The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “My dear,” he said amusedly, “I say it again. I am a party member. Of its shock battalions. If I am without papers at the moment, a mere telegram will secure me against suspicion.”

  She looked at him steadily, searchingly. Then she turned back to her cooking pot. There was silence, save for the aromatic bubbling of the pot itself, and small, crackling noises in the stove. Outside, the wind was still. The wooden spoon stirred and stirred. It seemed that a very long time passed.

  Then the spoon clattered suddenly against the side of the pot. Gregor heard a metallic clanking sound—and then a thunderous knock on the door. Not a knock. A terrific blow. The door burst open and there were three men inside. They wore the bulky, winter uniform of shock troopers of the party. Not much smartness about them, no. But two rifles held ready and a revolver in the hand of the third man was proof of efficiency, at any rate.

  The girl faced them composedly.

  “You saw my signal?” she asked. “I am Sara Vajnik, and last night I put a note beneath a flag in the trail for someone to come and arrest a suspicious person in my house. This is the man. He was moving toward the pass just before the storm struck. He took shelter here. He appears to be a spy.”

  Gregor knew, then, that he would never reach the pass or see the green pastures beyond it. He had a moment’s wry mortified disgust that he had failed to convince the girl, after all, and a moment’s wonder wherein he had failed. But there were more urgent matters afoot. To sell his life for the highest possible price, he needed that revolver in the third man’s hand. His own was gone. So he grinned very convincingly.

  “Sara Vajnik has anticipated me—perhaps. I am a party member and a shock trooper. Look at her papers first. The forgery is a very interesting one.” He needed only an instant’s distraction of the third man’s attention. Only an instant. He tightened his muscles, smiling, waiting for the turn of the third man’s head—

  Then a sudden cry. A scuffle. A struggle. A man’s oath.

  “She-devil! She tried to bolt—”

  The girl struggled desperately to reach the door, sobbing in rage and despair.

  And Gregor leaped. It was absurdly easy. A wrench—and he was astounded at his own strength—and he had the revolver. He raised it savagely, and felt it kick back in his hand. White smoke blotted out half the room. It kicked and kicked and kicked, while acrid smoke billowed all about and explosions ripped the hut. Then the revolver clicked empty, and Gregor knew he had exacted the highest price he could get for his life. He waited savagely to be killed.

  But he was not killed. Instead there was a deep silence. He heard an odd chattering sound. The girl stood staring at him, wide-eyed, while the smoke rose slowly to form a layer of fog next to the ceiling. Her teeth chattered.

  “Wh-why did you do it?” she stammered. “I—I—”

  “We have lied to each other. Every instant. I’m no party member,” Gregor said. “I’m scheduled to be shot. You—”

  “M-me too,” said the girl in a small voice. “Gregor—”

  He licked his lips and bent to the floor. He gave her a rifle. He fumbled for other arms.

  “They are—they are the last of the pass guard,” she told him shakenly. “I saw the tracks of the others last night, when I left the note. I wasn’t sure there’d be any more today, but these are—are the last.”

  “They’d have horses,” said Gregor. “We take them. We start for the pass now. They think it’s closed tighter than they could close it, but we’ll get through! There’ll be nothing to fight but snow and cold. Come on!”

  * * * *

  They made their way to the trail. They mounted the dead guards’ horses and rode toward the pass now garrisoned only by cold and wind and hunger and despair. But twice, as they rode, the girl turned in her saddle to look fearfully behind her, Gregor saw.

  “When we see green valleys,” he told her hungrily, “we will never look behind us. We will never lie to each other. We will never suspect anything. Ah, we will be happy when we reach the valleys beyond the pass!”

  The girl looked at him uncertainly.

  “Together,” added Gregor.

  She flushed. Then she smiled at him.

  They rode on toward the pass that had been made impassable by snow. The guard had abandoned it, because nobody could cross the mountains now. But they rode upward to try, because there were green valleys ahead, where a man could lie down and rest.

  TERROR ABOVE

  Originally published in Collier’s, June 10, 1939, as by “Will F. Jenkins.”

