Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Two-thirds of his time was gone. No use repeating the threat again—the battle was already lost or won.

  Perhaps the Over Race could recognize one of their errors now—an oversight that was understandable, since Venus had no water and no oceans, and the chance of a sufficiently violent explosion under the pressure of a great mass of water inducing the hydrogen-helium reaction, by a star, must never have played much part in their thinking. But of course they knew the theoretical possibility, and that once begun in a hydrogen concentration vastly above that in the Sun, it would be a chain reaction. And they could figure the effects. Within minutes after the detonation of Earth’s oceans, Venus too would be dead, sterilized by the terrific outrush of heat and radiation; it was doubtful if such a blast would leave any life in the Solar System. Watchers out in the Galaxy, if there were watchers, would record a Stella nova of unaccountable briefness.

  The other mistake the Venusians had made—the psychological one—was probably a mystery to them even now.

  Degnan called once more, “Margaret!”

  She did not stir; she hardly seemed to breathe. He wanted urgently to see light in her eyes again, see her face alive once more, if so it be that this were the end. He grasped her shoulders and drew her erect, unresisting.

  “Margaret—wake up. It’s all over now.” That was the truth, one way or another. “Come back to me, Margaret . . .” He bent to her parted lips. That seemed to rouse her; he felt her lips come alive under the kiss, her body lose its hypnotized rigidity.

  He said close to her ear, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I hurt you for nothing.”

  She sighed deeply. “I’m all right now. It’s gone . . . and you’re here . . . and I know it won’t come back any more,” she murmured, like a little girl being comforted out of a nightmare.

  General Fleming coughed. “Colonel Degnan. Your time is up.”

  DEGNAN released Margaret and turned away, his face a frozen mask. Did the Over Race’s misunderstanding of human mentality go so far that they had imagined he was bluffing. Or had he misjudged the Over Race—were they too capable of the hatred stronger than death, which so often in the human past had led men to go to destruction, if only to take an enemy with them?

  He said, “I’m ready,” and to Margaret, “Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

  But her face was stricken. She must have sensed something behind the words; or perhaps she remembered and understood something of the message he had tried to send.

  Degnan didn’t look at her again. The guards flanked him in the open doorway. The General said briskly, relievedly, “We’ve landed a flier in the street outside. Only a few minutes—”

  King, seated on the edge of the General’s desk and apparently absorbed in putting on his watch, looked up abruptly and said, “Wait.” Fleming stared at him, opened his mouth; but the deputy from CFHQ gestured imperiously for silence.

  Degnan tried to listen, and was hindered by a roaring in his ears. Unsteadily, he put a hand on the jamb of the door, and felt no vibration in the cool wood; and he saw the answer in the others’ faces at the same time.

  King reached for a phone at his elbow. “Sector Defense . . . That’s right. Give me the Head Coordinator. At once.” He snapped a curt question or two, listened, then broke the connection and asked for another, direct to Combined Fleet Headquarters. Waiting, he gazed quizzically at Degnan. “No projectiles have come in for close to three minutes now—and they were coming five or six to the minute. Now, what shall I tell the general staffs?”

  General Fleming made an incoherent noise; his eyes darted from King to Degnan and then to Margaret, and his wrinkles, for perhaps the first time in their history, expressed something like fright. He looked on the verge of crossing himself.

  Degnan moistened his lips. “They’d better get in touch with Venus right away and discuss surrender terms. The surrender of Venus, that is . . . The Over Race ought to agree in occupation and destruction of their spawning beds; it isn’t in them to set their race above self-preservation. That way they’ll be extinct after a generation; and we can get along with the Under Race.”

  Margaret moved quietly to Degnan’s side, and he drew her against him; but he was bracing himself for the questions that would come as soon as King finished talking to CFHQ. He couldn’t answer those questions—not until Earth ships had taken control on Venus and spiked the enemy’s guns.

  And then—In him was still a cold, dead weight of knowledge: Venus was defeated, but the curse that had been laid on him remained. He was still and forever an outcast from the rest of his victorious kind . . .

