The First Science Fiction Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  His Highness was the only one to relax appreciably.

  “And are you sure you’re supposed to be outside?”

  “We were supposed to stay on the top floor,” Tel said. “But him,” he pointed to his ragged Highness, “he got restless, and we started telling him about the tricks, and so we went up to the roof, and Alter said she could get us down.”

  “Can you get them back up?” Jon asked.

  “Sure,” said Alter, “all we do is climb…”

  Jon held up his hand. “Wait a minute,” he said. “We’ll go inside and talk to the man in charge. Don’t worry. No one’ll be mad.”

  “You mean talk to Geryn?” said Alter.

  “I guess that’s what his name is.”

  They started back out of the alley. “Tell me,” Jon said, “just what sort of person is Geryn?”

  “He’s a strange old man. He talks to himself all the time,” said Alter. “But he’s smart.”

  Talks to himself, Jon reflected, and nodded. When they reached the door of the inn, Jon pulled his cape off and stepped into the light. A few people at the bar turned around, and when they saw the children, they looked askance at one another.

  “Geryn’s probably upstairs,” Alter said. They went to the second floor. Jon let the children go ahead of him as they passed into the shadow of the hall. He only stepped up to them when Alter pushed open the door at the end of the hall and bright light from Geryn’s room fell full across them.

  “What is it?” Geryn snapped. And then, “What is it, quick?” He whirled around in the chair at the rough wooden desk when they entered. The giant was standing by the window. Geryn’s gray eyes fidgeted back and forth. Finally he said, “Why are you out here? And who is he? What do you want?”

  “I’m from the Duchess of Petra,” Jon said. “I’ve come to take Let to the forest people.”

  “Yes,” said the old man. “Yes.” Then suddenly his face twisted as if he were trying to remember something. Then shook his head. “Yes.” Suddenly he stood up. “Well, go on. I’ve done my part, I tell you. I’ve done. Every minute he’s in my house he endangers my boarders, my friends. Take him. Go on.”

  The giant turned from the window. “I am to go with you. My name is Arkor.”

  Jon frowned. For the first time the scarred giant’s height struck him. “Why…?” he started.

  “It is my country that we go to,” said Arkor. “I know how to get there. I can take you through it. Geryn says it is part of the plan.”

  Jon felt a sudden knot of resentment tighten inside him. These plans—the Duchess’, Geryn’s, even the plans of the triple beings who inhabited them—they trapped him. Freedom. The word went in and out of his mind like a shadow. He said, “When do we go then, if you know how to get there?”

  “In the morning,” said Arkor.

  “Alter, take him to a room. Get him out of here. Quick. Go on.” They backed from the room and Alter hurried them up the hall.

  Jon was thinking. After delivering Let to the forest people, he was going further. Yes. He would go on, try to get through the radiation barrier. But all three of them had to get through if they were to do any good. So why wasn’t Geryn coming instead of sending the giant? If Geryn came, then there’d be two people near the Lord of the Flames. But Geryn was old. Maybe the Duchess could bring him with her when she came. Mentally he smashed a fist into his thoughts and scattered them. Don’t think. Don’t think. Thinking binds up your mind, and you can never be—He stopped. Then another thought wormed into his skull, the thought of five years of glittering hunger.

  That night he slept well. Morning pried his eyes open with blades of light that fell through the window. It was very early. He had been up only a minute when there was a knock on his door. Then it opened, and Arkor directed the dwarfed form of the Prince into Jon’s room, then turned and left.

  “He says to meet him downstairs in five minutes,” Let said.

  “Sure,” said Jon. He finished buttoning up the ragged shirt stolen from the mugger the night before, and looked at the boy by the door. “I guess you’re not used to these sort of clothes,” he said. “Once I wasn’t either. Pretty soon they begin to take.”

  “Huh?” said Let. Then, “Oh.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Who are you?”

  Jon thought for a moment. “Well,” he said. “I’m sort of a friend of your brother. An acquaintance, anyway. I’m supposed to take you to the forest.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll be safe there.”

  “Could we go to the sea instead?”

  “My turn for a ‘why’?” Jon asked.

  “Because Tel told me all about it last night. He said it was fun. He said there were rocks all different colors. And in the morning, he said, you can see the sun come up like a burning blister behind the water. He told me about the boats, too. I’d like to work on a boat. I really would. They don’t allow me to do anything at home. Mother says I might get hurt. Will I get a chance to work someplace?”

  “Maybe,” Jon said.

  “Tel had some good stories about fishing. Do you know any stories?”

  “I don’t know,” Jon said. “I never tried telling any. Hey, come on. We better get started.”

  “I like stories,” Let said. “Come on. I’m just trying to be friendly.”

  Jon laughed, then thought a minute. “I can tell you a story, about a prison mine. Do you know anything about the prison mines beyond the forest?”

  “Some,” said Let.

  “Well, once upon a time, there were three prisoners in that prison camp.” They started out in the hall. “They’d been there a long time, and they wanted to get out. One was…well, he looked like me, let’s pretend. Another had a limp…”

  “And the third one was chubby, sort of,” interrupted Let. “I know that story.”

