A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  It was impossible to question him along a consistent vein. He would start talking about their organization and end wondering about the possible influences on human behavior of subtle rhythms in gravity. He would open a conjecture about the daily habits of their Leader and it would end a theory on the psychology of island cultures. His long expressionless horseface would turn to me and he would conclude with something like, “You know, Herman Melville was right about the sea. It is not a vista but a background. People living on it experience mostly in a foreground.”

  Every Operator for The Central has at times to think profoundly about such things and be equipped better than average to do so. You can’t deal effectively with the variegated human cultures now scattered far out into the galaxy without being neatly sensitive to the psychological influences of landscape, flora, climate, ancestry and planetary neighbors.

  But at present I had a much blunter assignment. I had to reach a carefully protected man I had seen only in photographs. I had to reach him in the shortest possible time and kill him. Now, the worse luck of all, my only Contact had “taken root.”

  It happened every day of course. Psychostatistically it was inevitable. A fine Operator hit a planet where he began to take an emotional interest. He adopted quite seriously one or more of the major habits of the natives. This man had reached the next stage where his emotional interest in his new-found “home” dominated his finely drilled ties to The Central. In his case it had taken only a standard month and a half. In fact it had not been visible a month ago when the pilot of my tiny space shuttle dropped me off in the dark at his cottage. I finally realized the only thing I could get from him now was a rehearsal of the story he had told me that night before I walked alone into the strange city.

  But I delayed asking him to retell his story. An odd thing happened. It happened just as I was about to ask him to go into town and buy me a set of the local power equipment. We were on our usual morning walk through the fern woods. Naturally he had refused to exercise until the passing of the second orbit moon. That had irritated me. I was on the verge of spitting out that I was wasting time and would be on my way as soon as he could run into town and buy me the local harness.

  There in the middle of the path lay my own power equipment—the harness they had stripped off with my clothes down on the tide shelf three weeks before. If they had only left this harness on me, I would have been able to antigrav my way over the fourth sea wall instead of frictioning my way up on peeling flesh. I knew the harness and helmet on sight. I picked it up and I was certain. The hair at the back of my neck stirred.

  I didn’t say anything and he was still enough of an Operator not to ask. We both knew it was no accident.

  Back at the cottage I spent the rest of the day and most of the night checking that harness of power equipment. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it that I could find. The radio, sending and receiving, was in perfect order both on inspection and when I check-called to my ship waiting on the second orbit moon. The arms, both the microsplosive for killing single targets and the heavy 0.5 Kg. demolition pistol were as they had been when on my person. The antigravity mechanism and its neatly built-in turbojet, part by part, under X-ray and on the fine balance he used for assaying quartzcar specimens, was an unblemished complexity. Again, when the equipment’s own X-ray was turned on its tiny “field-isolated” radioactive pile, no flaw could be seen. Naturally that was something of which I couldn’t be sure. Something that I couldn’t detect with these instruments might have been done to that tiny power pile at the subatomic level. The X-ray diffraction patterns were O.K. but—why did they want me to have my own harness? What reason outside the harness?

  I had reduced to a simple question about its nuclear fission pile that highly multiple question, “Has this power equipment been tampered with?” I would have to gamble for the rest of the answer and it was worth the gamble. An Operator’s power equipment is the best in the galaxy. From what I had seen of the equipment worn on this planet it was definitely second rate.

  It was nearly morning but he was still sitting in a corner, his long melancholy face buried in the local books on quartzcar. One of them was titled in the native language, “The Planetary Evolution of Quartzcar.” Well, it was not considered desertion to lose all interest in his assignment and all ties with The Central. It was just an occupational disease.

  “You know,” he said, suddenly standing up and walking to the greenish darkness of the window, “there are several piezoelectric substances.”

  “Yes,” I answered. I was busy putting the intricate crystal plates back into the atomic fission pile.

  “Quartz, of course, is one of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how a piezoelectric substance behaves?”

  I was annoyed. The job of slipping the countless delicate crystal plates back into the pile was exacting. “Well,” I said without bothering to cover sarcasm, “why don’t you tell me all about it. I got through physics on a fluke.”

  By the galaxy, he took me seriously. He stood there staring out at the fern forest and talked earnestly about electroelastic crystals like I was a first-year physics student.

  “These substances convert electrical to mechanical energy and vice versa. You know how the old-fashioned phonograph pickup worked?”

  I didn’t pay any attention to him.

  “The needle was activated by grooved impressions in a record by previous sounds. In the pickup device this needle pressed against a piezoelectric substance. Its mechanical movement against the crystal set up corresponding electrical discharges from it to the speaker.” I was silent working on the pile. I decided that if he said, “You know” again I would get up and poke him. “You know,” he continued, “every island on this planet is constructed from quartz—a piezoelectric substance.”

  I didn’t get up and poke him. I continued to stare at the harness but I stopped working on it. He went right on without turning. “These constructions of quartz are subjected to rhythmic mechanical stress when the lunar tides pile up against them.”

