Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  GENERAL Fleming was restlessly on his feet, pacing aimlessly back and forth as if his roomy office had become a prison cell. The shriveled mask of his face no longer hid the very real fear and uncertainty behind it.

  A redeyed and unkempt Ralph Degnan sprawled in the General’s chair and wished the General would stop talking so he could catch a moment’s sleep before the flier was ready. It had been a grinding session in the small hours with the handful of mathematicians and engineers he had finally persuaded them to call in—those men, who had been working without sleep on the problem of the hyperspace projectiles, had been at first wearily impatient, not believing, then at the last they had been wide-awake, firing questions at him faster than he could give the answers that were already clear in his mind.

  Fleming said abruptly, “I’ve had our defense potential concentrated over Los Angeles as long as you’re still here. Once you get to Combined Fleet Headquarters, you’ll be out of danger—about the only place on Earth they still can’t touch. It’s been more than six hours now since they sent over any of those damn things, but no telling when it will start again. God, how I’d like to think they’d used up their supply . . . Maybe those devils are just getting something new ready. We stopped over half of them during the last hour’s bombardment, and deflected most of the rest. But we’ve fired three months’ ammunition in four and a half hours. Our production can’t begin to fill the gap. You’ve got to be right!”

  Degnan said nothing. General Fleming worried on: “I can’t understand why human operators, working by guess, can stop them oftener than the machines.”

  “The calculators are logical,” said Degnan. “And so is the path of a body in hyperspace. But it’s a different logic. That’s all ‘hyperspace’ means—a different set of rules from those that apply to normal space and energy and matter, the rules man’s been learning and building machines by for thousands of years. Our robot brains work according to those rules, so they can’t determine the trajectory of a hyperspace projectile.”

  The General shook his head bewilderedly.

  “Our physics has been devoted to determining the characteristics of space, which to the Venusian psycho-physicists means the behavior habits of energy and matter,” explained Degnan wearily. “They found that other behavior patterns are possible. The difference is a question of energy levels. When a projectile changes to hyperspace drive, it loses about one kilogram of mass, which means enough energy to shake a planet. That’s related to the variation in limiting velocities—incidentally, we can use this principle to travel faster than light, or the Venusians can, if—” He stopped.

  The General frowned, grasped at a reality he could understand. “Colonel Degnan—I think I can admit now that you were right about the reason for delay in our offensive.” Degnan smiled faintly. “The big powers were afraid their handsome warships would get dented?”

  “Not any more, by heaven! Last word from CFHQ says the delegates took just one quarter of an hour to reach a unanimous decision after the second projectile landed. All fleets made fully available. The offensive is being mounted now—”

  A phone on the General’s desk buzzed. He snatched it up, listening for a moment without answering, and turned on Degnan with the receiver in his hand. “On your way! Your clearance has come through and the flier will be ready by the time you’re on the field!”

  DEGNAN’S memory preserved in photographic, nightmarish detail one glimpse of Los Angeles Spaceport as he skirted the field with his guards.

  Far out beyond the girdling fence, four great black warships loomed ready for takeoff and rendezvous with the gathering fleets. Above them the sky was turbulent, murkily luminous; Earth was slowly veiling her face in the smoke and dust of her own destruction, the reek of shattered cities and ruined countrysides.

  Between the fence and the field itself, under a glare of floodlights, seethed a mass of people, men and women almost equally mixed. They were the same people Degnan had seen in the streets and parks of the city, walking by twos and laughing unafraid in their security. Now, a confused crying rose over them, a voice of tears and lamentation. Women clung to their men, summoned this hour to duty, and wept and would not let them go to space and the deadly ships and the horror of airless or flaming death millions of miles from anything. And the men—were leaving wives and sweethearts on a world grown perhaps less safe than the gun-decks of a warship.

  Along the fence ranged stiffly a line of robot marines, armored bodies gleaming coldly under the lights, waiting mindlessly for orders from the mustached officer who stood beside them and watched the scene with an air of bleak dissatisfaction.