  There was only a faint trace of color in the sky to westward. It was already night on the ground, but the first of the pilot kites rose, twinkling, out of the earth shadow and into the sunlight again. The second followed. The motor of the reel truck rumbled throatily to itself. It was a monotonous, throttled-down thumping noise. Otherwise the world was very quiet. There were, in fact, just two other sounds in being. One was a thin whine of melody over by the antiaircraft battery. Somebody was playing on a mouth organ. The other was the voice of Sergeant Blairlee.

  “For Pete’s sake!” he said bitterly, “sendin’ up a rookie with me! I got a fam’ly behind the lines to worry about. Why sh’d I have more troubles? I’ll have to stand all watches an’ he’ll be sick and bleatin’.”

  The reel-truck man watched the dial and said soothingly:

  “Air’s smooth tonight, Sarge. An’ we didn’t have to use a bag to get the pilots up. You’ll ride easy.”

  Sergeant Blairlee would not be comforted. The last of the flare kites was two hundred feet up. The pilots were so far that they were visible only as golden motes in the sunlight that had passed on earth. Now the main-lift surfaces went wobbling up into blackness. One Two. Three. Four. The upper wind caught the first of them. The needle on the reel-truck dial jumped and skittered. Sergeant Blairlee regarded it sourly. The second caught its lift. The needle steadied. The third. The fourth. The needle was steady as a rock, and showed the lift of the group of kites to be appreciably more than three quarters of a ton.

  “I guess we’ll get off the ground,” conceded Sergeant Blairlee bitterly. “We would, with a rookie for me to dry nurse!”

  “Yeah,” said the reel-truck man. Between groundmen and kitemen of the air barrage, there was a bond of resentment that their force was used so extensively for the seasoning of men intended for other services. “An’ there’s likely to be somethin’ doin’ most any night now, too. The goons’ve served warnin’ of unrestricted bombin’.”

  The goons, of course, were the enemy, and unrestricted bombing was the latest and most logical development of modern warfare. Since a modern state functions as a military unit in time of war, the goon government reasoned plausibly enough that any part of that military unit must be considered liable to attack.

  “Don’t remind me!” said Sergeant Blairlee grimly. “My fam’ly’s back o’ the lines. I don’t want to think about it. Where’s that damn’ rookie I got to take up tonight?”

  The reel-truck man grinned faintly and jerked his thumb. From the bunk built over the driver’s seat in the truck, a runty man with defiant eyes climbed down. He wore a private’s uniform, but the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head explicitly proclaimed, “Commissioned officer.” The private’s uniform as definitely said, “Broken.”

  “Private Simpkins reporting for duty,” said the new man defiantly.

  “A’right,” said Sergeant Blairlee sourly. “Come on. They’re hookin’ on the hearse now.”

  He strode to the weirdly and wonderfully shaped contrivance that the service called a hearse. It was a woeful object to look at. It was huge and clumsy and quite improbable. It was painted black, and even in the ground wind it swayed and wobbled from side to side like an over-obese elephant in pain. It was an adaptation of the tetrahedral kite played with by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell in the prehistoric days of av
iation, and it took two observers and an assortment of apparatus up two miles and hung there, lurching drunkenly. Its function was in theory the detection and illumination—by flare kites overhead—of raiding enemy planes. In practice, it usually made them stay home, which was useful but not spectacular.

  Sergeant Blairlee climbed into the small kite cabin and growled inarticulately at his companion. The new man entered. They went up, the kites already aloft hauling valorously upon them.

  In the beginning the motion was lunatic. The bulky kite seemed determined, at first, to wallow itself upside down and inside out. Then it made clumsy but determined rushes in divers directions. The result of those gyrations was not notably comfortable, but Sergeant Blairlee held on grimly. Private Simpkins followed suit.

  Above five hundred feet the air eddies began to smooth out, and the kite climbed more steadily. It was a thousand feet up. Two. Three. Earth was a vast expanse of velvety black below. The stars seemed very near, but far from friendly. They looked like small, unwinking eyes close overhead. The clumsy kite went up and up. Seven thousand feet. Eight. Sergeant Blairlee busied himself with a tinny contraption, striking match after match. A wick caught reluctantly and he closed the ignition door. Then there was no light anywhere except from the luminous handles of the switches and the bright and hostile stars without. But the pungent smell of imperfectly burning oil seeped out into the enclosed small cabin, and presently a perceptible trace of warmth made itself felt.

