Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “You’re quite wrong about that,” Arlene told him. “I don’t remember all of it, but I’m still very much aware of perhaps half of what happened—though I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to forget it. It was like an extremely unpleasant nightmare.”

  Harding looked surprised. “That’s very curious! The other eases reported complete amnesia. Perhaps you . .

  “You’ve been under a heavy strain yourself, haven’t you, Frank?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “I? What makes you think so?”

  “You’re being rather gabby. It isn’t like you.”

  Harding grunted. “I suppose you’re right. This thing’s been tense enough. He may have enjoyed it—except naturally at the very end. Playing cat and mouse with the whole human race! Well, the mice turned out to be a little too much for him, after all. But of course nothing was certain until that last moment.”

  “Because none of you could be sure of anyone else?”

  “That was it mainly. This was one operation where actually nobody could be in charge completely or completely trusted. There were overlaps for everything, and no one knew what all of them were. When Weldon came here today, he turned on a pocket transmitter so that everything that went on while he was being instructed in the use of the diex projector would be monitored outside.

  “Outside was also a globe-scanner which duplicated the activities of the one attached to the projector. We could tell at any moment to which section of Earth the projector’s diex field had been directed. That was one of the overlapping precautions. It sounded like a standard check run. There was a little more conversation between Lowry and Weldon than was normal when you were the assistant operator, but that could be expected. There were pauses while the projector was shut down and preparations for the next experiment were made. Normal again. Then, during one of the pauses, we got the signal that someone had just entered Weldon’s private nonspace conduit over there from this end. That was not normal, and the conduit was immediately sealed off at both exits. One more overlapping precaution, you see . . . and that just happened to be the one that paid off!” Arlene frowned. “But what did . . .”

  “Well,” Harding said, “there were still a number of questions to be answered, of course. They had to be answered fast and correctly or the game could be lost. Nobody expected the rogue to show up in person at the Cleaver Project. The whole security island could have been destroyed in an instant; we knew he was aware of that. But he’d obviously made a move of some kind—and we had to assume that the diex projector was now suspended in the conduit.

  BUT who, or what, was in there with it? The project guards had been withdrawn. There’d been only the three of you on the island. The rogue could have had access to all three at some time or other; and his compulsions—until we found a way to treat them—were good for a lifetime. Any of you might have carried that projector into the conduit to deliver it to him. Or all three might be involved, acting together. If that was the case, the conduit would have to be reopened because the game had to continue. It was the rogue we wanted, not his tools . . .

  “And there was the other possibility. You and Dr. Ben are among the rather few human beings on Earth we could be sure were not the rogue, not one of his impersonations. If he’d been capable of building a diex projector, he wouldn’t have had to steal one. Colonel Weldon had been with Special Activities for a long time. But he could be an impersonation. In other words, the rogue.”

  Arlene felt her face go white. “He was!” she said.

  “Eh? How do you know?”

  “I didn’t realize it, but . . . no, go ahead. I’d rather tell you later.”

  “What didn’t you realize?” Harding persisted.

  Arlene said, “I experienced some of his feelings . . . after he was inside the conduit. He knew he’d been trapped!” Her hands were shaking. “I thought they were my own . . . that I . . .” Her voice began to falter.

  “Let it go,” Harding said, watching her, “It can’t have been pleasant.”

  She shook her head. “I assure you it wasn’t!”

  “So he could reach you from nonspace!” Harding said. “That was something we didn’t know. We suspected we still didn’t have the whole picture about the rogue. But he didn’t know everything either. He thought his escape route from the project and away through the conduit system was clear. It was a very bold move. If he’d reached any point on Earth where we weren’t waiting to destroy him from a distance, he would have needed only a minute or two with the projector to win all the way. Well, that failed. And a very short time later, we knew we had the rogue in the conduit.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  Harding said, “The duplicate global scanner I told you about. After all, the rogue could have been Weldon. Aside from you two, he could have been almost anyone involved in the operation. He might have been masquerading as one of our own telepaths! Every location point the diex field turned to during that ‘test run’ came under instant investigation. We were looking for occurrences which might indicate the rogue had been handling the diex projector.

