by Jerry
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. Like governing children.
If more of these angels showed up, he reflected, it would simply be necessary to pretend they were demons, Lucifers, outer-space men bent on assassinating humanity. So simple.
The slate-hued buildings of the base rose over the tundra. From the frigid outdoors he entered rooms heated to a tropical temperature by the nearby reactors. There, too, the Soviets had somewhat surpassed the free peoples.
His secretary, Maximov, had thoughtfully forwarded Lamenula, to temper the hardships of the premier’s Siberian hegira. He was amused, even somewhat stirred, to learn the young lady had objected to the trip, had fought, was even now in a state of alternate hysteria and coma—or simulated coma. A little communist discipline was evidently needed, and being applied; and he would take pleasure in administering the finishing touches.
Late that night he woke up with a feeling of uneasiness. A feeling, he decided, of fear. The room was quiet, the guards were in place, nothing menaced him in the immediate moment, and Lamenula was asleep. Her bruises were beginning to show, but she had learned how to avoid them in the future, which was the use of bruises.
What frightened him was the angel. Church music, which he had remembered, but refused to listen to in his mind, now came back to him. It did not cause him to believe that the visitor had given a new validity to an Old Testament. It had already caused him to speculate that what he, and a billion others, had thitherto regarded as pure myth might actually be founded on scientific fact.
What therefore frightened the premier as he lay on the great bed in the huge, gaudily decorated bedchamber, was an intuition of ignorance. Neither he nor his physicists, he nor his political philosophers—nor any men in the world that still, ludicrously, blindly, referred to itself as “free”—really knew anything fundamental about the universe. Nobody really knew, and could demonstrate scientifically, the “why” of time and space and energy—or matter. The angel—the very beautiful angel that had lain on the cold tundra—might possibly mean and be something that not he nor any living man, skeptic or believer, could even comprehend.
That idea wakened him thoroughly. Here was a brand-new dimension of the unknown to be faced. He sat up, switched on the light and put a cigarette in his thin mouth.
How, he asked himself, could this fear of the unknown be translated into a hatred of something known, and so employed to enhance power? His power. That was, invariably, the formulation; once made, it generally supplied its own answer.
You could not, however, set the people in the Soviets and the people in the rest of the world to hating angels. Not when, especially, their reality—or real counterpart—could never be exhibited and had become a military secret.
Mornsk’s theory bemused him. Had the Americans also shot one down with an H-bomb? If so, they’d followed a procedure like his own, apparently. Saying nothing. Examining the victim, doubtless.
He realized he should go to sleep. He was to be roused early for the test of the next super-H-bomb, but he kept ruminating, as he smoked, on the people of the United States.
Whom, he reflected, we shall destroy in millions in——The number of months and days remaining before the blitz of the U.S.A. was so immense a secret that he did not let himself reckon it exactly. Whom we shall slaughter in sudden millions, soon.
But suppose something intervened? Angels?
He smiled again. Even if such creatures had visited the earth once before, it was long ago. They might be here again now. They would presumably go away again, for millenniums. Ample time to plant the Red flag everywhere in the world.
Still, he could not know, and not to know was alarming.
There was a phone beside his bed. He could astound telephone operators halfway around the world, and yet, doubtless, in ten minutes, fifteen—perhaps an hour—he could converse with the President of the United States.
“Seen any angels, Mr. President? . . . What do you make of it? . . . Perhaps we aren’t as knowing as we imagine . . . Possibly we should meet and talk things over—postpone any—plans we might have for the near future? At least, until this matter of invading angels is settled.”
It wouldn’t be that simple or that quick, but it might be done. And it might be that that was the only possible way to save the Soviet, because it might be the one way left to save man and his planet.
He thought about the abandonment of the communist philosophy, the scrapping of decades of horror and sacrifice, the relaxing of the steely discipline; he thought of the dreams of world domination gone glimmering—of “freedom” being equated with communism. There welled in him the avalanche of hatred which was his essence and the essence of his world. He ground out his cigarette and tried to sleep. . . .