  “We don’t have flyin’ suits,” grunted Sergeant Blairlee, “because o’ supply shortage. Easier to give us a dinky stove. Modern war! Now lemme show you how to work the listeners.”

  The altimeter needle crept over and over. Nine thousand feet. Ten. Eleven. Sergeant Blairlee paid no attention. He demonstrated the listeners—the amplifying devices that multiplied tiny sounds by thousands of times and fed them into earphones for the occupants of the cabin to listen to. He showed the switches that chose the several microphones, from those in the main-lift surfaces and the flare kites to those in the pilot kites which used the supporting surfaces of the pilots themselves as diaphragms.

  “We got mikes that use the surface of the old hearse, here,” he observed, “but y’needn’t bother with ’em. They ain’t any good.”

  The runty man said harshly:

  “If orders are to use those mikes, they’d better be used!”

  The tone of this Private Simpkins was that of a commissioned officer. But he wore a private’s uniform and was subordinate to Sergeant Blairlee.

  “Listen, guy!” said Sergeant Blairlee grimly. “You’ve been wearin’ shoulder bars, maybe. You ain’t wearin’ ’em now. I’m runnin’ this hearse, an’ I got a fam’ly back o’ the lines to make me want to run it right! If you wanna report me for not obeyin’ orders, go to it when we get down. Meanwhile, listen here! These are the controls. If somethin’ happens, we stick an’ set off all our flares one at a time. When they’re all gone we can cut loose an’ the ol’ hearse turns into a kinda glider. About half the time she can be landed without smashin’ anything but us. We land dark. We got landin’ flares but we ain’t allowed to use ’em. Nice, ain’t it?”

  Private Simpkins was sullenly silent. Sergeant Blairlee handed him a headset and ran through the microphones, making professional comments the while. Once he said, “Here’s a wind whistle. Tune the filter like this”—his fingers moved—“an’ you step it up. Then wobble the control—” He moved the lever and the cabin swayed wildly and seemed to dive crazily toward earth— “an’ the sound changes. That proves it’s us an’ not a goon plane glidin’ with power off. Get it?”

  Private Simpkins said nothing. Sergeant Blairlee relaxed.

  “Now, anything else y’want to know?”

  “Yes,” said Private Simpkins harshly. “How do you cut loose from all cables, for free flight?”

  “Top cable here, bottom cable—” Sergeant Blairlee said sharply, “What the hell? We don’t cut free till all our flares are burned!”

  “Oh,” said Private Simpkins coldly.

  Sergeant Blairlee scowled. He took out a cigarette and bent over the odorous oil-stove. He clapped a muffler on the lighted tube, so that no spark could show. He looked out a vision port. Private Simpkins reached over and took the hearse control handle in his grip. He moved it. The floor seemed to drop away beneath their feet. Sergeant Blairlee grabbed and missed, but the hearse kite checked smoothly. Its descent stopped abruptly. It fell off to one side, righted itself, and then swung back and forth in a monstrous, sickening arc.

  “Say!” snarled Sergeant Blairlee, flung crazily about and fighting to get at the control. “What the hell—”

  There was a little jar, and the hearse kite rode steadily again.

  “She handles like a mud scow,” said Private Simpkins scornfully.

  A buzzer wailed plaintively. Sergeant Blairlee jabbed a button and spoke down two miles of kite cable to the reel-truck man.

  “Nothin’ the matter. Just I got a crazy man up here with me. I’ll bat him over the head if he goes tryin’ out controls again.”

  He turned back and glared angrily through the darkness at his companion.

  Private Simpkins bent over the oil heater, lighting a cigarette as the sergeant had done. Sergeant Blairlee said ironically:

  “Listen, ace! This ain’t a practice flight, it’s business! An’ if you go showin’ off to convince me that you used to have a shoulder bar, I’m willin’ to believe it! But—”

  “I had two bars,” said Private Simpkins coldly.

  “If they busted you for bein’ a damn’ fool,” snorted the sergeant, “they done right—”

  “They didn’t,” said Private Simpkins more coldly still. “I was invited to resign my commission, Sergeant, to avoid court-martial for cowardice.”