  “The first reports didn’t start to come in until after the Weldon imitation had taken the projector into the conduit. But then, in a few minutes, we had plenty! They showed the rogue had tested the projector, knew he could handle it, knew he’d reestablished himself as king of the world—and this time for good! And then he walked off into the conduit with his wonderful stolen weapon . . .”

  Arlene said, “He was trying to get Dr. Ben and me to open the project exit for him again. We couldn’t, of course. I never imagined anyone could experience the terror he felt.”

  “There was some reason for it,” Harding said. “Physical action is impossible in nonspace, so he couldn’t use the projector. He was helpless while he was in the conduit. And he knew we couldn’t compromise when we let him out.

  “We switched the conduit exit to a point eight hundred feet above the surface of Cleaver Interplanetary Spaceport—the project he’s kept us from completing for the past twenty-odd years—and opened it there. We still weren’t completely certain, you know, that the rogue mightn’t turn out to be a genuine superman who would whisk himself away and out of our reach just before he hit the marblite paving.

  “But he wasn’t . . .” THE END

  WATCH THE SKY

  It’s one thing to try to get away with what you believe to be a lie and be caught at it—and something different, and far worse sometimes, to find it isn’t a lie . . .

  Uncle William Boles’ war-battered old Geest gun gave the impression that at some stage of its construction it had been pulled out of shape and then hardened in that form. What remained of it was all of one piece. The scarred and pitted twin barrels were stubby and thick, and the vacant oblong in the frame behind them might have contained standard energy magazines. It was the stock which gave the alien weapon its curious appearance. Almost eighteen inches long, it curved abruptly to the right and was too thin, knobbed and indented to fit comfortably at any point in a human hand. Over half a century had passed since, with the webbed, boneless fingers of its original owner closed about it, it last spat deadly radiation at human foemen. Now it hung among Uncle William’s other collected oddities on the wall above the living room fireplace.

  And today, Phil Boles thought, squinting at the gun with reflectively narrowed eyes, some eight years after Uncle William’s death, the old war souvenir would quietly become a key factor in the solution of a colonial planet’s problems. He ran a finger over the dull, roughened frame, bent closer to study the neatly lettered inscription: GUNDERLAND BATTLE TROPHY, ANNO 2172, SGT. WILLIAM G. BOLES. Then, catching a familiar series of clicking noises from the hall, he straightened quickly and turned away. When Aunt Beulah’s go-chair came rolling back into the room, Phil was sitting at the low tea table, his back to the fireplace.

  The go-chair’s wide flexible treads carried it smoothly down the three steps to the sunken section of the living room, Beulah sitting jauntily
erect in it, for all the ninety-six years which had left her the last survivor of the original group of Earth settlers on the world of Roye. She tapped her fingers here and there on the chair’s armrests, swinging it deftly about, and brought it to a stop beside the tea table.

  “That was Susan Feeney calling,” she reported. “And there is somebody else for you who thinks I have to be taken care of! Go ahead and finish the pie, Phil. Can’t hurt a husky man like you. Got a couple more baking for you to take along.”

  Phil grinned. “That’d be worth the trip up from Fort Roye all by itself.”

  Beulah looked pleased. “Not much else I can do for my great-grand nephew nowadays, is there?”

  Phil said, after a moment, “Have you given any further thought to—”

  “Moving down to Fort Roye?” Beulah pursed her thin lips. “Goodness, Phil, I do hate to disappoint you again, but I’d be completely out of place in a town apartment.”

  “Dr. Fitzsimmons would be pleased,” Phil remarked.

  “Oh, him! Fitz is another old worry wart. What he wants is to get me into the hospital. Nothing doing!”