  Earth would be grateful; no doubt they would be ready to give anything he asked, perhaps even the right to remain among men. He couldn’t do that, though.

  Margaret nestled her head against his shoulder, and looked up with the beginning of a smile on her lips. She might smile again, in a world without fear, as she had in that picture on the telescreen . . . He blotted the thought out.

  She said, “It’s really over now, isn’t it? And we’re all right.”

  Degnan looked away for a moment. She was going to be hurt too, he realized, and the sooner it was over the better. For a moment, just now, he had wondered if she knew . . .

  He said in a low voice, disjointedly, “The end of one thing is the beginning of another. Now that the System is safe for man—before long they’ll be building the first ship to go beyond. A long trip, a one-way trip perhaps, for whoever’s chosen to go. And I think—”

  Her arm tightened about him in a close embrace of possession and understanding. She whispered: “As long as the star ship will carry two.

  THE END

  THE TOWER OF BABBLE

  Millard first knew he and his friends were close to some forbidden secret when an invisible wall held their minds apart

  THE CAR purred sweetly through gine and tires blending into a the warm night, the sound of ennarcotic thrum. The black road rolled endlessly out of darkness, and beyond its shoulders gray stunted bushes flashed monotonously past, and only once in a while a ghostly yucca, crowned with pale bloom, drifted through the field of headlights.

  John Millard found himself yawning, and switched on the dashboard lights. He needed the speedometer, anyway, to assure him he was traveling a steady sixty, that only the desert’s empty vastness made him seem to be crawling.

  All the same, the will-o’-the-wisps ahead, that had beckoned from the world’s dark rim for absurdly long, were undoubtedly growing and spreading out. Off to the right, far from the highway, he saw the bright square of a ranchhouse window and its reflection in an irrigation ditch. The firefly swarm ahead scattered and strung out along the die-straight line of the road: yellow lights of houses, the red and blue and green that meant filling-stations and motels and stores, a brave oasis of neon.

  Presently Millard took his foot off the gas and the car began to slow with a sound like a long sigh. Cottonwoods rustled past and from beyond them came the methodical chug of a pump. The first outlying gas-station, a floodlit stage set on a backdrop of darkness, sailed toward him . . .

  Millard blinked at it, shook his head, and blinked again. Then he trod on the brake and slid to a gravelspraying stop, and sat staring from under knitted brows.

  The glaring red sign fronting the road—he couldn’t read it. It seemed to be in an unknown alphabet, the shapes of whose letters, vaguely familiar, were yet unintelligibly alien. His gaze leaped to other signs, on down the highway. They were meaningless scrawls of flame.

  It wasn’t the night driving doing things to his eyes. He could plainly see the gas pumps, the row of electric bulbs above and the bright insects gyrating about them. On a sheet-metal sign nailed to the side of the building, a familiar beautiful girl held an utterly familiar bottle aloft like a beacon. But the letters on the sign meant nothing.

  Presently Millard transferred his foot to the accelerator and pulled back onto the asphalt. In a sort of frozen trance he let the car drift ahead, down the highway
-main street of the little town. Wherever he looked, it was the same. Lettered plate-glass windows, illuminated signs, a theater marquee and the posters on either side of the entrance below it—nothing made any sense.

  Dizzy, he pulled up to the curb in front of a lighted drug store. The whole look of the place—he had seen its like in a thousand little towns—said “drug store,” but the blue-glowing letters over the corner entrance said nothing.

  Still Millard didn’t stir for a time, his palms sweaty on the wheel. Then he flung open the door and climbed shakily out. He had to find out, even if it uprooted the conviction of his own sanity.

  THE STORE’S interior was papered with advertisements of soft drinks, vitamins, ice cream, corn plasters. Not one word of them was legible. In their midst a little gray-haired man stood at bay, glancing fearfully about him; at the door’s opening he faced it and made a pitiful effort to control his twitching face. He mumbled something at the newcomer.

  Millard drew a deep breath. Insanity was postponed; the thing was real, in the sense that others saw it too.