In the morning, after the test shot—which was also very successful and, the premier thought, frightening—he requested the report on the autopsy of the casualty. He had to ask repeatedly, since it became clear that none of the nearby persons—generals, commissars, aides, technicians—wanted to answer. He commanded Mornsk.
The general sweated in the cold air, under a sky again clear and as palely blue as a turquoise. “We have no report, comrade. The autopsy was undertaken last night by Smidz. An ideal man, we felt—the great biologist, who happened to be here, working on radiation effects on pigs. He labored alone all night, and then—your orders, comrade—the—remains were fixed to the bomb.” Momsk’s glance at the towering mushroom disposed of that matter. “It was then discovered that Smidz made no notes of whatever he learned.”
“Get Smidz.”
“This morning early, comrade, he killed himself.”
General Scott did not return to the Pacific until nearly Christmastime. He had hoped not to go back at all, particularly since he had spent the autumn with his family in Baltimore, commuting weekdays to the Pentagon. In December, however, he received secret information of still another series of springtime nuclear-weapons tests and orders to fly again to the Sangre Islands, where he would prepare another of the group for total sacrifice. The death of islands was becoming commonplace to the weaponeers. In the unfinished span of his own military career, a suitable target had grown from a square of canvas stretched over a wooden frame to a building, and then to a city block, next a city’s heart, and now, an island the size of Manhattan. This, moreover, was not holed, wrecked or merely set afire, but wiped off the earth’s face, its roots burned away deep into the sea, its substance thrown, poisonous, across the skies.
He went reluctantly, but as a soldier must, aware that by now he had the broadest experience—among general officers—for the task at hand.
Work went ahead with no more than the usual quota of “bugs”—or what his orderly would have called “snafus.” It was a matter of “multiple snafu,” however, which finally led the general to order a light plane to fly him to Tempest Island. There had arisen an argument with the natives about property rights; there was some trouble with the placement of instruments; a problem about electric power had come up; and a continuing report of bad chow was being turned in from the island mess hall. Time for a high-echelon look-see.
As he flew in, General Scott noticed the changes which he had helped to devise. The mission playing field had been bulldozed big enough to accommodate fair-sized cargo planes on two x-angled strips. Here and there the green rug of jungle had been macheted open to contain new measuring devices of the scientists. The harbor had been deepened; dredged-up coral made a mole against the purple Pacific as well as the foundation for a sizable pier. Otherwise, Tempest was the same.
His mind, naturally, returned to his previous trip and to what had been found on the island. The general had observed a growing tendency, even in Admiral Stanforth and Rawson, now a colonel, to recall the angel more as a figure of a dream than as reality. Just before the landing gear came down he looked for, and saw, the very glade in which the angel had fallen. Its clear spring was an emerald eye and the Bletias were in violet bloom all around
.
Then he was on the ground, busy with other officers, busy with the plans and problems of a great nation, scared, arming, ready these days for war at the notice of a moment or at no notice whatever. Even here, thousands upon thousands of miles from the nervous target areas of civilization, the fear and the desperate urgency of man had rolled up, parting the jungle and erecting grim engines associated with ruin.
He was on his way to the headquarters tent when he noticed, and recognized, the young boy.
Teddy Simms, he thought, was about ten now, the age of his own son. But Teddy looked older than ten, and very sad.
The general stepped away from his accompanying officers. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll soon catch up. This is an old friend of mine.” He waved then. “Hi, Ted! Why you all dressed up? Remember me?”
The youngster stopped and did recognize the general, with a look of anxiousness. He nodded and glanced down at his clothes. “I’m gonna leave! Tonight. It’ll be”—his face brightened slightly—“my very first airplane ride!”
“That’s swell!” The general had been puzzled by signs of apprehension in the boy. “How’s your father? And your aunt? Cora, wasn’t it?”