  As Degnan and the two Intelligence agents with him hurried past, the officer turned his back on the crowd. Drops of sweat glistened on his expressionless face as he snapped an order to the motionless machines. The line of seven-foot robots pivoted with inhuman precision and moved on the swarm of humans, against and among them. Their steel arms flashed and thrust, separating those who must go from those who stayed behind, with the efficiency of a mechanical sorter . . .

  One of the men with Degnan muttered something under his breath. The other said, “They ought to stop that. They shouldn’t let those women come this far: they go crazy when they see the ships. It’s bad for morale.”

  “Oh, dry up!” said the other.

  Degnan said nothing. His dark face was rock-hard as he led them both across the field toward the flier that waited, dwarfed by the vastness of the interplanetary cruisers.

  One of his escorts—the one who had said, “Oh, dry up!”—went aboard with him, the other returned to report that they’d got him safely that far.

  GLANCING out through the heavy glass of a window, Degnan became aware that, above the artificial lights of the field, the sky was beginning to flush with rose and delicate violet. Not a minute later, when the flier was many miles above the Earth and racing westward, that had become a red and murky dawn, the dust of battle diffusing sunlight and turning itself into the likeness of smoke from hell’s furnaces.

  Westward, out over the Pacific. Degnan turned to the man beside him, “Where we headed? Asia?”

  The agent shrugged; Degnan guessed that he honestly didn’t know. Combined Fleet Headquarters was the secret of secrets—Earth’s hidden nerve center, housing the top military staffs and the top scientists who could—perhaps—still make use of Degnan’s special knowledge in time.

  Degnan had firmly intended to sleep through the flight, but a gnawing unrest kept him wide awake now. Deliberately he lit a cigarette; by the time it was smoked down the flier might be over China. He found himself alternately glancing at his watch and staring with smarting eyes out the window, into the flaming cauldron of clouds that brightened as the ship rose higher, then began fading again as its flight outran the sunrise. His imagination did strange things with it, turned it into something terrible, a burning wind and fire that swept over the face of the Earth and left lifeless desert behind. The Over Race’s final weapon, with which their radio had threatened Earth again last night . . .

  Probably a bluff, he told himself angrily. And why should it occur to him now? He could do nothing that he was not doing already—going at a dozen miles a second to save Earth from the hyperspace bombardment.

  But why the deadly pressure behind his racing thoughts, the cold knot of fear in his stomach, his sense that the sands were running out?

  A change of pitch in the high screaming of thin air outside told him the ship was going down, probably slowing as well toward a landing. It rocked and swerved a little, battered by the changing pressures of a too-swift descent, and Degnan glimpsed a vast sweep of ocean, glittering in faint moonlight, unbroken by any land. All at once he remembered that these gravitic fliers could travel under water as well, and he knew where Combined Fleet Headquarters was—under the bottom of the Pacific, below one of the great deeps. The only place on Earth, sheltered under all that cushioning water, that no interplanetary bombardment could reach. There might have been
a political motive for the choice of location, too; the oceans had belonged to no nation since the first feeble international laws were set up.

  A MINUTE or two left. The roar of riven air grew louder, more ominous—like the whistle of a shell prolonged intolerably, for a lifetime before the explosion thunders, like the scream of a falling bomb—

  A bomb was falling, howling and shrieking its tuneless death song before it blew itself into nothingness and took with it the whole Earth, everything, everything that had been good and bad and indifferent in the world of man. Its crescendo noise swelled and beat against the confines of Degnan’s skull, drowning the one silent sound that he had to hear.

  Something in his brain was struggling, beating on a closed and barricaded door, shouting incoherently into the clamor of the descending bomb. Degnan saw only the sweeping second-hand of his watch. He had to understand, to remember before that hand went round once or twice again and it was too late forever and ever.

  Something was coming up out of the abyss of darkness and drugged forgetfulness. The gleam of his watch-face transformed itself into the pitiless shining eyes of a great Venusian, eyes cold and burning with knowledge and passionless will.