  “What’s happened here?” he asked hastily.

  The druggist jarred back as if the question had been a blow. He shrank against a soda-fountain stool, and words spilled from his quivering lips. Words, by their complex inflections of terror mingled with questioning, pleading. But they were in no language Millard had ever heard.

  “What’s the matter?” he queried again in a voice that shocked him by trembling.

  That he took a step forward was too much for the little man. He wheeled and bolted toward the rear of the store; his elbow grazed a pharmacy shelf and brought bottles crashing down, but he disappeared through a curtain without looking back.

  Millard made no move to follow. He stood rigid, fighting the contagion of panic. At his elbow was a magazine rack. Mechanically he picked up a gay-covered pulp, flipped it open to a random page. It gave the impression of a page of Russian—a haunting ought-to-be familiarity, that as you looked closer evaporated into strangeness.

  Carefully he replaced the magazine, and his eye fell on a counter display of ballpoint pens with a scratchpad beside it. He took a pen, and let his hand write his own name on a blank sheet. Then he looked, and saw nothing but a scribble.

  Stiffly Millard straightened. This, together with the druggist’s fright and the almost-complete normality of the store, the street, the town, left no room for his first wild theory—that somewhere back along the black road he had driven unknowing across the dividing line between this and some other, alien world. The thing was in his mind; at least he was spared the lonely torment of knowing it to be in his mind alone.

  Something had stretched out a hand and slammed a shutter in his brain, and his eyes saw and his ears heard, but no meaning came through to the imprisoned, logically thinking cortex. Something had closed a door, created a wall, as a psychologist’s hand drops a sliding panel in front of a questing, channeled rat to drive him into rat schizophrenia.

  Something . . . He was on the street again, and involuntarily he looked up, into the black sky stabbed with stars. There was nothing there, no shadowy wings hovering over the Earth, and Millard laughed a short laugh that caught in his throat. Animistic thinking. Slugged by facts totally new to experience, he had reacted as his race had countless times in its haunted youth. But the stars, bright and unwinking in the desert sky almost as the stars of space must be, steadied him. The constellations were right, the pointing Dipper and the Pole Star a third of the way up the invisible arc from horizon to zenith.

  Somebody brushed against him as he stood with feet planted wide on the sidewalk; the man veered unsteadily away, muttering apologetically.

  “Hey!” Millard arrested him with a gesture, pointed up the street toward what was evidently the bar the other had just left. “Can you read that sign?”

  The drunk peered toward the flaming letters, grinned sheepishly and said something unintelligible. Then he flapped a hand at the street, a, careless gesture of dismissal, and wandered off.

  Millard smiled crookedly. There was one fellow who wouldn’t be bothered, tonight, by whatever had hit this town. But others would, and there would be hell to pay. Just what form it would take he didn’t know—but men robbed of speech would be animals, dangerous because frightened . . . From the bar came raised voices, thick with fear and alcohol. Millard turned back to the car.

  HE COULD not know how far this thing extended, but he could guess. As he slid behind the wheel again, he glanced at the dashboard’s dials. The figures on them were meaningless, even though he could identify most of them by position. But he was sure they had been readable when he switched on the lights, four or five miles out of town. Perhaps the shutter, the wall, hadn’t been in place then; but, instinctively visualizing the affected area as a circle with, say, a twenty-mile radius, he located the town on the periphery. There was no Earthly reason for it to be the center.

  He was seeking un-Earthly reasons, though. Animistic thinking again, inventing motives for a willfully malignant power from outside.

  The black highway was hissing under the wheels, the town’s lights dwindling into a cluster in the rear-vision mirror, when he saw the side-road on the left. He braked hard and swung into it, and instantly stepped on the gas again, bouncing nerve-rackingly over a narrow asphalt strip pounded to pieces by heavy-laden trucks.

  How many miles the road wound into the desert, over ridges and through arroyos, the speedometer couldn’t tell him; at last the lights showed a high woven-wire fence ahead, blocking the road with a gate. Beyond it, the scrubby sameness of more bushes and sand.

