Poul Anderson's Planet Stories

by Poul Anderson

  Steadiness came, a thrumming urgency of purpose that would not let him rest. Jones had spoken of others on their way, a swarm of thugs and ice-hearted scientists who would make short shrift of him. He had to get out.

  He looked around the laboratory and sighed. Pity to destroy a good ten million dollars' worth of magnificent equipment, the notes and the machines and the instruments, the whole labor of a heroic lifetime. But there must be nothing for the Unionists to find, and Raihala's essential results were still alive in Fredison's brain and in the thing which lay shining and mysterious on the floor.

  With shaky speed he gathered the papers in the center of the floor and poured kerosene over them, touching his cigarette-lighter to the heap. It blazed up, red and smoky, the greatest achievement of the century burning before his eyes. It was as if he saw Raihala's thin stooped ghost wavering in the fire.

  We'll keep it alive, Doc, we'll keep it alive and see that it's used right. Men won't have to curse your name, Doc.

  Jones stirred, moaning out of a bloody mouth. Fredison found some rope and tied him securely. Then he went into the cellar and located the rest of the tordenite that had been used to blast the foundations of the laboratory. He set a twenty-minute fuse and went upstairs again.

  Clothes against the Antarctic winter. . . But where to go, where to go? He had worried before now about the discovery, how it would be used, what sort of titanic struggle might shape up over possession of the demon which Raihala had bottled. Now—whom could he trust, where could he hide, what could he do?

  The government? No, not if it could be avoided. The Liberals had a majority in the Federation parliament, but it was not a big one, there were Unionists holding important posts. Especially, and most disastrously, the Minister of Internal Security was known to have Unionists leanings. Nor were all the Liberals or the members of smaller parties shining knights. Earth's government was a shaky coalition of a dozen warring elements, corrupt in too many vital places. There was hardly a one in it he would trust with a counterfeit nickel, let alone the basic sun-creating force of the universe.

  Paris—yes, Astier was in Paris, a good man with an apartment roomy enough to hold him for a while. Astier had worked with Raihala a few years back, appreciated the issues involved, had contacts. He'd go there.

  He stopped to poke up the fire, make sure that the thick sheafs of paper were safely charring. Not that the explosion would leave anything to read, but you never knew, you never knew.

  The energy globe was chill in his sweating hand as he picked it up and stuck it in one capacious pocket. Five kilos—eleven pounds of hell chained and raging to be free. Five kilos of mastery over the worlds. His tunic sagged with the weight, the future dragging at his shoulders.

  He stuck Jones' pistol in his belt and, grunting, picked up the mumbling man. The door swung open for him as he stumbled toward it. There was a storm door beyond it, shaking in the gale, and when it opened the polar night came in and struck him in the face.

  A veil of snow plastered itself on his glasses. He cursed, wishing he had remembered to take them off, but he didn't dare stop, the fuse was burning down. Doggedly he stepped outside.

  The wind screamed, galloping over nighted miles with snow and ice-dust sleeting before it. The cold was like a fang, ripping through his clothes, flaming in his cheeks. Blindly, he groped toward the landing field. His feet sank into a bitterness of snow. He slipped on the ancient ice beneath it. Darkness and cold and a wildness of wind, the enemy lancing through the gale toward him, destruction burning to its climax behind, he had to be on his way!

  Dimly, he saw Jones' rocketplane ahead, already half buried by snow. He fumbled over its hull, feeling after the doorhandle. No time to get his own vessel out of the hangar and this one was probably faster anyway.

  The door swung open to a narrow darkness. Fredison shoved Jones behind the pilot seat, crawled into place, and slammed the door with a sobbing gasp. He was there. He was on his way.

  The baffled wind screeched about the metal shell, which trembled as if poising for flight already. Doggedly, Fredison wiped his glasses clean and checked the instrument panel. Atomic drive—good, he had no fuel worries and he knew that this make could get into the upper stratosphere and carry him at fantastic speed. He touched the controls and heard the engines thutter, warming up. A breath of hot air blew from the heater against his numbed skin.

  The night fountained up in a blaze of fury, sudden sheets of leaping fire, a roar that cut through the storm and banged on his eardrums and rattled the teeth in his skull. There went the lab, there went fifty years of labor, there went Raihala's tenuous ghost spattered and streaming away like smoke...

  No, no, that wasn't right. If anything survived after death, if there was such a spirit remaining of the gentle old man, then it was riding with him now. And beside it, perhaps, were the shades of Newton and Faraday and Einstein and all the quiet-voiced great of Earth who had seen their dreams turned to murder. He smiled and sent the rocket skyward.