“She’s O.K. But father——” His lip shook.
Marc Scott no longer smiled. “Your father——”
The boy answered stonily, “Went nuts.”
“After——” the general asked, knew the answer and was unsurprised by the boy’s increased anxiousness.
“I’m not allowed to say. I’d go to prison forever.”
A jeepful of soldiers passed. The general moved to the boy’s side and said, “With me, you are, Ted. Because I know all about it too. I’m—I’m mighty sorry your father—is ill. Maybe he’ll recover, though.”
“The board doesn’t think so. They’re giving up the mission. That’s why I’m going away. To school, Stateside. Father”—he fell in step with the general, leaping slightly with each stride—“father never got any better—after that old day you were here.”
“What say, we go back where—it happened? I’d like to see it once more, Ted.”
“No.” Teddy amended it, “No, sir. I’m not even allowed to talk about it. I don’t ever go there!”
“It’s too bad. I thought it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
The boy stared at the man incredulously. “You did? Father thought it was the worst thing ever happened.”
“I felt as if you, Ted—and I—all of us—were seeing something completely wonderful!”
The boy’s face showed an agreement which changed, slowly, to a pitiable emotion—regret, or fear, perhaps shame. It was the general’s intuition which bridged the moment: Teddy knew more than he had ever said about the angel; he had lied originally or omitted something.
“What is it, son?” The general’s tone was fatherly. Eyes darted toward the jungle, back to the general and rested measuringly, then hopelessly. It was as if the youngster had considered aloud running away and had decided his adversary was too powerful to evade.
He stood silent a moment longer; then said almost incoherently, “I never meant to keep it! But it is gold! And we were always so mighty poor! I thought, for a while, if father sold it——But he couldn’t even think of things like selling gold books. He had lost his reason.”
If the generate heart surged, if his mind was stunned, he did not show it. “Gold books?” His eyes forgave in advance.
“Just one book, but heavy.” The dismal boy looked at the ground. “I didn’t steal it, really! That angel—dropped it.”
The general’s effort was tremendous. Not in battle had composure cost him as dear. “You—read it?”
“Huh!” the boy said. “It was in all kinds of other languages. ‘Wisdom,’ that angel said it was. ‘Gathered from our whole galaxy—for Earth.’ Did you ever know——” His voice intensified with the question, as if by asking it he might divert attention from his guilt. “Did you know there are other people on other planets of other suns, all around? Maybe Vega, or the North Star, or Rigel, or more likely old Sirius? That angel mentioned a few names. I forget which.”
“No. I didn’t realize it. And, you say, this book had a message for the people on Earth, written in all languages? Not English, though?”
“I didn’t see any English. I saw—like Japanese and Arabian—and a lot of kinds of alphabets you never heard of—some, just dots.”
“And you—threw it away?” He asked it easily too.
“Naw. You couldn’t do that! It’s gold—at least, it looks like gold. All metal pages. It’s got hinges, kind of, for every page. I guess it’s fireproof and even space-proof, at the least.
I didn’t throw it away. I hid it under an old rock. Come on. I’ll show you.”
They returned to the glade. The book lay beneath a flat stone. There had been another the general was never to know about—a book buried beneath a sod hut in Siberia by a peasant who also had intended to sell it, for he, too, had been poor. But the other book, identical, along with the hovel above it, had been reduced, to fractions of its atoms by a certain test weapon which had destroyed the body of its bearer.
This one the general picked up with shaking hands, opened and gazed upon with an ashen face.
The hot sun of noon illumined the violet orchids around his tailored legs. The boy stood looking up at him, awaiting judgment, accustomed to harshness; and about them was the black and white filigree of tropical forest. With inexpressible amazement, Marc searched page after page of inscriptions in languages unknown, unsuspected until then. It became apparent that there was one message only, very short, set again and again and again, but he did not know what it was until toward the last pages, he found the tongues of Earth.