  Millard slowed to a crawl and let the car nose against the gate. It was heavily padlocked, but no one was in sight, no guards. He fed the engine carefully metered doses of power, the rear wheels buzzed and gripped again, then something snapped and the car lunged forward, wire clawing along one fender.

  On the next long rise, there were lights ahead, low lights of windows off to the left and straight ahead a string of stars that rose far into the moonless sky, inclining a little eastward.

  When the way was blocked by a second fence, and another road elbowed left, in the direction of the lighted buildings, Millard made the turn, then pulled up and left the car idling while he gazed toward the tower.

  It was a good place to collect his thoughts. If he didn’t look at the dashboard, he couldn’t feel the wall in his mind. He could almost see the tower against the sky, its skeleton framework picked out by many lights.

  Only around its base, where there should have been light and busy figures, was darkness, cloaking the hulked shoulders of machines.

  He had seen no one. The armed men who should have guarded the gates back there and here were gone, swept away by the terror—primeval fear of the dark, perhaps, wakened by the glacial loneliness of finding themselves without speech. If any of those men were still around, Millard didn’t want to meet them. The fear of stampeded beasts is terrible, but if those dumb beasts have been men . . .

  He took a final look at the tower—not the loftiest structure of men’s building, but the boldest, raised to defy the stars. If it was really the center, then you could hardly avoid supposing something that thought and acted like a man, that saw and feared and struck. A cosmic something cunning and powerful enough to strike at the weak point of its enemies’ minds.

  THE IDEA of a human agency crossed his thoughts hardly long enough to be consciously dismissed. It was too obvious that nowhere, on either side of the barrier men had erected across the Earth, was human science in hoping distance of producing the phenomenon of this wall. Psychology could do no more than label it an aphasia, a paralysis of vaguely-plotted speech centers in the brain . . . Why, then, keep giving anthropomorphic features to the power behind the wall? The blind interaction of mechanical forces may stimulate will and purpose wonderfully; a Brownian particle has no will, but does a molecular virus? Or an ant? Or, for that matter, a—

  Annoyed at himself, Millard chopped the
thought off short and set the car rolling again.

  The long low structure with the lights came near. Millard stopped, slid out and crunched up a gravel walk. The main door was ajar, and in the front office all the lights blazed, bathing its emptiness in pitiless white. It was wholly empty of people, except for the dead man lying face down on the floor.

  Millard bent briefly, his mind seeming to click as it pigeonholed the emotions of shock and horror for more leisurely reference, and appended murder to the data that must presently add up to a logical total. It was logical to find that the dead man was Dr. Pell—no mistaking the fringe of gray hair that the blow from behind had mixed with blood and brains.

  He straightened up and pushed open the right-hand door. That room too was brilliantly lit, and four men sat in it, each with his back to a corner. They glanced up, keeping silence, and the eyes of each shifted quickly back to vague anxious wandering over the others’ faces.

  Millard paused in the doorway, wondering if his own face looked as strained and strange as these. Probably not—they had been sitting here for sometime now. And he could sense the tension that had built up and up, with never a word to break it.

  Where no words were, an action had to suffice. He moved forward to the middle of the room, focus of those frozen eyes, and looked down casually at the disordered papers atop the desk there. Neat typewritten sheets, perfectly illegible—Pell’s final summary of the preparations, probably, finished save for Millard’s report on the television arrangements, which Pell would never add . . . When he raised his head and turned slowly all the way around, it had worked a little; the web of stares was broken, and the faces were less like those of beasts in an unfriendly lair, more like those of men he knew and had worked with to build the tower.

  Carlsen, the atomic physicist, his plump face like a child’s whose building blocks were electrons, protons, neutrons, force fields . . . MacLeod, the lanky astronomer, spiritual descendent of men who had longed toward the stars through many generations . . . Weidemann, who had built the impossible engine. . . Novinski, eyes veiled behind glittering lenses that suggested one of his robots that could see and interpret and almost think . . .