She didn’t seem to see him standing in the doorway. He called hoarsely, “Athalie!”
The girl raised her head, saw him, and sprang to her feet in a quick scared motion. She took a recoiling step.
“It’s me. Ralph.” He came toward her, and she did not retreat again, but her gaze on him was feverish and blank. There were sleepless shadows under her eyes, her bright hair was unkempt, her makeup smudged, some of her fingernails broken and untrimmed. Half-consciously Degnan noted those details and could not understand, until he remembered that she, like all Earth, had gone through the night of terror, the hours of the hyperspace bombardment. He hesitated. “Is your father here?”
She shook her head, said painfully, “He went with the Fleet. He had a reserve commission, and he got them to take him. He went on one of the battleships—I don’t remember which one.”
DEGNAN was prey to a sinking feeling. He would greatly have preferred, just now, to talk to Charles Norton, who was his friend and whose combination of hardheaded-ness and imagination he respected . . . But Athalie would have to do. Certainly the quarrel they’d had counted for less than nothing now.
He said with an uncontrollably pounding heart, “And your father’s yacht—did it go out with the Fleet?”
“No. The guns weren’t ready, or something. What do you want?” she demanded uncomprehendingly.
“I want that ship,” said Degnan, and the way he said it made her take another backward step. Her lips moved and relaxed without framing a question. “It’s still on his field? Guarded?” She nodded, finally got out, “Why?”
He ignored the query. His whole being was centered on the need to that ship—perhaps the only space-going vessel left on Earth now which had a full-gravitic drive, which might carry him through Earth’s defense and out of reach . . . “Listen. They’ll let you in to look at the ship, won’t they? And maybe me with you. You’ve got to help me get to the Azor’s controls.”
She went on staring at him; then a spark of the old strong-willed Athalie flared up. “You must be crazy! Where have you been? What’s happened? What can you possibly—”
He took a deep breath, realizing the strange figure he must be—drenched from head to foot, haggard, the awful burden he carried showing in his face. “I want to go to Venus,” he said, and regretted it the same moment; now he would have to explain, and he had hoped to get Athalie’s help without that.
“Now I know you’re crazy. Venus! Nobody can go to Venus. The Venusians are coming here . . .” She broke; her body shook with sobs, but her eyes were dry and over-bright.
He might have tried to comfort her, but somehow the strength wasn’t in him. He stood gazing down at her, and in terse sentences, jealous of the time that was trickling through his fingers—in a toneless voice, as one telling a story already grown old, he related what had happened since yesterday evening; told her why he must go to Venus, or failing that at least leave Earth, if he died in the attempt.
She quieted, and as he finished, shrank back against the wall, pressing her hands against it. His eyes bored into her, seeking; but he could not tell whether she believed or not.
AFTER A silence that was not long, but seemed so, Athalie said, “But even if it’s true—it doesn’t make any difference. Everything’s over anyway. We—Earth is going to surrender.”
“The hell you say!”
She nodded abstractedly, as if he had agreed. “It was on the radio a few minutes ago. A message from Venus: if we don’t surrender, they’ll start the bombardment again at one o’clock. We couldn’t stand it—you see that, don’t you? They broadcast the message, because the censorship is down—we’ve all got to make up our minds now. And the Nations’ delegates are meeting to decide.” The world seemed to rock around Degnan. He muttered hoarsely, “The Fleets . . .”
“They can’t win. The radio didn’t say that, of course—but everybody knows it’s hopeless.” She straightened suddenly and grasped at his arm with nervous strength, her manner fevered again. “Ralph! The Venusians have promised to let some people go, to live on Mars. They’ll let us go if they think we’re on their side. Help me think, Ralph—how can we make them understand we’re in favor of surrendering?”
For a moment Degnan felt hollow, sick and weak inside; he realized how tired he was . . . He set his teeth and caught Athalie by both shoulders in a grip that made her cry out sharply. “That’s enough of that!