  He was a capable man or he would not have been an Operator in the first place. That a man “took root” on some planet and became absolutely untrustworthy as an Operator did not mean he was not still a brilliant and sincere man. This one was obviously trying to solve a serious problem and doing well at it. I looked up with a new respect and he turned from the window.

  He couldn’t help smiling and I had to admit he had slipped one over on me. He said, “You see, it could be that these quartzcar islands generate an electric field as the tides press on them. The strange blind movement of some of the vegetative forms could be a response stimulated by that electric field. The cessation of animal movement could be a safeguarding adaptation preventing disease which might develop when strenuous activity is pursued in the presence of such fields.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. I had been blindly driving ahead because the assignment was urgent and I had missed all this.

  “I realize,” he continued, “that I have taken root but I think it is important that I was trying to solve the defeat of our first operation when I first took up the question of quartzcar.”

  “You know,” I interrupted, “they treated me just as they treated your group—just as you described it to me that first night. They left me absolutely alone—no interference at all. I knew I was asking for it when I overplayed my hand. But I had to do something to get action. Up to then it was like working in a vacuum. You wouldn’t have guessed there was a Party. There was no sign of them. It was only by boring in with the full intention of killing the Leader if I wasn’t stopped that I finally forced them to show.”

  “Yes, that’s how it was with us,” he agreed. “Not one of the six of us met any interference until in a period of thirty seconds in various parts of the city two crashed from heights as though the antigravs had suddenly failed, two were blown to bits and one just simply died while walking through the rotunda of the Government Building w
here he was supposed to create a divergence in ten seconds.

  “But why did they spare me? Was it because taking a shower was so innocent? If they could so neatly blow the whole plot wide open just at the moment it was climaxing they must have realized my part in it. They must have known I was innocently occupied taking a shower only because it was not my moment to be in action.

  “Within seventy seconds their Leader would have been dead. Instead five of us were dead. It took me a long time to figure out that that was not due to a lot of concerted planning on their part. They had known it was going to happen at a certain time with no help from them. They knew when we were going into action and knew therefore that we would fail due to some calculable force. It wasn’t necessary for them to interfere if we didn’t plan to act before a certain time.”

  I nodded. “And I got what was coming to me because I went into action before they could calculate my defeat. Well, then the quicker I try again the better. I’m going in this morning.” He almost volunteered to go with me.

  “Back in the city my mutilated face created attention. When I antigraved onto the sixth floor balconade of the Great Island Hotel people at nearby tables of the open-air restaurant turned to stare and turned quickly away. The table I had hoped for was unoccupied. I took it facing away from most of them so I could see the entertainment stage. Beyond the stage, as it was viewed from this point, were the antigrav tubes of the hotel. They were transparent and in them people rose to the upper floors or descended to the street without need of harness such as I was wearing.

  The waiter came and took my order for a drink. He didn’t recognize me, yet he and I had had a joke once about that drink.

  My watch said it should be only a few minutes before she would be on the stage singing quiet little songs. It was on this stage that their Leader had first seen her. His only overt human quality was an interest in tall lanky women. He liked them at least eight inches taller than himself. This one he had promptly moved from the artists’ and actors’ quarters of the city to a penthouse atop the Great Island Hotel.

  Presently the string trio she used for a background came out and lounged about the potted trees on the stage. They warmed up with a few dolorous little melodies. Beyond the stage the antigrav tubes were crowded. In one of them a tragic waterfall of humanity descended to the street level. In the other people drifted upward. Occasionally a person or couple in more casual ascent hesitated as they passed the restaurant and decided to come in for a drink.

  The string trio started another number and she walked gracefully out onto the informal stage. She smiled on her audience with a possessive warmth that was half her popularity. Then she began singing in a husky, unmusical but dramatic voice. She was a beautiful girl all right but my attention was suddenly diverted.

  I recognized the short scrawny one immediately—the big man when he spoke. “Say, I never thought we’d see you again. Mind if we sit down?” He waited politely.

  I motioned to the chairs. “Say,” he chuckled, closer to my face, “we sure did a beautiful job on you, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I owe you both a great deal.”

  He had a big hearty laugh. “Well,” he gasped between guffaws, “no hard feelings, I hope.”

  “I’m very objective. I understand it was all in a day’s work.”

  “Sure,” he said solemnly. “Let us buy you a drink.” The waiter had come up.

  I shrugged at my glass. “I’ll have the same. There’s no strychnine in it.”

  That set him off again. “Say,” he burbled, “you’re a card. You know when I first took a shine to you?”

  I declared I couldn’t imagine when it might have been.

  “When I broke your arm. You really took it like a man. Didn’t he take it well, Shorty?”

  The little man wasn’t saying anything. He was making his good-humored grin do as his contribution.

  “Well, here’s to your health.” The big man raised his glass the minute the waiter set it down.