  It was a scientist and a ruler—one of the masters of the Over Race, who would some day be masters of the Universe. As man had foolishly dreamed . . .

  “Forget,” it seemed to drone in the travesty of human speech that was the best their voice-converters could make of Venusian speech-sounds. “Forget one minute longer, and the experiment will succeed. Go on. You cannot fail. We cannot fail.”

  It lied. With a savage effort of will, he wiped the vision out of existence. And as it vanished, the floodgates of memory were opened, and he knew—what Venus had planned, what he had been about to do.

  As Degnan’s sight cleared, he found himself on his feet, swaying like a drunken man. Before him danced a face, that of his escort, whom he must have pushed aside as he stood up—a shocked stare, dawning suspicion: “What’s the matter with you?”

  Degnan faltered only a moment. With merciless clarity he realized the impossibility of explaining to this man, or any other, in the time that was left; with regret, but with brutal purposefulness, he hit the agent on the point of the jaw and saw the man fall down limply.

  The pilot had still less warning. Degnan struck one skillful, chopping blow and snatched at the control bar; through the nose window he saw the steely glint of waves sliding swiftly nearer, and yanked. He felt nothing, of course, through the full-gravity-thrust drive. But now there was only the night sky in the window, and he knew the flier was climbing almost vertically. Only then did he heave the half-stunned pilot out of his seat and into the aisle of the passenger compartment.

  HE SANK into the seat, breathing hard, momentarily incapable of further thought or action. Through timeless intervals, the sky’s turbid darkness gave place to a hard, crystal-clear blackness, and in it the stars came out and shone with unwinking brilliance. On the control panel an alarm buzzed stridently and a red light winked on and off. That meant the flier was approaching the danger limit for unshielded atmospheric craft, radiation in the space around it becoming dangerous to life. Still, it was a while before Degnan stirred to shift the controls and drop Earthward again.

  He leveled out in the stratosphere, recovering from shock and beginning to think furiously. There was no hiding here, high up in air; within minutes, at most, an alarm would be out and radar tracers searching for the flier. Overpowering the other, seizing the ship had been an almost instinctive reaction of self-preservation; it made no real difference in his position. He was outlawed anyway, exiled from Earth now and forever by the strangest and most terrible fate a man had ever suffered.

  Behind him someone groaned, beginning to come to. Almost without looking around, Degnan slammed and locked the door of the pilot’s compartment. Clinging desperately to sanity, he tried to form a plan.

  He knew now the nature of the Venusians’ final weapon. He was that weapon.

  Every atom of his body, every particle of flesh and blood and bone was a grain of explosive waiting for the flash of a detonator.

  Earthmen had known, without thoroughly understanding, that the Over Race’s science could convert any inorganic substance into fissionable material without changing its overt physical or chemical properties; for that reason, import of articles from Venus had been rigorously supervised. They had not known, the enemy had carefully kept them from finding out, that the same thing could be done with living matter. The Venusian liberation of nuclear energy was inferior, in ergs returned for ergs invested, to Earth’s use of the power metals—but it had the one decisive advantage in war, that a Venusian atomic bomb could take any form, even that of a living, breathing man. The one form in which it would surely pass Earth’s defenses and find its way—

  Degnan remembered what the detonating impulse was to have been. A simple and thoroughly Venusian device. His arrival—his own realization that he had arrived—at CFHQ would have been the trigger.

  Mass times the velocity of light squared—he tried briefly to calculate the force of explosion, and recoiled from the figures that suggested themselves. At the very least, Earth’s vital center would have vanished into dust together with cubic miles of the planet’s surface.

  HE COULDN’T go back. If he were taken to CFHQ, even his conscious knowledge of what was to come would not check the automatic reaction. Even his lifeless body must not return to Earth. It was that thought, largely, that had kept him from heading the flier on into space and the burning bath of radiation; the defense patrol would intercept it and bring him back, alive or dead. He couldn’t imagine that there was any alternative way of setting off the explosion, any control that could reach across space from Venus—but the danger was too great for any chance to be taken.