  Sergeant Blairlee’s mouth was open to speak. But no irony, no insult, could possibly have had the bite of Private Simpkin’s own confession. The sergeant turned away, enraged and shocked and very much upset. He growled: “Aw, hell!”

  He stared out the vision ports. The earth was inky black below. No lights showed because there was a war, and whenever lights or movement showed human life, of course patriotism would urge someone on one side or the other to drop bombs upon it.

  Private Simpkins said sardonically: “Aren’t you going to ask me for my alibi, Sergeant?”

  Sergeant Blairlee grunted.

  “It might give you a laugh,” said Private Simpkins bitterly. “I had a big Cottrell bomber with two half-ton bombs. My orders were to go with half a dozen others and bomb one of the enemy’s munitions factories. We went over high altitude and they didn’t spot us. The idea was for us to sneak up from the rear, drop our bombs, and get back if we could. It didn’t look like we would.”

  Sergeant Blairlee grunted again.

  “The others didn’t get back,” said Private Simpkins. “They pretty well smashed that factory, but they didn’t come back. I did. With both my bombs in their racks and not a bullet hole in my wings. All I had to show for the trip was an alibi.”

  Sergeant Blairlee said: “Yeah?”

  “My story,” said Private Simpkins in heavy irony, “was that I saw a new type of enemy ship, and it was so brand-new that I figured it was more important to come back and report it than to carry on and drop my bombs. So I came back, and reported, and nobody believed it.”

  “What kinda ship did you see?” asked Sergeant Blairlee. “I ain’t one of those people that don’t give the goons credit for anything at all. They’re human, just like us. I got nothin’ against goons except that we got to lick ’em.”

  “The ship was a giant,” said Private Simpkins coldly. “That’s all. A giant! It was damned near as big as a Zeppelin, and it had twenty-four motors, I counted ’em! Six front and six back, on each wing! When I reported how big it was, headquarters figured that a ship that big coul
d barely get off the ground and it’d be so useless it’d be silly, and therefore the goons wouldn’t build it. And therefore it didn’t exist and I was a liar and I’d funked carrying out my orders. So they gave me the choice of resigning or facing a court-martial as a coward.”

  Sergeant Blairlee said nothing whatever for a time. Then he observed: “We’re supposed to do half-hour tricks at the mikes. You want to take over now or later?”

  Private Simpkins snarled at him for his incredulity. Then he said sullenly: “I’ll take over now.”

  “Okay,” said Sergeant Blairlee. He settled himself back to relax. “But, listen, guy! If somethin’ happens an’ you cut loose for free glidin’ before every damn flare we got has burned out, you ain’t goin’ to live to land! I got a fam’ly back of the lines, an’ the goons say they’ goin’ to bomb unrestricted. See?”

  There was silence inside the cabin for a long time.…

  * * * *

  The buzzer wailed. Sergeant Blairlee opened his eyes. Private Simpkins spoke into the phone transmitter to earth:

  “Yes…? Very well. I’ll tell Sergeant Blairlee.” He turned, and the sergeant grunted. “The enemy’s got a big air fleet aloft. Objective not yet known. Extra vigilance ordered for this sector. The gunners down below are standing to their guns.”

  “Umph!” said the sergeant. “A’ right.” Then he said uneasily: “It’s a hell of a note, ain’t it? Unrestricted bombin’!”

  Private Simpkins said nothing. Sergeant Blairlee said suddenly:

  “Say, did y’ever figure out a reason for the goons to build a ship as big as y’said y’saw?”

  “Yes,” said Private Simpkins. “To carry ten-ton bombs. It could do it. Several of them!”

  The sergeant blinked. Then he blinked again. He swore suddenly. The thought was just beginning to sink in.

  A hundred-pound bomb is a bad thing to have exploding near you or the house you’re living in. A two-hundred-pounder is just four times as bad, because the shattering effect of explosions goes up in geometrical ratio to the amount of explosive fired. A thousand-pounder does one hundred times the damage of a bomb one-tenth its weight. And a ten-ton bomb ought to shake down half a city where a hundred-pounder would merely demolish a house or two. Literally, it should shake down half a city. So that from a military standpoint almost anything would be worthwhile if it allowed ten-ton bombs to be used.