  They were up into the enormous stillness of the stratosphere, stars blinking fierce in a cloudless night and only the throb of the rockets having voice, before he relaxed. Then it was into a trembling which lasted for minutes before he had control again.

  Jones croaked behind him, trying to form words with a broken jaw. Fredison turned around and smiled without humor.

  "I'd bandage you up if I could," he said, "but there doesn't seem to be anything here to do it with. Meanwhile, I've read too many detective stories where the one party has got the other one captured and then gets careless. You're going to stay hog-tied in spite of every excuse you can think of. So shut up and let me think."

  The autopilot was running the plane now, guiding it through the upper heavens at a speed which should get him to Paris in ten hours or so. Fredison took off his glasses—he needed them only for close work— and lit a cigarette and put his chilled wet feet close to the heater. Yes, there was a lot of thinking to do. A hell of a lot.

  It was so incredible that he, plain unadventurous Lars Eric Fredison, Ph.D. in physics, twenty-seven years old, North American by birth and Liberal by politics and middle class by income, that he should be caught in a sudden game of murder and struggle, that it had a dreamlike quality. This wasn't real, such things don't happen outside books and stereoshows, any minute now he'd wake up. . .

  No, no, the rockets rumbled and flamed behind him, the stars were hard and sharp outside the windows, hooded lights on the control panel glowed dully off polished metal and plastic. He had an itch in his right shoulder just out of scratching range, the cigarette smoke tickled his nostrils, the logarithm of pi was 0.49715, he had fixed himself mashed potatoes and hamburger steak over a Bunsen burner just two hours—two eternities —ago. He was real and this was real and he was in it up to the ears..

  He sighed and considered his own potentialities. He was of medium height, stocky and broad-shouldered, a fair-to-middling boxer and halfback, not hopelessly bad on a pistol range. His head was large, sandy-haired, with gray eyes and wide mouth and stubborn chin and a few freckles dusted over a snub nose, nothing to mark it out. He had a growing reputation as an experimental physicist in the electronic and magnetronic field, and he had been Edvard Raihala's assistant in the Antarctic laboratory before age had taken the brilliant and kindly Finn. He had borne the body to Helsinki and returned to clean up what little remained to do.

  They were almost finished with the work, they had produced an energy sphere and needed only to get exact numerical values for certain of its properties before announcing the results. Raihala had never liked preliminary reports, he wanted to show the world a fait accompli. He had been quite unconcerned with the political implications which had occasionally worried Fredison.

  "No, no, Lars, you are too narrow, you do not see de wision. Man hass needed dis, to free him from hiss limitations. Unlimited energy! No more worry and fighting ower dwindling fuel suppliess, de wery stars before us now." Only it hadn't worked that way
. The political implications had been dumped right in his lap and what was he going to do about it? Yes, what was he going to do about it?

  Jones mumbled behind him. "Shut up," said Fredison.

  "Owwrr—yuh ca' ge' 'way—"

  "I said shut up," repeated Fredison mildly. "The only reason I've bothered to lug you along is that I don't want a murder rap to add to my woes and give your side an excuse to fall on me. It wouldn't be too much trouble to dump you into the Atlantic."

  It was strange that he should feel so ruthless. He had never killed a man in his life. But all the human race was pretty hard-boiled these days, the slowly dying hangover of the Hemispheric Wars. For one of the gang which had torn the world apart for a hundred years of hell, whose secret police and concentration camps and torture cells were still a livid memory, who had earned the hate of Mars and Venus for all their kind, and who sought to bring back the old viciousness in a new and subtler disguise, there could be no mercy. You step on scorpions, don't you?

  Well, that might be an over simplification. The Unionist Party included a number of sincere, fairly decent, and hopelessly prejudiced people. You can't have totalitarianism all over the world, fascist and communist and nationalist and the nominal democracy which fought them, without leaving traces. Theoretically, the Unionists were simply another party, and if certain things they advocated were contrary to the Federation constitution, well, they claimed they would only seek to amend it by legal means.

  But they stood for the end of the painfully won and still shaky freedom of man, the return of the secret police and the marching men, for an arrogant assumption of race superiority and the renewed oppression of Mars and Venus and human minorities. They were the heirs of the monster which had so lately been slain, first in open war and men in world-wide revolution and then in a series of bitterly contested elections.