Mankind isn’t ready to quit yet. And you—you’ll do one last thing for your own world before you start bowing and scraping to Venus!”
Athalie had wilted. He felt her trembling, knew it was fear of him and did not relent. Nothing mattered now except his purpose.
There was a half-mad light in the eyes that met his—or perhaps they only reflected his own. She faltered, “Don’t, don’t—I will.”
He let her go, feeling at last a touch of pity for her. Last night had shattered her brittle self-confidence, left her subject to only one motive: fear.
He ordered, “Take me to the Azor.” It was Degnan who took the wheel of Athalie’s sky-blue speedster and pushed it at savage speed over the road that wound along the shore. But as Charles Norton’s one-time private landing field came in sight, he slowed and flung at the girl:
“I’ll be an engineer friend of yours, who wants to see—informally—if the ship mightn’t be usable after all. I can talk some technical language, and you vouch for me . . . At least they’ll be thrown off guard.”
There had been a low fence around the field when he had seen it last; the military had heightened that and topped it with barbed wire. One gate was closed and barricaded; beside the other one, a flimsily-built guardhouse. And beyond the fence—the Azor, its once golden hull painted space-black, a spidery temporary scaffolding about it. Work was evidently at a standstill now. They wouldn’t have touched the engines, though; and even if the ship weren’t sealable he could fly it in a vacuum suit.
HE was well aware that he had no chance of getting to Venus alive. But he knew the Azor of old, knew what its powerful drivers would do; there would be an excellent chance of shooting past the units of Earth’s defense patrol that had not been drawn off by the offensive, into deep space, and once out there—set a collision course for Venus and give the engines full power. By the time the fuel was exhausted, the ship would have a velocity of over five thousand miles a second. Even if it were blasted to fragments when it hit the Venusians’ barrage, the fragments would still have the momentum of its two thousand tons.
And if that death plunge should carry him close enough to the enemy world—There was a question which, when it first occurred to him, he had hastily crammed back into the darkest recess of his mind; he brought it into the light now. If he were to think, with deliberate conviction: I am at Combined Fleet Headquarters—now!—would that thought set off the reaction, before the brain censor could label it a lie?
He set the brakes in front of the gateway and reached for the door-button, eyes still fixed hungrily on the space ship. Then a scuffing sound jerked his head around—and he saw the car’s other door already open, and Athalie outside, running, stumbling across the sand toward the guardhouse, crying shrilly, “Help! Help! There’s a crazy man out here!”
For only an instant, Degnan sat stunned. The thought streaked through his head: I should never have looked away. If I’d only kept my eyes on her she’d never have dared—But there was no time for regrets. A uniformed figure had appeared at the door of the guard-shack, and the sun flashed on metal in its hands.
Degnan slammed full power into the drive unit and spun the wheel; the car whipped round with violence that almost blacked him out. There was only one way to go and that was back, a quarter mile of naked shore before the road dipped from sight, and he took that road at a hundred, a hundred and fifty miles an hour, tires screaming on the curves. He thought he heard a shout behind; but he was counting on the fellow not shooting before he found out what was up. For a wild moment, he had thought of crashing the fen
ce; but then the guard would certainly have opened fire.
The rising ground hid him, and he released held breath. But he didn’t slacken the deadly pace for half a mile more; then, within sight of the Norton house, he swung the car off the road, careening into the ditch where it would be partly shielded from aerial view by a couple of scrubby pines, and sprang out. His weary muscles responded poorly, but he drove himself into a dogged run—inland, toward the city.
Within minutes the hunt would be up—on the ground, in the sky, many against one, and sometime the lone quarry must stop, rest, while the ring closed in . . .
Skirting a tree-bordered road, he slowed at last to a walk. The road and the air above seemed deserted, but he kept under cover of the trees. Ahead, the sun climbed higher—a weird sun, a white disk through the high pall of dust that hung over the Earth.
