Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Novik started to run. Heart thudding, breath rasping in his throat, he shouldered through the ecstatically listening crowds. In their ears he screamed: “It’s not so! We mustn’t use it!”

  They stared after him, some shouted “Stop him!” but no one wanted to miss the Dictator’s epoch making speech.

  It was over a mile to the Dictatorial palace, and Novik ran all the way. He was reeling with exhaustion when he got there, and he had to lean against a pillar and wrestle with nausea for a time before he was able to produce his wallet and show the card in it to the tall Guardsman at the gate.

  The Guardsman raised his eyebrows; the disheveled and panting young man before him didn’t look much like a Popo agent.

  Beyond the gates, though, Novik encountered officials who knew him, and in a remarkably short time he was led before the Dictator. Since Chaber’s demise, the leader had appointed no successor to the post, taking care of the most important police matters himself. Now he was still flushed from his speech to the people and delighted by the first reports of the people’s reaction.

  Novik faced the Dictator, holding himself erect with an effort. He said thickly, “Agent Novik reporting, sir, in the case of Dr. Joseph Euge . . .”

  “What’s the matter with you?” The Dictator stared at him from under knitting brows. “Are you drunk?”

  “He is a traitor,” said Novik. “He has withheld information . . . vital to defense . . .”

  “Eh? You mean Euge? What information?”

  “His experiments . . . the mice. Been doing them for months.”

  “For months? Then why haven’t you reported it before?”

  “Another traitor,” mumbled Novik. He swayed unsteadily on his feet, caught himself with a peculiar jerk; his eyes were somnolent. Before them the Dictator blurred in a bright painful glitter of metal. Two Dictators, shining and terrible here at the end of the world. “The virus . . . not a weapon. Not to be used, because . . . it’s death. It’s . . . fear . . .” The Dictator recoiled, recognizing the red-rimmed vacant eyes, the twitching face of the young man. He opened his mouth to say too much, and held his breath; then he stiffened and ordered harshly: “Take him! Take him away!”

  4

  DURING the speech to the people, the first rockets had already risen from their scattered launching sites and were soaring at ten, fifteen, twenty miles per second over continents and oceans. The enemy was not unprepared; his immensely complex and expensive systems of warning and defense, radar-eyed, electric-nerved and robot-brained, were fully on. But that defense setup, which laced a whole nation and concentrated bristlingly over the great cities, was designed primarily to detect, deflect and destroy projectiles with atomic warheads, which must approach within a few miles of their targets to do damage. The bombardment rockets of the Diktatura burst quietly high in the stratosphere, before very many of them were met and annihilated by the interceptor barrage. Their cargos dispersed earthward in a rain of little protective plastic globes, which, as they fell through the warm restless levels of the troposphere, darkened and shriveled in a fantastically swift chemical decay, and spewed their liquid contents in a fine spray into the air.

  Six days before—the virus’ average incubation period—the code word had been sent out to the spies and the native fifth columnists who served the Diktatura for pay or loyalty’s sake. It was their mission to distribute the small quantities of Virus RM4 which had been smuggled to them, in such a way as to make the plague’s initial onslaught as paralysing as possible. The enemy’s total destruction in the end was foregone; but his power to strike back must be cut down to a minimum.

  The broadcasts and the headlines continued to proclaim to the nation that this was Victory Day.

  EUGE HAD CLEARED away the remains of his experiments methodically. There was nothing more to be learned that way, and most of the establishment was converted now to helping in the mass production of Virus RM4. Euge locked up the contagion laboratory and settled down by his private televisor to observe the progress of the ultimate experiment, whose laboratory was the world.

  Guessing as he did the reason for Novik’s failure to return, he was little surprised or alarmed when a half-dozen booted Guardsmen clumped in on him, and their leader informed him that he was again confined to quarters.

  “If the Dictator wishes to see me—” began Euge politely.

  “The Dictator’s busy.” said the squad leader. “He’ll talk to you in due time.”