  Phil shook his head helplessly, laughed. “After all, working a tupa ranch—”

  “Nonsense. The ranch is just enough bother to be interesting. The appliances do everything anyway, and Susan is down here every morning for a chat and to make sure I’m still all right. She won’t admit that, of course, but if she thinks something should be taken care of, the whole Feeney family shows up an hour later to do it. There’s really no reason for you to be sending a dozen men up from Fort Roye every two months to harvest the tupa.”

  Phil shrugged. “No one’s ever yet invented an easy way to dig up those roots. And the CLU’s glad to furnish the men.”

  “Because you’re its president?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It really doesn’t cost you anything?” Beulah asked doubtfully.

  “Not a cent.”

  “Hm-m-m. Been meaning to ask you. What made you set up that . . . Colonial Labor Union?”

  Phil nodded. “That’s the official name.”

  “Why did you set it up in the first place?”

  “That’s easy to answer,” Phil said. “On the day the planetary population here touched the forty thousand mark, Roye became legally entitled to its labor union. Why not take advantage of it?”

  “What’s the advantage?”

  “More Earth money coming in, for one thing. Of the twelve hundred CLU members we’ve got in Fort Roye now, seventy-six per cent were unemployed this month. We’ll have a compensation check from the Territorial Office with the next ship coming in.” He smiled at her expression. “Sure, the boys could go back to the tupa ranches. But not everyone likes that life as well as you and the Feeneys.”

  “Earth government lets you get away with it?” Beulah asked curiously. “They used to be pretty tight-fisted.”

  “They still are—but it’s the law. The Territorial Office also pays any CLU president’s salary, incidentally. I don’t draw too much at the moment, but that will go up automatically with the membership and my responsibilities.”

  “What responsibilities?”

  “We’ve set up a skeleton organization,” Phil explained. “Now, when Earth government decides eventually to establish a big military base here, they can run in a hundred thousand civilians in a couple of months and everyone will be fitted into the pattern on Roye without trouble or confusion. That’s really the reason for all the generosity.”

  Beulah sniffed. “Big base, my eye! There hasn’t been six months since I set foot here that somebody wasn’t talking about Fort Roye being turned into a Class A military base pretty soon. It’ll never happen, Phil. Roye’s a farm planet, and that’s what it’s going to stay.”

  Phil’s lips twitched. “Well, don’t give up hope.”

  “I’m not anxious for any changes,” Beulah said. “I like Roye the way it is.”

  She peered at a button on the go-chair’s armrest which had just begun to put out small bright-blue flashes of light. “Pies are done,” she announced. “Phil, are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?”

  Phil looked at his watch, shook his head. “I’d love to, but I really have to get back.”

  “Then I’ll go wrap up the pies for you.”

  Beulah swung the go-chair around, sent it slithering up the stairs and out the door. Phil stood up quickly. He stepped over to the fireplace, opened his coat and detached a flexible, box-shaped object from the inner lining. He laid this object on the mantle, and turned one of three small knobs about its front edge to the right. The box promptly extruded a supporting leg from each of its four corners, pushed itself up from the mantle and became a miniature table. Phil glanced at the door through which Beulah had vanished, listened a moment, then took the Geest gun from the wall, laid it carefully on top of the device and twisted the second dial.

  The odd-looking gun began to sink slowly down through the surface of Phil’s instrument, like a rock disappearing in mud. Within seconds it vanished completely; then, a moment later, it began to emerge from the box’s underside. Phil let the Geest gun drop into his hand, replaced it on the wall, turned the third knob. The box withdrew its supports and sank down to the mantle. Phil clipped it back inside his coat, closed the coat, and strolled over to the center of the room to wait for Aunt Beulah to return with the pies.

  It was curious, Phil Boles reflected as his aircar moved out over the craggy, plunging coastline to the north some while later, that a few bold minds could be all that was needed to change the fate of a world. A few minds with imagination enough to see how circumstances about them might be altered.