  Also, he was not the kind of man to display suicidal courage until every other kind of courage had failed.

  The Venusians had known him well, he realized sickly, when they had chosen him. They had planned every step ahead, foreseen everything, when they had arranged his “escape” from the Sheneb, his return to Earth with the knowledge they had deliberately planted in his mind, knowledge important enough to make sure he would be sent to CFHQ—latent, triggered into consciousness by the fall of the first hyperspace projectile. Perhaps they had even made sure to see that he would be in the open to see that by inspiring Margaret Lusk to make a date with him in the park; at all events, her call had been a psychological primer, to put him in a receptive mood. His capture by the Venusians’ slaves, to be sure, had been a crossup in their scheme—it showed, what might be important, that they didn’t have direct mental control over the humans they had worked on—but it had made little difference. They had known he would get through; they had chosen their instrument with perfect understanding of human psychology . . . But, no: their plan had failed at the last moment, when the mental blocks they had used on Degnan had gone down by a miracle he was still too dazed to question. There was still room to hope.

  Drenched in cold sweat, Degnan stared at the gleaming dials and knobs before him, the paling sky beyond the nose of the flier. He had headed it mechanically back the way it had come, toward the North American coast. And now an idea began to glimmer . . . He would be risking not only his own life—forfeit already!—but many others besides; yet on the other hand . . . Convulsively he leaned forward and spun the power rheostat as far as it would go.

  The line of shore was featureless in the light of a gray dawn, encroaching on the oily darkness of the sea. Degnan braked the flier swiftly and swooped lower, finding partial orientation by the lights that still shone sickly here and there, where Los Angeles sprawled to southward.

  At last he located the little bay he knew. Rummaging hastily in a storage compartment, he found the automatic pistol stowed there as per some ancient regulation having to do with mutiny on shipboard; he thrust it into a trousers pocket. He cast his coat aside, and dropped the flier still lower. When it
drifted at a bare twenty miles an hour only a few feet above still deep water not far offshore, he flung open the emergency door, took a deep breath and in the same motion pulled back on the control bar and leaped clear.

  WHEN HE broke the surface, striking out for the beach, he dashed the water from his eyes and saw the flier already far away, climbing and vanishing into the gray-rose sky. The farther it traveled before it was picked up, the less help it would be to the men who shortly would be combing the planet to find him.

  If they could know not only where he was but what he was—there would probably be a mass exodus from Los Angeles right now. He reflected grimly that, if the worst were realized, if there were an open switch on Venus that would be closed when the enemy grew tired of waiting, Los Angeles would get it whether he was there or not. He had stayed there two days—and a nail-paring of his, a stray hair from his head, would be enough to level city blocks.

  He splashed ashore and broke into a jogging run that, weary as he was, he could keep up for the short distance he had to go.

  As he ran, the Earth seemed to groan beneath his steps with a premonition of catastrophe.

  He couldn’t go to the authorities again; with horrible vividness he pictured himself trying to explain to them, being called crazy and shipped back, a prisoner, drugged perhaps, to CFHQ so the scientists there could pick his brains. But he had to have help, and he was going to the only place on Earth where help might be.

  The wide white house came into sight as he rounded a bend in the beach road. Built in the rambling California style, among pruned green gardens on a rise of ground, it had a view of the sea from its flat roof—the roof where, on a warm night with a great moon silvering the Pacific, he had got engaged to Athalie, once in a world that was far away and unreal. Tonight, if tonight ever came, there would be no moon.

  But Athalie was there. He found her—having flung open the unlocked door and plunged inside without ceremony, in a sudden fear lest the house be as deserted as it looked—in the spacious living room; she was huddled in a big chair, against the wall opposite the great windows that looked eastward across the dunes, staring out at the brightening sunrise.