  “I understand,” Euge nodded resignedly, and turned back to his newscasts.

  His own name was repeated in them with considerable frequency, and recorded pictures of him were broadcast. He was understood to be a modest hero of science, with a passion for anonymity. In the Dictator’s due time, Euge realized, he might receive the accolade of a martyr to science.

  He passed over the mentions of himself impatiently. Once he had rather liked the modicum of glory and the comfort that the Diktatura granted him in return for his work, but now he was down to basic motives, and his desire to live was largely a product of his avid curiosity to see what the offspring of his curiosity would do to mankind’s world.

  The picture emerged but slowly from behind the bright parade of censored reports; only for one like Euge, who had some experience of the government’s inside ways and who, moreover, knew better than any other living man what “to expect, did it emerge at all.

  It was evident before long that the enemy’s resistance was greater than anticipated. Easy to say “according to plan”, but it was impossible to ignore or gloss over the news when enemy atomic rockets leaked through the defenses, and a city here or there puffed skyward in a pillar of smoke and flame. Or when highflying enemy machines sowed the seeds of a controllable, but extremely nasty epidemic, which touched even the capital.

  The fifth-column offensive must have failed miserably. Naturally, the first to die in the enemy’s country would have been those entrusted with spreading the plague. Euge wondered if the Dictator had found that out, and if so, what he thought about it.

  Never acknowledged, but quickly apparent to the expectant Euge from certain veiled illusions, denials and instructions that came over the air, was the beginning spread of RM4, in its active and lethal form (the latent infection must be almost universal now), among the people of the Diktatura. In his head Euge kept a map, in which the increasing areas that the newscasts never mentioned were represented by creeping splotches of blackness. When he examined and revised it, he was wont to lean back with closed eyes, on his lips a faint smile that made his guards look uneasily at one another.

  Immured, Euge had no means of learning directly what spirit was abroad in the masses. But he could make shrewd deductions from the changing tones of the propaganda directed at them. Within the space of less than a month, it shifted from paeans of celebration for a quick and easy conquest to the harsh task of inspiring a fiercely realistic, do-or-die determination, to which Victory was once again a far wandering fire, beckoning out of storm and darkness ahead.

  Realism went as far as an admission that the initial biological attack had failed to fulfill the hopes pinned on it. The plague had taken hold and spread slowly, but, on the bright side, it was doing its work now all the more thoroughly . . . There followed a map, showing the estimated extent of plague areas in the enemy lands, and an extrapolation by noted pathologists of the time that must pass, the time that must be endured with courage, fortitude and hard work, before the foe would be blotted from the face of the Earth.

  Euge closed his eyes and made comparisons with his private map and with his extrapolations from it, and he smiled unpleasantly yet again.

  He asked for and received a bundle of newspapers; it was among those there chanced to be an ill-printed pamphlet issued by the Witnesses of the Lord, which stated positively that, had the original experiments been correctly understood, it would have been plain at once that RM4 was the Judgment Virus, come to slay the wicked and spare the righteous, whose lintels were sprinkled
with blood . . .

  Euge read the pamphlet through with a sharp quickening of interest, but when he had finished he shook his head sadly.

  HE WAS BROUGHT before the Dictator for the last time.

  The leader’s eyes were sunken and spoke of sleepless nights. They rested on Euge with the cold impersonal enmity of a snake’s.

  “You lied to me,” he stated flatly.

  “No,” denied the scientist. “I let you interpret the data in your own way. It is not my fault that you believed what you wanted to believe.”

  The Dictator strove visibly to say what he had planned. “I have recalled you, despite grave suspicions, to—to appeal for assistance. Perhaps you have had pacifist sentiments all along—” Euge made a scornful gesture. “In any case, it is no longer a question of making war. The enemy has practically ceased to fight, now It is the plague that must be conquered—”

  “I imagine,” said Euge softly, “that your statisticians have told you that RM4 will be pandemic in this country as soon as, or before, it is in the enemy’s.”