A sound was made by the man as he read them—a sound that began with murmurous despair and ended, as comprehension entered his brain, with a note of exultation. For the message of icy space and flaring stars was this: “Love one another.” THE END
THE MEN OF BORU
Jack A. Nelson
There is always a breed immune to mass hypnosis, and to them falls the duty of rebellion . . . The story, by a Brigham Young University senior, that won the second award of $500 in IF’s College Science Fiction Contest
A SWIRL of dust licked at the grass sandals of the men standing on the hill. There were eight men, and they stood looking west over the burned, gutted land that lay barren before them—barren except for a series of huge mounds that lay in a depression far out from the hills on the rocky plains.
“Do you still think we can make it?” asked a stocky man with a livid scar that ran from his upper lip to his forehead. “I for one would rather live alone and meagerly than not live at all.”
The speaker received a stern glance from a tall hawk-nosed man wearing a finely-worked leather belt, apparently a symbol of leadership.
“We have already agreed, remember, Franz? We have to succeed or disappear off the face of the Earth. You may turn back if you wish. We are going on.”
Franz scowled, rubbed his scar and contemplated the mounds in the distance. “You forget I have lived there. You have not. Well, maybe to be a slave is not so bad after all. Or to die.”
“If we die we will not go alone,” said Sten, the leader. He turned to the others. “Let’s go. It will be dark soon.”
The men moved single-file down through the hills without speaking.
As it grew dark they could feel the heat radiate from the sand. They felt the heat press against them and silently praised Sten’s wisdom in waiting for the cold time of year before making the attempt. They wore a tunic of coarse-woven cloth that hung loose from their shoulders, and even that single garment was too warm here. They moved in silence, Sten in the lead, followed by his brother, Johnathon, a smaller man with wide shoulders and a quick smile.
A gibbous moon was showing over the mountains when they stopped. Solemnly they gathered in a circle.
“We will separate now,�
�� Sten spoke softly. “Franz and Johnathon and Karl and I will enter from the south. Bradley, you and the others will find the way in from the north. You can find the place. If we’re not back at our last camp by morning of the third day, go on without us. You have the map where the valley lies?”
The leader of the other group nodded.
“Then hurry. Until three days, then. Remember, the only hope lies in us. Some of us have to make it!” The men separated with only a wave of farewell and the two groups moved in opposite directions across the hot sands.
Clouds covered the moon and it grew darker as the four men approached the edge of the mounds. An ominous sense of foreboding fell over them. It seemed they could feel the vibration of the city that lay beneath them. Beneath them lay life—stilted, twisted, enslaved life, but life nevertheless.
“Are you sure they don’t post a guard?” Johnathon asked.
“Against what, the Root-Diggers?” Franz spat “contemptuously. “No, they are secure. They need fear nothing.”
It was another hour before they found the tunnel and entered in single file. Groping their way through the darkness, they finally felt a solid wall rise in front of them. Franz made his way to the left, feeling his way along the wall until he found a large box in a niche in the rock.
“It’s here! It’s still here after all.”
“Good,” Sten said. “All right, everybody up against the wall and push.”
Karl, the biggest of the men, laughed as he eased his bulk against the obstruction. “It would be real sport,” he said, “to move this wall and find one of their Steel-heads waiting for us.”
Franz snickered. “It wouldn’t be sport long, my friend. They’re trained from birth to be trigger-happy and there’s nothing anyone in Panamia fears more than the outside, or anything connected with it. And we’re outsiders.”
The wall suddenly gave before them and they moved into a half-darkened room. Carefully, in a sort of frozen silence, they moved the wall back into place. The box had contained city clothes; and now the men worked swiftly in the semidarkness. When they were ready Franz walked up and down making final adjustments in each of their uniforms. As he finished, Sten laid his hand on his shoulder. “Franz, you’ll take over now. You know what everything is like here. We’re placing ourselves in your hands.”