaret Lusk—ridiculous that he hadn’t learned her name before, after all they’d been through together. He felt a queer bond between himself and her, born of a few long, long minutes aboard the Sheneb; and he found himself, half-consciously, comparing his memory of her face, ravaged by suffering and terror, with his last glimpse of Athalie—blonde beauty marred by passion, her furious blindness to everything but her own desires. The comparison was in Margaret Lusk’s favor.
Above all, though—she might hold the answer, or a part-answer, to the question that was becoming his nightmare.
BEFORE seven o’clock he was marching restlessly up and down in the park grounds before the Museum. In the warm gathering dusk, there were other strollers otherwise preoccupied. Couples arm in arm, walking or sitting on the benches and talking and laughing softly while darkness came over the city.
In the west, above the trees, a bright star shone before the rest—Venus as evening star. The people in the park saw it, but their gayety was not damped by it.
As the night came nearer, Venus grew brighter still and the other stars came out, and high up among them brief sparks of light streaked swiftly like the burning pebbles of a meteor shower, and died redly or flared out of existence in soundlessly brilliant explosions. They came as often as one to the minute, in every part of the sky, and Degnan knew what they were—bombardment rockets from Venus approaching Earth at five hundred or a thousand miles a second, caught and wiped out by the interceptor barrage.
Ahead of him a girl squealed with a tingling thrill of fright and snuggled against the soldier with her, as they saw one flash out brighter than the rest.
“That was a near one,” said the soldier gruffly. “Must not have stopped it more than two, three hundred miles up. But,” he swelled his chest a little “we’re safe. Not a one’s got through, and not a one’s going to.”
The girl murmured something admiring.
Margaret Lusk was late showing up. Degnan was beginning to wonder if she’d stood him up, or if there had been some mistake in time or place. And then he glimpsed her at the other end of the tree-lined walk he had been pacing, turned, and hurried toward her.
As he came near he saw that it was really she, trim and tidy as he bad not seen her before, her dark hair braided neatly about her head. She saw him too, smiled quickly and started to call to him . . .
A huge and blazing star glided clear across the sky, drenching the Museum’s grounds and the whole city in an unholy bath of reddish light. Far to the eastward it touched the Earth, and a second later a mountain of searingly radiant vapor began rising there, boiling higher and higher and turning night to day even as the fire-trail faded.
By that glare, Degnan saw the girl’s pale face and wide eyes looking like holes burned in a blanket. He said idiotically, “We’re all right. The city wasn’t hit.”
“It’s happened!” she gasped, and he couldn’t tell whether her tone was terror or ecstasy. She stood stiffly beside him but apart, gazing at the rising pillar of fire.
Degnan’s ability to think came back; he snapped, “Better get down. Flat on the ground. The shock-wave’ll be here before long.” But it was minutes before the ground heaved and shuddered with earthquake. On the heels of the earth-wave came the air-wave, a hurricane in violence, and in its midst the lights in the Museum facade, which had so far burned steadily, went out as something happened to Los Angeles’ central power plant. Screams rose then from among the people scattered in the park.
THOUGH Degnan didn’t know it then, he had seen the arrival of the first of the hyperspace projectiles, which landed fifty miles east o€ Los Angeles. The manner of its coming was this:
The great robot brain in Denver, which coordinated the defense barrage over all North America and parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, registered, routinewise, the approach of a Venusian missile aimed at the West Coast. Nothing unusual; a torpedo of normal size, traveling at the somewhat low velocity of five hundred miles per second. In routine fashion, also, the calculator transmitted the information to its human watchers at the same time that it made the necessary computations and sent out the necessary orders to subsidiary units of the interception network. No special alarm was sounded, since it was a simple piece of work to encompass the projectile’s destruction.
To do that, the robot brain in essence set up within its own structure the rocket’s flight in space and physically possible evasive maneuvers, correlated with the positions of the mines strewn lavishly in orbits about the Earth. It sent out the signals to set those mines in motion that would carry them across all possible paths of the missile, with their blast guns, their charges of atomic explosive and their seeking, thinking controls.
Within the brain the paths converged, met, and the rocket was destroyed.
But in the reality of space, ten thousand miles out—a detector in the Venusian projectile tripped a switch at the first contact with Earth radar, and threw it into hyperspace drive. And it never reached any of the predicted positions, never encountered the searching beams or the shattering explosions.
The robot brain knew that within a fraction of a second. It rang the alarm, this time, and simultaneously sent the inner belt of mines into action.
By now men were incredulously watching the instruments that registered the hyperspace projectile’s flight—or tried to register it; the wild shifting of the needles, the crazy fluctuation of the graphs could not be translated into any meaningful space-time coordinates.
While they stared, helpless, the embattled calculator used its last resort; hundreds of interception rockets, tiny, viciously potent proximity-fused things, left their launching sites and climbed at a hundred thousand gravities’ acceleration to meet the enemy.
It evaded them, too, still flying its impossible course, and fell not far from San Bernardino, which together with neighbor
ing Riverside and other towns and villages around, vanished that instant from the face of the Earth. Like most such weapons, the hyperspace projectile bore no explosive warhead; but it struck at five hundred miles a second. It blasted a crater a mile across, and the shock waves from it did much damage in San Diego.
By that time the second one, which landed on Calcutta and killed two million people, was coming in toward the Asiatic sector.
DARKNESS, pallidly relieved by the rising moon, lay with strange silence on the great city. Somewhere, far off, sirens sobbed of disaster.
The girl stood facing Ralph Degnan, her back against a tree-trunk in a vaguely defensive pose. He could not read her face, a white blur in the shadow.
He commanded again, “Think! What more do you know?”
“I don’t know,” said Margaret Lusk. “I had to send you that message, that’s all. Something told me to call you—but not about meeting you here. That was my idea.”
“I can guess what ‘something’ was,” growled Degnan. He wanted to question her ruthlessly and to the point, but he was finding it hard to concentrate. Something was churning in his mind, struggling toward the light like a formless monster heaving itself to the surface of a swamp. Since the projectile’s fall he had felt that—the sense of being about to remember something once known but forgotten.
His outward senses seemed to strain sympathetically toward hyperacuteness. He thought he heard rustlings round about, a stealthy scuffing of feet in the park shrubbery.
An idea struck him with shocking force. He demanded, “Say! How’d you know where to call me? I only found that room late last night!”
She made no reply, but he heard the quick, suspicious intake of breath.
“Answer me!”
Then the slight sounds he had heard and half-dismissed materialized into a rush of pounding feet from every side at once. Instinctively he ducked and spun around. Someone tackled him round the waist and hung on, and other hands were laid on him. His fists lashed out at indistinct figures, and smote air as often as flesh and bone; he lunged furiously, and had a moment’s hope of breaking free before something blunt and hard descended stunningly on his head.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 34