  The other’s mouth twitched. “You performed exhaustive experiments with the plague; you hold the key to its nature and possibly to a remedy.”

  “It is true that I learned something about the virus’ raison d’etre. Novik must have told you about it. There was nothing which pointed to a preventive, let alone a cure, at this stage. I am no immunologist, anyway.”

  “Novik said,” the Dictator’s eyes narrowed, “ ‘It is fear!’ ”

  Euge nodded with satisfaction. “He was right. The virus attacks only brains that are already sick with fear. Not—my results with mice indicated—the normal alarm of a healthy organism, which expresses itself in flight or fight, but the pathological anxiety-state that come of an inescapable threat or frustration in the environment, and that turns itself so easily into feelings of guilt or hatred . . . The fear of the criminal, the neurotic, the paranoiac.”

  “Then all that is needed is to stamp out such elements, the focus of infection!”

  Euge looked at him with open amusement. “You’re welcome to try it. But remember—we are at war now. The psychology of the people is fear, like that of the criminal, the hunted hunter, the hated hater, perhaps the guilty. . . As long as there was peace, the Diktatura gave most of us security, reasonable happiness, freedom from fear. The same is true of the enemy’s government, however short it may have fallen of ours. But a nation at war is a nation afraid.

  “And RM4 is a successful mutation,” added Euge didactically. “It creates the thing it feeds on. One of the most basic fears in men or mice—the fear of one’s own dead. Thanks to that, the plague is independent now of anything you do or leave undone.”

  The Dictator stared smolderingly. He spoke with bitter irony, “You awe me, doctor. You are a traitor to your country and to all mankind. Yet you seem to consider yourself justified.”

  Euge shrugged. “I am a scientist; I deal in questions of what can be done. It is left to you politicians to concern yourselves with what should be.”

  The Dictator choked, recognizing his own doctrine. “Irresponsibility—science!” His face flamed with finally unleashed passion. “If I survive this, I’ll see to exterminating the whole breed of scientists!”

  Euge studied him coolly. “You won’t survive; you are afraid.”

  BENT OVER HIS DESK, the Dictator struggled to compose a speech to the people—one that would reassure, enhearten, inflame the blackening coals of hope.

  He wrote: “There is nothing to fear but fear. A way will be found . . .” He scowled at the shaky hand-writing of the last line, scratched it out angrily and began again.

  “A way will be found . . .” But his fingers twitched convulsively with the pen, and the sentence trailed into a senseless scrawl.

  THE TRUCK SWUNG round and lurched, to a halt not far from the road, and they saw that there would be no grave—only a stretch of wild, rank weeds in a wet meadow.

  “So,” said Joseph Euge in the same weary monotone, “there will be an end of man—unless somewhere on Earth are found men without fear.”

  He flinched from the prodding bayonet of a frightened man in a terrible mask, and stumbled stiffly to his feet.

  1953

  THE CAPTAIN’S GETAWAY

  BOLD WAS THE CAPTAIN, PIRATE OF THE VAST INTERPLANETARY SPACES . . . BUT THE SCIENTIST WAS BOLDER!

  YALMAR GUNN leaned over the table and shook his large, hairy fist in the little Scientist’s mild face. The gesture was pure drama, but, Norry Falk told himself, obviously Gunn was a man of dramatic gestures.

  “By the stars,” he bellowed with all the ferocity at his command, “you’ll hand it over, or I’ll lift my ship tonight and blow your deleted city to atoms!”

  The two other men at the council table in the Perkunian tower chamber held their breaths. For that matter, Norry Falk, Savant Twens Dalen’s thirty-year-old assistant, had been holding his consistently since the space captain’s voice had begun to rise and he Bad taken to fondling his flame pistol. Now even the hard-faced lieutenant whom Gunn had brought with him to the meeting removed his pipe from his mouth and seemed to grow tense.