  “You do?” asked Jon.

  “Sure,” Let said.

  “Then you go on and tell it.” Jon was a little annoyed.

  Let told it to him.

  They were outside waiting for Arkor when the boy finished. “See,” Let said. “I told you I knew it.”

  “Yeah,” said Jon quietly. He stood very still. “You say the other two…didn’t make it?”

  “That’s right,” Let said. “The guards brought them back and dumped their bodies in the mud so that…”

  “Shut up,” Jon said.

  “Huh?” asked Let.

  He was quiet for a few breaths. “Who told you that…story?”

  “Petra,” Let answered. “She told it to me. It’s a good story, huh?”

  “Incidentally,” Jon said. “I’m the one that got away.”

  “You mean?” The boy stopped. “You mean it really happened?”

  The early light warmed the deserted street now as Arkor came to the door of the inn and stepped into the street.

  “All right,” he said. “Come on.”

  CHAPTER VII

  The news service of Toromon in the city of Toron was a public address system that flooded the downtown area, and a special printed sheet that was circulated among the upper families of the city. On the mainland it was a fairly accurate brigade of men and women who transported news orally from settlement to settlement. All announced simultaneously that morning:

  Crown Prince Kidnaped

  King Declares War!

  In the military ministry, directives were issued in duplicate and redelivered in triplicate. At eight-forty, the 27B Communications Sector became hopelessly snarled. This resulted in the shipment of a boatload of prefabricated barracks foundations to a port on the mainland sixty-two miles from the intended destination.

  Let, Jon, and Arkor were just mounting the private yacht of the Duchess of Petra whic
h was waiting for them at the end of the harbor. Later, as the island of Toron slipped across the water, Let mentioned to Jon, leaning against the railing, that there was an awful lot of commotion on the docks.

  “It’s always like that,” Jon told him, remembering the time he’d gone with his father in the morning to the pier. “They’re inspecting cargoes. But it does look awfully busy.”

  Which was a euphemism. One group of military directives which had been quite speedily and accurately delivered were the offers of contracts, primarily for food, and secondarily for equipment. Two of the distributors of imported fish who had absolutely no chance of receiving the contracts sent in a bid accompanied by a letter which explained (with completely fraudulent statistics) how much cheaper it would be to use imported fish rather than those from the aquariums. Then they commandeered a group of ruffians who broke into the house of old Koshar’s personal secretary, who was still sleeping after the previous night’s party which he had helped out with. (So far he has appeared in this story only as a hand seen around the edge of a storage cabinet door, a broad hand, with wiry black hair, on which there was a cheap, wide, brass ring in which was set an irregular shape of blue glass.)

  They tied him to a chair, punched him in the stomach, and in the head, and in the mouth until there was blood running down his trimmed, black beard; and he had given the information they wanted—information that enabled them to sink three of the Koshar cargo fleet that was just coming into dock.

  The Duchess’ private yacht made contact with a tetron-tramp returning to the mainland and Let, Jon, and Arkor changed ships. Coming from the yacht in bare feet and rags gave them an incongruous appearance. But on the tramp, among those passengers who were returning for their families, they quickly became lost.

  On Toron, the pilot of the shuttle boat that took workers from the city to the aquariums found a clumsily put-together, but nevertheless unmistakable, bomb hidden in the lavatory. It was dismantled. There was no accident. But an authority, Vice-Supervisor Nitum of Koshar Synthetic Food Concerns (whose name you do not need to remember, as he was killed three days later in a street brawl) clenched his jaw (unshaven; he had been called to the office a half an hour early over the sunken cargo boats), nodded his head, and issued a few non-official directives himself. Twenty minutes later, Koshar Synthetic Food Concerns was officially given the government contract to supply the armies of Toromon with food. Because the two rival bidders, the import merchants, had ceased to exist about twelve minutes previously, having suddenly been denied warehouse space, and their complete storage dumped into the streets to rot (nearly seven tons of frozen fish) because the refrigeration lockers, and the refrigeration buildings, and the refrigeration trucks had all been rented from Rahsok Refrigeration, and nobody had ever thought of spelling Rahsok backwards.

  In the military ministry, Captain Clemen, along with Major Tomar, was called away from his present job of completing the evacuation of the top four floors of an adjacent office building to accommodate the new corps of engineers, mathematicians, and physicists that the army had just enlisted. Apparently riots had started in the streets around the old Rahsok Refrigeration Houses. The warehouses were just a few blocks away from the official boundary of the Devil’s Pot.

  They got there ten minutes after the report came in. “What the hell is going on?” Clemen demanded, from the head of the City Dispersal Squad. Behind the line of uniformed men, masses of people were pushing and calling out. “And what’s that stench?” added Clemen. He was a tiny man, exactly a quarter of an inch over the minimum for military acceptance—4’ 10”.

  “Fish, sir,” the Dispersal Chief told him. “There’s tons of it all over the street. The people are trying to take it away.”

  “Well, let them have it,” Clemen said. “It’ll clear the streets of the mess and maybe do some good.”