SOMETIME later, he was in an outlying business center; normally its streets would have already been crowded at this hour, but today there were few people, and those hung in knots on the street-corner or crept aimlessly about, glancing up in furtive fear at the pallid sky. Among them, Degnan’s bedragglement and his haggard look was not conspicuous; his clothes had finished drying as he ran, and he had halted briefly to brush away the incrusted salt. He breathed more deeply; by losing himself among Los Angeles’ millions, he would at least gain a little time.
Much further on, in a little park, he crept beneath a dense thicket of bushes to rest. The leaves sagged tiredly under a film of sooty dust, and as the day wore on it was growing crushingly hot, as before a thunderstorm. At one o’clock—
With continuing effort Degnan held himself just above the edge of sleep, letting his body rest while his mind stayed feverishly awake. Could he ever sleep again? For he might dream—An hour or more by the white sun he lay there—his watch had stopped since his plunge into the sea—and at the end of that time got stiffly to his feet and went on. Aimlessly now, for there was no use trying to put more distance between himself and the point where he had last been seen—the point around which they would have drawn a circle, within which he must be. Perhaps they already knew, by a process of elimination, that he had gone into the city.
He knew now that no one on Earth would believe his story. Athalie . . . She had not believed—not that it would have made any difference; she was too far gone in hysteria. She hadn’t even been scheming to get him caught, back there; she had only been running away.
Here and there on the streets he saw pairs and groups of new citizen militia, grim-faced, with arm-bands and rifles, often accompanied by regular police robots. The night just past must have created a problem of order the regular forces couldn’t handle; there would be many who, like Athalie, had lost their heads completely, and their panic could take unpleasant forms. Human civilization had been shaken to its roots. And over every effort to hold it upright now lay the shadow—the new Venusian ultimatum.
Somewhere on Earth, out there under the Pacific, no doubt, the United Nations’ delegates were meeting under that shadow. And in each of them—the poisonous thought: “They’ve promised to spare a few. If one should speak out now for surrender—”
Those men would surely reject such a motive with revulsion. But there was another, more insidious thought: “Man’s time has come, to go the common way of a million other species, of the dodo and the tyrannosaur—outclassed and replaced. What use to struggle against a higher life form?”
IN ALL THE millennia of his blundering, bloody history, man had achieved no more than the vision of detached intelligence, emancipated from the blind compelling forces that rose constantly out of his unconscious to mock him with apehood. The unconscious is the larger part of Homo sapiens’ mind; there had been dreams of a Homo superior to come some day . . . But the Over Race had such intelligence now.
Some Earthly psychologists had claimed—and the Venusians had never denied—that the brain of the Over Being was actually inferior, in absolute potential, to the human. But their potential intelligence was one hundred per cent realized and uninhibited by feelings; it wasn’t that they lacked emotional drives, but their emotions were on the conscious level, the intellect dominant.
The history of Venus was relatively short, as the Over Race was a recent mutation of their lesser kin whose psychic structure resembled that of men. But that history was one single purposefully rising curve, without the waverings and cyclic reversions of man’s past; on Venus there had been no dark ages, no great divisions and wars. In the absence of the factors which had made introspection a hissing and a byword among Earthly psychological methods, the science of mind had led technical achievement—but that too had advanced on the rising curve. That the first ships to cross space had been Terrestrial was perhaps only an accident; under their cloud blanket the Venusians had had little idea of astronomy, no direct knowledge of stars and planets.
That was a basic environmental difference. Through all his wanderings and dark ages, man had seen the stars overhead, and dreamed dreams; he had been at last almost ready to reach out for the stars . . .
That was the last and greatest prize at stake in this last war: the right to fulfill that human dream. Only for the Venusians, if they won, it would be no such fulfillment, but only another episode in the smooth mechanical functioning of their total intelligence.