  Falk eyed bitterly the captain’s holstered gun; in view of the growing distrust between the men of Science City and the crew of the Fomalhaut, there had been a no-weapons clause in the terms for the parley. Ridiculous, perhaps, since the warship’s guns completely commanded Science City from its berth out on the airless surface. But Falk wished ardently that he had smuggled in at least a small needle-gun on his own account.

  Twens Dalen, blinking a little at the large fist as the other let it fall, still clenched, was speaking, with a choice of words which betrayed a passion for precise statement. “It is not a question of those alternatives, Captain,” he said quietly. “If Science City must be blown to atoms, as you put it, it will not be by your agency.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” Gunn scowled with all his big blond face. He had once been accustomed to be polite—almost silky, in fact—with the personnel of captured cargo or passenger vessels in the depths of space; but those had been occasions on which he had held all the cards. Now his nerves were on edge; before he had left his bridge to come to the parley, he had rechecked a certain set of figures on the calculator, and the results might have shaken even a better balanced individual.

  Dalen blinked again; but a little of his studiedly courteous manner fell from him as he spoke. “I’m aware, Captain Gunn, that you are the representative of no stellar government whatsoever; in short, you are a private. Furthermore, your ship escaped to Perkunas after a brush with a Bellatrician patrol cruiser in deep space, and you believe yourself to have been pursued. You have calculated the time required for the patrol ship to change course; it should arrive within twenty days.”

  As the pirate, silenced for once, merely stared at him, the Savant explained gently: “You see, Captain, Perkunas, though technocratically governed and devoted to the pursuit of pure science, has its working classes and its taverns—where some of your crew on leave saw fit to talk.”

  The Scientist’s circumlocutions had given Gunn time to recover his wits. Without moving, he said sullenly, “Okay, Doc, so you can’t be kidded. But I’m not trying to kid you when I say that unless you hand over that deleted space drive, I’m going to get sort of rough with a few atomics. You know now just why I’ve got to have it.”

  There was a deadliness in the last statement that made young Norry Falk wish even more urgently for a needle-gun. It might just be possible, he reflected, to snatch the pirate’s own weapon from its holster and use it . . . But the timidity of one born and bred as a comrade of Science on isolated Perkunas, with its scant million of people and its poverty-engendered immunity to raids and strife, held him back.

  Dalen said, “You seem to hold the illusion, Captain Gunn, that you are in a position to dictate to me—to our planet. That is an error.”

  “And what do you mean by that?” demanded Yalmar Gunn, his cold
blue eyes narrowed.

  Dalen did not answer at once. Instead, head bowed, he was examining his wrist watch, an elaborate radium timepiece; he seemed to be adjusting it. At last, still concealing the dial from Gunn, he raised his eyes and said expressionlessly, “I frequently use this chronometer as a timer for certain mechanisms. At present, the vibration frequency which it emits is keyed to a single control in my laboratory directly beneath this tower. If the chronometer is not set back, once every three hours, to a certain definite point, this control will automatically disintegrate the five tons of radioactive copper which form our power reservoir.” He paused, then added, with a touch of apology, “An elementary device for purposes of personal security. I cannot claim that it has any scientific merit.”

  He did not need to add that such an explosion would blow not only Science City, but most of the planet of Perkunas, and the ship Fomalhaut along with it, quite literally to atoms.

  By a Herculean effort, Norry Falk kept his face immobile. That was necessary, for if he had allowed anything to show there Gunn’s alert, fox-faced lieutenant might have read from his expression that there was no such control as Dalen had mentioned—indeed, no five tons of atomic copper buried under Science City. And had there been, the gentle chief of the Perkunian Scientists would never have gambled with a million lives, even to save his most precious secrets.

  But Captain Yalmar Gunn took the threat at face value, for the moment, at least, and on that basis he thought very fast indeed. He was motionless for one staggered moment—. Then, with a roar, the blond pirate lunged headlong across the small table, seized Dalen’s left wrist in a bruising grip, and twisted it savagely until he could see the chronometer dial.