“The speakers throughout spoke!” quivered a young captain of arcs. “Is it . . . was it in truth Lorrilard?”
Lorrilard, just then, was walking up and down the command deck of the Angel’s Dance. He took a bottle from his steward, poured himself a short drink of whiskey, downed it and threw the gurgling quart to Roseca.
“All hands a drink to victory! All hands!” The cooks could be heard padding aft with buckets.
“Range?”
The electrar man looked at his captain. They made a good team when they worked this way, a team despite the fact that this was just a kid with an electronically gifted brain. Good-looking kid, too. “Eighteen thousand miles.”
Lorrilard looked at the kid. “Keep them coming.” He turned to his conmaster. “All directors ahead one. Hard two o’clock. Ease her.Meet her. All directors ahead two.”
“Seventeen thousand. Sixteen five. Fourteen . . .” chanted the kid. The crew tensed as they swooped at the fort.
“Hard seven o’clock! All directors ahead four! Ease her. Meet her. Steady!”
“Sixteen, twenty, twenty-four. Thirty-one thousand miles. Fifty thousand miles. One hundred and ten thousand—”
“All directors back full! All directors stop.”
The entire sky, at the point they had turned, went into an aching flare of light as the fort fired, twisting and snapping as great arcs sucked across the dark of space.
The crew breathed easier and grinned.
“Hard six o’clock!” said Lorrilard. “All directors ahead one.”
“Ninety thousand, eighty-six . . . seventy-one . . . fifty-three thousand miles. Forty-six—”
“All directors back one. All directors stop.”
“Range steady at thirty-seven thousand miles,” said the kid.
Lorrilard turned to Paula, his engineer. “Character of activity of those arcs they shot back there?”
“Eighty-third degree psi,” said Paula, reading her sample of contaminated space.
“Hook ’em?” said Lorrilard.
Paula had a broken nose from a brawl in some dive but she was still pretty, especially when she smiled. “Think so.”
Tomlin, wavetender first, took a tube from Paula and they left the command deck.
“Now you,” said Lorrilard to Gustavson, his director division chief, “tune down close on that force cone and stand by with an interlock.”
“Aye, aye,” said Gustavson, pushing the electrar kid aside so he could crawl into a booth, newly and economically fitted behind the range panels on this very economical command deck.
“Here we go, kid,” said Lorrilard. “Keep ’em coming.”
“Ready number six,” said Paula from a speaker.
“Stand by, number six,” said Lorrilard. “Easy two o’clock. All directors ahead one.”
“Thirty-six five . . .” began the kid, chanting ranges. “Thirty-four. Thirty . . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-one . . . eighteen—”
“All directors ahead four,” said Lorrilard. “Hard twelve o’clock. Hold her. Hold her. Let her come!”
The ship was staggering with this brutality. She was being turned wrong side out, pulling herself one hundred and eighty degrees off course.
“Ease her!” said Lorrilard.
“Thirteen thousand two hundred miles—” chanted the kid.
“Meet her!”
The crew had seen the white and black of the fort in their gun directors and they had seen it terribly large. They were swallowing their chews and, like good space bullies, staying on target.
The Angel’s Dance shuddered. The sky flamed blue white!
“All directors ahead ten!” And, “COMMENCE FIRE!”
Paula had grappled the arcs and the Angel’s Dance jerked like a drunk. Every plate of her bucked with the lash of her batteries.
And all down that black and awful sky ran the white-fringed fury of eighty-third psi. Backfiring. Boostered and double-ranged by riding back down the fort’s own beams.
Lorrilard didn’t have to look. He’d figured it out long since.
He was chanting conning commands.
“All directors ahead fifty. Hard six o’clock. Ease her. Meet her. Easy nine o’clock. Meet her. Easy twelve o’clock—” She was moving very fast now.
“Six hundred thousand . . . one and one-half million . . . one and one-quarter million . . . one million—” chanted the kid.
“Stand by, Gustavson. All directors ahead FULL!”
There was an instant of screaming friction, a thing which rode not on sound waves nor yet existed in finite space. The grapples of the Angel’s Dance had connected with the force cone and the speed of the intended man-o’-war, riding up now to half a light-year, tripped the formulas of velocity and mass.
There was a lurch. Men fell through the ship. The bruised steward, a girl of fourteen, hung on to the bridge ladder up which she had been coming and looked huge-eyed at her helmet, come off now with a burst strap and hanging midair in defiance of artificial gravity and all else.
Then there was a sag and an easing of the strain as though the Angel’s Dance had pulled herself out of mud.
“All directors stop. All directors back one. Easy nine o’clock. Easy six o’clock. Let her swing. All directors back two. Meet six o’clock. Steady six o’clock. Let her swing. Meet nine o’clock. Steady as she goes!”
“One-half million. Four hundred thousand . . . one hundred thousand . . . seventy thousand—” chanted the kid. “Forty-one thousand— Gee! Gee, Captain! Look at that fort!”
People were laughing uncertainly along the battle stations. There was a buzz as arc men tried to shove the pointers away from their viewscreens and see for themselves.
And it was a sight worth seeing—to them.