  “You don’t understand, sir,” the head of Dispersal explained. “It’s been poisoned. Just before it was dumped, it was soaked with buckets of barbitide. Half a ton of the stuff’s already been carried away.”

  Clemen turned. “Tomar,” he said. “You get back to headquarters and see personally that a city-wide announcement goes out telling about the poisoned fish. Call General Medical, find out the antidote, and get the information all over the city. See to it personally, too.”

  Tomar got back to headquarters, got General Medical, got the antidote, which was expensive, complicated, and long, and drafted his announcement.

  WARNING! Any citizen who has taken fish from the street in the area of Rahsok Refrigeration is in immediate danger of death. The fish has been treated with the fatal poison barbitide. No fish other than that directly traceable to the Synthetic Markets should be eaten. warn your neighbors! If fish has been eaten, go directly to the General Medical building (address followed). Symptoms of barbitide poisoning: intense cramps about two hours after ingestion, followed by nausea, fever, and swollen lymph nodes. Death results in twenty minutes after onset of cramps under normal conditions. Foods with high calcium contents prolong spasms to a maximum hour and a half (foods such as milk, ground egg shell). General Medical has been alerted. There you will receive injections of Calcium Silicate and Atropayic Acid which can counteract the effects of the poison up until the last five or ten minutes.

  Tomar personally sent the directive through Communications Center 27B, marked urgent and emergency. Ten minutes later he received a visiphone call from the Communications Engineer saying that 27B had been hopelessly snarled all morning. In fact so had 26B, 25B. In further fact, said the engineer, the only available sectors open were 34A and 42A, none of which, incidentally, had access to complete city lines.

  Tomar made a triplicate copy of the warning and sent it out, nonetheless, through Sectors 40A, 41A, and 42A. A half an hour later the secretary to the Communications Engineer called and said, “Major Tomar, I’m sorry, I just got back from my break and I didn’t see your message until just now. Because of the tie-ups, we’ve received instructions only to let authorized persons have access to the available sectors.”

  “Well, who the hell is authorized,” Tomar bellowed. “If you don’t put that through and quick, half the city may be dead by this evening.”

  The secretary paused a minute. Then he said, “I’m sorry, sir, but…well, look. I’ll give it directly to the Communications Engineer when he gets back.”

  “When is he getting back?” Tomar demanded.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Who is authorized?”

  “Only generals, sir, and only those directly concerned with the war effort.”

  “I see,” Tomar said, and hung up.

  He had just dispatched seven copies of the announcement with an explanatory note to seven of the fourteen generals in the ministry when the Communications Engineer called again. “Major, what’s all this about a bushel of fish?”

  “Look, there are seven tons of the stuff all over the streets.”

  “And poisoned?”

  “Exactly. Will you please see that this message gets out over every available piece of city-wide communication as fast as possible? This is really life and death.”

  “We’re just allowed to work on getting war messages through. But I guess this takes priority. Oh, that explains some of the messages we’ve been getting. I believe there’s even one for you.”

  “Well?” asked Tomar after a pause.

  “I’m not allowed to deliver it, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not authorized, sir.”

  “Look, damn it, get it right now and read it to me.”

  “Well…er…it’s right here sir. It’s from the chief of the City Dispersal Squad.”

  The message was, in brief, that twenty-three men, among them Captain Clemen, had been trampled to death by an estimated two and a half thousand hungry residents of the
Devil’s Pot, most of them immigrants from the mainland.

  A ton and a half of fish was finally removed from the streets and disposed of. But five and a half tons had made its way through the city. The Communications Engineer also added that while they’d been talking, a memorandum had come through that Sectors 34A to 42A were now out of commission, but that the major should try 27B again, because it might have cleared up.

  * * * *

  The second shift of workers that day was arriving at the aquariums. In the great pontooned building, vast rows of transparent plastic tubes, three feet in diameter, webbed back and forth among the tetron pumps. Vibrator nets cut the tubes into twenty-foot compartments. Catwalks strung the six-story structure, all flooded with deep red light that came from the phosphor-rods that stuck up from the pumps. Light toward the blue end of the spectrum disturbed the fish, who had to be visible at all times, to be moved, or to be checked for any sickness or deformity. In their transparent tubes, the fish floated in a state near suspended animation, vibrated gently, were kept at a constant 82°, were fed, were fattened, were sorted according to age, size, and species; then slaughtered. The second shift of workers moved into the aquarium, relieving the first shift.

  They had been on about two hours when a sweating hulk of a man who was an assistant feeder reported to the infirmary, complaining of general grogginess. Heat prostration was an occasional complaint in the aquarium.

  The doctor told him to lie down for a little while. Five minutes later he went into violent cramps. Perhaps the proper attention would have been paid to him had not a few minutes later a woman fallen from a catwalk at the top of the aquarium and broken one of the plastic arteries and her skull, six stories below.

  In the red light the workers gathered around her broken body that lay at the end of a jagged plastic tube. In the spread water, dozens of fish, fat and ruddy-skinned, flapped their gills weakly.