Yet, for all their superiority, they had made one basic mistake in the field where they were strongest; Degnan, on whom the error had been made, could recognize it now. They had wholly misunderstood the duality of the human mind, supposed that knowledge erased from the conscious would no longer affect the subject’s motives or actions. But human psychologists, who had fumbled at the gates of the unconscious for centuries, knew that to it belonged the complex of blind forces which the old theologians had called “conscience”, and to which various names had been given since Freud’s pioneer hypotheses; by any name it was the same, a power greater in the end than merely conscious reason or will. The Over Race could not be expected to see that; their mentality was by definition conscienceless . . .
THE SIGHT of a squad of armed militiamen jarred Degnan out of a sleep-walking bemusement and made him step quickly into the doorway of a cafe, to busy himself holding matches to a waterlogged cigarette. The cafe was open, and he glimpsed a lighted television screen inside; he realized then two of his own most immediate problems—he must eat if he were to have the strength to keep going, and he must know whether a general alarm had gone out for him.
In the latter he was almost incredibly lucky. He had scarcely collected a hasty meal and sat down inconspicuously in a corner—fortunately the cafe was an automat—when the screen blazed with an announcement, at once printed and spoken for extra emphasis:
“The persons whose pictures will be shown immediately following are slaves of Venus and traitors to Earth. They are believed to be somewhere in this city. All citizens are requested to watch for them and assist in their capture dead or alive.”
A series of over a dozen pictures, with names, ages, other data, displayed for a minute or two apiece. Among them Degnan recognized the red-faced Clark; and last in the series was Margaret Lusk. Degnan’s heart contracted strangely as her image filled the screen; it was a moving picture, breathtakingly real, and it must have been taken some time ago, before she had gone to Venus, for in it she was smiling with a carefree gayety he had never seen in the brief time he had known her, and in the background were glimpses of a summer landscape of Earth . . .
Then a repetition of the announcement. “The persons whose pictures have just been shown . . . Dead or alive!”
Degnan bitterly regretted not having advised the girl to go straight to the police. But everything had seemed so simple then. Now—it wasn’t likely to make any difference to her, or anybody else, before long, anyway.
The important thing was that they hadn’t broadcast his picture. Perhaps that meant they still hadn’t come to a decision about what was behind his disappearance; certainly, at least, it meant they wanted him alive.
If they caught him, it wouldn’t be alive. It was as good as certain now that his dead body would be harmless, that the only trigger was a perceptive reaction in his living brain. By now the Venusians, as their new ultimatum showed, had written their “final weapon” off the books and were going on to victory without it.
Degnan froze; the telescreen now showed a news-announcer, and “the Fleets” had come crashing into his consciousness.
THE ANNOUNCER’S face had an ill-hidden strained, hunted look, “. . . that military operations which began around Venus at eight o’clock Pacific Time had practically ceased. Some units of the Combined Fleets, including a number of cruisers and lighter craft, were reported regrouping between Venus and the Sun, with a good chance of returning safely to Earth. The two battleships, San Ch’ieh and Yucatan, previously thought to have escaped the Venusian barrage, are now definitely known to have been lost . . .”
Mechanically, Degnan glanced at the clock beside the telescreen. It was eleven o’clock; three hours since the Fleets had contacted the enemy.
And it was evident that the Fleets had been destroyed. At the moment he didn’t even care much about learning the details; he only half listened as the announcer went on, in a taut unnatural voice, briefly reviewing the disastrous Battle of Venus. Little enough was known—only that the Over Race had produced some new and frightful wizardry, that Earth ships had exploded and disintegrated in apparently clear space still a quarter of a million miles from the enemy world, attacked by something which neither ordinary equipment nor that hastily rigged up to cope with hyperspace missiles could detect or fend off. With what he alone knew, Degnan could guess at the nature of that attack. A variation on the hyperspace principle, pulsating fields projected by devices too small to register on detectors until it was too late; the ships must have torn themselves apart as portions of their structures ceased to obey the same physical laws as the rest . . .
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 37