The fort, the strongest Asian outpost, was in a very queer situation. It resembled a mushroom which has been pulled up by the roots and brought a quantity of dirt with it— providing mushrooms have roots that will hold.
The force screen above it, which would have conducted its batteries to distant ranges not possible at the sides and would have prevented any ship from diving at it, had worked both ways. The batteries silenced by backlash, the force screen could be hit and grappled with a snagger developed in the Andes.
But it would take a madman to hit one like that. A madman like Lorrilard. Who could lay all his money on a formula of velocity and mass and win.
Uprooted before she could disconnect, the fortress was finished and done, the whole mass of it a slab of dirt on its side.
“I wonder,” said Lorrilard sympathetically, “where Kolchein vaulted up that gold.”
They landed and found out.
They buried it because they could not carry any great part of it away and to this very day on New Earth, née Stella, there is a tradition of Lorrilard’s treasure. But Lorrilard was much too thorough an exploiter. Before the news was out and before the technique could get old, the Angel’s Dance laid three hundred and ninety major Asian fortresses on their sides and took their contents apart for future reference.
Probably tradition is right. Probably they did miss some. For when they came back to Earth the following year they were trimmed light for battle. They made just one attack. Moscow.
In New York, after Earth’s politicos had chewed and hewed on a treaty of peace which, amongst other things, disbanded the Asiatic Federation, the Asian delegation was much horrified to know that the entire strength of the “Grand Fleet of the United Continents” consisted of just one cruiser with a new technique and an exploiter for a captain who had no official standing.
“I say,” said the secretary for defense of the United Continents, speaking to Lorrilard and, therefore, speaking with deference, “you gave us a nasty turn, you know. We couldn’t find the old emergency code you used. Navy hasn’t touched it for years. Thought we had an invader from space on our hands when Moscow was hit. Almost rushed aid. Joke, eh?”
“Uh-huh,” said Lorrilard, looking thoughtfully at his
wine.
“However, we’ll repay you,” said the secretary.
“You might make up for Moscow. We couldn’t land for its loot,” said Lorrilard. “But speaking of something serious, you know, I just had an idea.”
“Yes?” very respectfully.
“Stella.”
“Do I know her?”
“No, no,” said Lorrilard. “It’s a planet the Asians had nailed down. Earth-size. Lot of empty towns up there. Lot of machinery. Take about a hundred percent of your excess population if you’d let them go. Build a new Earth. That’s it. New Earth! Not Stella. New Earth. Say, Mr. President—”
It was a king-size job, but they had a king-size man. There is no evidence to show that he ever ruled it for a single day out of time, but he has been there. He has been there for a long, long time.
If you go there, take a look at the tomb in the valley. The inscription is very thin now, just as the huge statue of him shows the wear of the ages. But it can be read. It says:
George Marquis Lorrilar
Born in Year One of New Earth
Died in Year Ninety of a
Crash Landing on Stigo
He prepared this planet,
Rid it of all Encumbrances,
Organized the first Earth Colony
And equipt it with all necessities
From his own pocket.
Ad astra per aspera
There was a verse below it, but the monument, in the course of time, has sunk so far into the ground that it can no longer be read.
Sunk even further on this site, although the fact is known to very few, are the decaying metals of a citadel and the body and bones of Kolchein and Sze-Quon.
In Lorrilard’s time a large plaque was erected here, beaten from solid gold. It reflected the greatness and the coldness of the man, for it was done by his direction.
It was to Kolchein, “whose obstinance and pig-headedness made this great accomplishment possible.” But somebody has long since carted it away and melted it up out of greed for the metal. Lorrilard would have understood that.
Final Enemy
Final Enemy
ALL these extraterrestrial races were more or less of a kind, Captain Bristol thought. They might crawl over rocks like snails or fly like birds, but their culture was definitely limited by their low intelligence. Of the fifty races so far discovered, on half a thousand explored planets, man’s superiority was so strikingly manifested that an explorer was a pessimist indeed who did not expect to be welcomed as a god. The past hundred-odd years of painful and slow exploration had added much to man’s knowledge. But it had not added intelligence of beings in the universe which were superior to himself.
The Aloyts were an immediate fair example. They were humanoids, with a vocabulary of around a thousand words and a culture inferior to man’s Stone Age. They sat on the ground now, their greased suckerlike faces shiny in the firelight. They were decked out in childish robes. They held forth with absurd dignity on matters of no importance, which Captain Bristol and his officers of the Argonaut VI found boring.
Captain Bristol was a levelheaded, gray-eyed young American brought up and trained to his trade. He had seen half a hundred worlds and was not easily astonished. Therefore when Sam Catsby, whose startling facility in language qualified him as Captain Bristol’s interpreter, nudged him earnestly, the captain broke from his doze expecting to find some marauding beast upon them. Hand to weapon, he glared about him, only to be nudged again, and harder.
“Captain,” said Sam Catsby in a whisper, “hear that?”
“Hear what?” said Bristol irritably. “I can’t understand ten words of this yammer. And I don’t care to know five words of it. This planet is a dis—”
“He’s saying that they’ve been attacked by men before! That they want to be at peace with us. That they are scared that the other race will come back and poison them again.”