  On his left, far below, was now the flat ribbon of the peninsula, almost at sea level, its tip widening and lifting into the broad, rocky promontory on which stood Fort Roye—the only thing on the planet bigger and of more significance than the shabby backwoods settlements. And Fort Roye was neither very big nor very significant. A Class F military base around which, over the years, a straggling town had come into existence, Fort Roye was a space-age trading post linking Roye’s population to the mighty mother planet, and a station from which the otherwise vacant and utterly unimportant 132nd Segment of the Space Territories was periodically and uneventfully patrolled. It was no more than that. Twice a month, an Earth ship settled down to the tiny port, bringing supplies, purchases, occasional groups of reassigned military and civilians—the latter suspected of being drawn as a rule from Earth’s Undesirable classification. The ship would take off some days later, with a return load of the few local products for which there was outside demand, primarily the medically valuable tupa roots; and Fort Roye lay quiet again.

  The planet was not at fault. Essentially, it had what was needed to become a thriving colony in every sense. At fault was the Geest War. The war had periods of flare-up and periods in which it seemed to be subsiding. During the past decade it had been subsiding again. One of the early flare-ups, one of the worst, and the one which brought the war closest to Earth itself, was the Gunderland Battle in which Uncle William Boles’ trophy gun had been acquired. But the war never came near Roye. The action was all in the opposite section of the giant sphere of the Space Territories, and over the years the war drew steadily farther away.

  And Earth’s vast wealth—its manpower, materials and money—was pouring into space in the direction the Geest War was moving. Worlds not a tenth as naturally attractive as Roye, worlds where the basic conditions for human life were just above the unbearable point, were settled and held, equipped with everything needed and wanted to turn them into independent giant fortresses, with a population not too dissatisfied with its lot. When Earth government didn’t count the expense, life could be made considerably better than bearable almost anywhere.

  Those were the circumstances which condemned Roye to insignificance. Not everyone minded. Phil Boles, native son, did mind. His inclinations were those of an operator, and he was not being given an adequate opportu
nity to exercise them. Therefore, the circumstances would have to be changed, and the precise time to make the change was at hand. Phil himself was not aware of every factor involved, but he was aware of enough of them. Back on Earth, a certain political situation was edging towards a specific point of instability. As a result, an Earth ship which was not one of the regular freighters had put down at Fort Roye some days before. Among its passengers were Commissioner Sanford of the Territorial Office, a well-known politician, and a Mr. Ronald Black, the popular and enterprising owner of Earth’s second largest news outlet system. They were on a joint fact-finding tour of the thinly scattered colonies in this remote section of the Territories, and had wound up eventually at the most remote of all—the 132nd Segment and Roye.

  That was one factor. Just visible twenty thousand feet below Phil—almost directly beneath him now as the aircar made its third leisurely crossing of the central belt of the peninsula—was another. From here it looked like an irregular brown circle against the peninsula’s nearly white ground. Lower down, it would have resembled nothing so much as the broken and half-decayed spirals of a gigantic snail shell, its base sunk deep in the ground and its shattered point rearing twelve stories above it. This structure, known popularly as “the ruins” in Fort Roye, was supposed to have been the last stronghold of a semi-intelligent race native to Roye, which might have become extinct barely a century before the Earthmen arrived. A factor associated with the ruins again was that their investigation was the passionately pursued hobby of First Lieutenant Norman Vaughn, Fort Roye’s Science Officer.

  Add to such things the reason Roye was not considered in need of a serious defensive effort by Earth’s strategists—the vast distances between it and any troubled area, and so the utter improbability that a Geest ship might come close enough to discover that here was another world as well suited for its race as for human beings. And then a final factor: the instrument attached to the lining of Phil’s coat—a very special “camera” which now carried the contact impressions made on it by Uncle William’s souvenir gun. Put ‘em all together, Phil thought cheerily, and they spelled out interesting developments on Roye in the very near future.