  I drank with them and we sat in silence listening to her song until he called the waiter over for another round.

  “Yes, sir,” he exclaimed when it had arrived. “I sure never expected to see you again.”

  “Oh, you knew I got off the tide shelf. That’s why you planted my power harness so I’d find it.” That took the humor out of his eyes.

  “I don’t get you,” he said in a level voice. The little guy had stopped grinning.

  I explained about finding my power harness on our path in the fern forest.

  “I think,” he said with finality, “some animal dragged it up there. We left it on the tide shelf.” There was ice in his eyes.

  “That could be,” I said, knowing it could not be.

  “Waiter,” he called, “bring us another drink.”

  Well, they had me and they weren’t letting me go. I was going to have to sit quietly in the public restaurant of the Great Island Hotel and get drunk without making a scene.

  It was getting on to noon and there was a big moon hitting its zenith. Activity in the restaurant was beginning to slow and there were fewer people in the antigrav tubes. She was singing her last number backing off stage with the trio.

  I looked at the big man and his scrawny companion. There was one good solid reason why they had suddenly showed up and why they were gluing themselves to me. The Leader was up above in his Great Island Hotel penthouse waiting to spend the luncheon with his long lanky beauty.

  How long would the siesta last? I wasn’t very far into that thought when I came up with a start and my hand stopped in the act of putting down my glass. They both glanced at me.

  All five moons were going to be overhead at noon. They would lift the sea onto the fourth tide shelf. That was the biggest tide and it was rare. I calculated the last time it had happened was over a standard month and a half ago. If my sudden guess was right, the healthiest place for a Central Operator at that time would be in the shower.

  “What’s the matter,” the big man asked in a monotone. “You worried about something? You afraid you’re stuck in bad company? Don’t worry. We just want to have a couple more drinks with you and then we have to leave . . . in a hurry.”

  “Thanks. I’ll sit the next one out. I want to have a little talk with that singer.” I stood up and he grabbed my arm, the one he hadn’t had any practice breaking.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He tightened down on the arm. But my advantage was the secrecy they needed.

  “You wouldn’t want a scene, would you?” I shook my arm loose. People were beginning to take notice and he sat quietly glaring at me.

  I beat it through the stage door and back to her dressing room. I stepped in without knocking. She looked up startled from where she stood buckling a belt to her lounging shorts. She didn’t recognize me and she didn’t like me.

  “Get out of here.”

  “You remember me,” I soothed. “Three weeks ago you and I were regular pals. One night you went so far as to introduce me to a couple of special friends of yours in an aircar down there on the street.”

  She was genuinely horrified and began backing away. I walked toward her. “You thought they were going to kill me, didn’t you?”

  She nodded dumbly. Then, “For the Leader—” and automatically remembering another Party slogan, “for Planetary Security.”

  “You didn’t know they were just going to torture me?”

  She shook her head piteously almost imploringly—a little provincial girl caught in something bigger and uglier than she had dreamed.

  “And leaving me alive to come back and ask you questions? Admitting the pleasure they took in how badly I would suffer when I regained consciousness how could they afford to take the chance of leaving me alive?”

  “Because you will die anyway.” There was an abrupt personal fright on her face. She raised her hands with the palms outthrust as though pushing the sight of me away.

  I thought I saw something move
at the open window and changed my position in the room backing from her. She was almost wailing, “You will die now . . . the tide . . . it’s almost—”

  One thing they weren’t taking chances with was that I might radio her answer off the planet.

  The scrawny devil popped up from where he had been antigraving at the window and the microsplosive he put in her chest made her dead throat shriek as the long beautiful legs crumpled to the floor. I blew his head off while her glaring face sank before me. His body spun but antigraved where it was till I got to the window to haul it in.

  From somewhere above the big guy fired at me as I yanked the body in and took the harness. I peeled out of my own power equipment and threw it in a corner and got out of the room. In a washroom down the hall I adjusted the little guy’s harness to fit me. As I stepped out into the hall again there was a shattering explosion from her dressing room. I had got rid of that harness one hundred twenty seconds soon enough.

  There was one spot the big hoodlum wouldn’t be looking for me. I went right back to my table in the restaurant. There was, of course, no activity or conversation between the few who had stayed at their tables during the high tide. People sat in silence and seemingly asleep waiting for the moons to pass. I knew from experience that in that condition they would resist hearing my voice. I kept it low and held the radio pickup of the harness close to my lips.

  After some hunting around due to unfamiliar controls I made contact with my ship on the second moon. I told them where and when to pick me up. “Now,” I said, “in case I don’t make it get this down: Piezoelectric islands generate field in response to lunar tides. At highest tide this vibrates the field generating crystals of the fission pile in Operator’s harness. Under interfering frequencies radioactives jar to critical mass and explode. Local harnesses do not react.”

  I was just leaving the table preparing to antigrav outside the building to where that penthouse hung in the mists fifty floors up when I saw my Contact racing toward me.