“What’s this?” said Bristol. “On this planet?” He nudged Godolphin, his second-in-command. “Hear this, Ralph.”
“From some other planet,” said Sam Catsby. “He’s saying that a long, long time ago, they were invaded by superior beings, smaller than us but madder.”
“Oh-ho!” said Godolphin. “Been wondering how far out we’d have to go to run into this. I always said that it wasn’t likely that man was the only civilized race in the universe. If—”
“Sam, get him to stop that confounded speech and answer some questions to the point. When was this?”
Sam Catsby stood up, his black face shining in the firelight, hand upraised courteously to halt the harangue of the Aloyt leader. That worthy stopped, leaning with impressive dignity on his tall, flower-decked cane.
“When did he see these people?” said Bristol.
Sam put the question. “He says maybe during his great-grandfather’s time. That’s probably about seventy-five years ago. He never saw them himself.”
Bristol was tense now. This was something more important than a planet. If a superior race existed—and if it had already conquered space—a clash was almost inevitable, should it prove that Earth’s zone of influence touched on it.
Sam Catsby’s questioning was long and earnest now. And the chief’s replies were long and timid, as though the memory frightened him. Finally Catsby turned to the captain.
“He says they had a round ship, not like ours. Their suits weren’t made of metal cloth but were like animal skins. Maybe they weren’t suits at all.
“He says his own people were very numerous then and lived all over the planet. They had some cities which the jungle has covered up; and they could do a lot of things that they can’t do anymore. From what I gather, he says that once they had metal knives and chest protectors. But after that invasion they couldn’t make ’em anymore.”
“Lost their know-how,” said Godolphin.
“Go on,” said Bristol, eagerly.
Catsby put several more questions to the chief and then said, “They had eyes as big as the palm of your hand, black all the way across. And each man had feelers, if you call them men. They carried little sticks and whenever they pointed them at anybody he got awfully sick. A few days later he died.”
“Hand radioactive weapons,” said Godolphin. “Good God, we haven’t even got them yet.”
“He says they were very mad. They came down outside a city and they picked up several of the people; and when some of the other people came out of the city, the invaders made a thunderstorm and it killed hundreds. He says his grandfather was part of the crowd. They rushed the invaders and drove them back to their ship. But they didn’t know the importance of these little sticks.”
When Catsby had questioned further he turned to the captain. “He says they cut off one member of the party by throwing stones, but the rest of them got away and took off. It must have been just a scouting expedition, because there weren’t ten men in the whole outfit. This member they stoned was still alive and they dragged him up to a cave they used for their religion. They took all of his weapons away from him before he came to.
“They say that when he finally came around, thirty of them tried to hold him down and couldn’t make the grade. He killed a round dozen of them and the rest got away. They barricaded the door with stones and then they spent four or five days walling it up further. But by this time a lot of them had started to get sick.”
“Ask him if he knows the symptoms,” said Bristol.
Catsby at length nodded and while the Aloyt waited across the fire, he relayed the information to Bristol. “He says some blotches broke out wherever the little stick had been pointed and the people just died. But they’d sent this stick around as a curiosity and everybody in all the cities on this continent had seen it. And this is the only big continent on the planet. Everybody got sick. Pretty soon there weren’t enough people left to keep the jungle out of the cities. He says maybe four or five million people died in all.”
Godolphin and Bristol looked at each other. Bristol was a littl
e white.
They rushed the invaders and drove them back to their ship. But they didn’t know the importance of these little sticks.
As soon as he was sure that he could get no more information about the actual landing, Bristol demanded to know where the cave was that had been walled in. The old chief consulted lengthily with many people around the fire. But after half an hour, he admitted that no one present knew.
Bristol turned to Godolphin. “Ralph, take ten men and go find out what you can about that cave. Open it up if and when you find it, and give me the results. I don’t think you’ve got much chance of finding it. Although this is a pretty slim hope, I am sending back the Supply to report. If we’re on the rim of some other superior race, Earth may need every minute she can get. A hand radioactive weapon could knock us all apart before we had a chance to get started. And we’d find our planet in the same condition that this continent got into, with everybody dead. Go get what facts you can and meet me back at the ship when you think all chances have been exhausted for further details or when you find that cave.”
Godolphin picked up his volunteers and Bristol wrote his dispatches. Before dawn the Supply scorched atmosphere and started on her three-month trip Earthward. There followed an uneasy and toilsome time for the expedition. Captain Bristol, with a small party, ransacked every range of hills he could find in the vicinities of the buried cities. His archaeologists were fascinated by the deterioration of culture shown by mighty walls and towers. And his botanists would have lingered over strange flora. Bristol would give them no time.
“Everything depends on the first advantage,” he said. “If we can just find that being that they walled up, he may have on him some astronomical clue as to the location of his system. It has been a standing order for the last half-century to follow up any such lead as this. So far as I know, this is the first lead ever discovered. So forget about these towns.” And he would turn them back to the thankless task of unwalling ancient burial caves by the score, wherein the dehydrated remains of Aloyts sat in mummified majesty. But they did not discover that will-o’-the-wisp, the invader.
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 30