  They kept their private armies, swaggering bullies parading the streets in open defiance of the laws. They assassinated higher-up opponents and kicked in the teeth of harmless little men who dared speak against them. They were the largest of the minority parties in the Federation parliament, their demagogues howling up the votes of the unemployed and the prejudiced and the psychopathic. If Raihala's demon fell into their hands there was an end of all things which mattered.

  And I—I am up against that! What to do? What to do?

  The tension faded, died in Fredison's weary body. He was of a somewhat stolid disposition anyway and if there was nothing else to do right now, well, why not catch a nap? He checked Jones with elaborate care and dozed off.

  The renewed thrum of rockets as the plane came gliding earthward woke him. He stretched stiffly, wishing for a plate of ham and eggs and several gallons of coffee, and looked ahead. Europe was below him, Paris, a million lights in a starry summer darkness. The Antarctic seemed incredibly far away.

  "Jones," he said, "we're going to land in the usual manner and take a cab to the place of an associate of mine. I'm going to be helping you along. You're a friend of mine who got banged up when we swerved to avoid a collision. If you try to say anything there will be a regrettable accident involving a gun I didn't know was loaded."

  Hatred glared starkly back at him.

  He found the usual license papers in the glove compartment, made out to Henry Jones of New Denver, North America—an alias if ever there was one. When the control tower at the rocketfield called to him, he answered firmly in passable French, "Lars Fredison of North America, with Henry Jones of the same in plane belonging to the latter. Request permission to land, and please have a cab ready. There's been an accident. I want to take Jones to the doctor."

  "Oui, monsieur." Was there an overtone of excitement, or was it simply his own jumpiness? Too late now, the radiobeam had already taken over and was bringing him down. He turned in his seat and untied Jones. "I've got the gun in my pocket, and my hand on the trigger," he said. "Don't forget."

  The man shrugged. It was as if his crushed, face sneered.

  The plane set down on the glare-lit concrete expanse and rolled to a halt near one gate, A couple of mechanics stood by to shove it into a hangar and a car was just pulling up beyond the fence. Good.

  Jones leaned heavily on Fredison as they clumped out of the door. The scientist wondered vaguely how to shoot a man and make it look accidental. But the Unionist would be too weakened to offer much resistance to anything. What the hell to do with him once they got to Astier's was another question.

  Two men got out of the car and approached. It wasn t a cab Fredison saw with a sudden horrible sinking.

  One of them stood before him, a big blocky form cutting him off from the gate. His face was as if carved in dark granite.

  "Fredison?" He spoke English with a clear American accent. "I am from Security. Briefly he showed the badge under his coat. "I have a warrant for your arrest."

  II

  For a wild instant the physicist's finger tightened on the gun in his pocket. Shoot them down?

  Sanity returned and with it an immense weariness. He hadn't a chance. He was one against three, no, against the entire personnel of the rocketfield. There wasn't a thing he could do except make more trouble for himself.

  His eyes went dully past the detective, searching without hope. Under a white blaze of lights, the concrete stretched over acres to the sprawling buildings at the far end. Transcontinental and transoceanic airliners were landing, taking off, disgorging the commerce of a world, a rush and a swarm of humanity half a mile from the nearly deserted area marked off for private craft. A tractor was hauling a giant American freighter to its hangar. An express to China spouted flame and thunder, stood on its tail, and climbed for the sky. Beyond the fence lay darkness.

  There weren't many people near him. A couple of laughing, tipsy Frenchmen climbing out of a low-powered Fiat. Half a dozen coveralled mechanics going about their business, the two by him watching his arrest with an avid curiosity. The gendarme at the gate, equally alert, prepared to assist the international cops if necessary. A scrawny Martian mooching past on some errand of his own, watching with idle yellow eyes that held the same loathing for all humans. Not a chance, not a prayer.

  "What is the charge?" he asked tonelessly.

  "Suspicion of treason to the Federation. Now come along." The man frisked him expertly, removing the gun but leaving the energy globe. Either he didn't know what it was, or he knew it was inactive and harmless. In no case could Fredison pull a comparable bluff.

  "Look, this is some mistake," he insisted wildly. "I haven't done a thing. I'm here to see Astier—you know, the Astier, the nucleonics man. I demand a chance to call him up."

  "You'll get it at headquarters. Maybe." The detective shoved him ahead. The other closed in, wary-eyed. Jones followed weakly, throwing Fredison a nastily triumphant look.

  They got into the car, Fredison between the two plainclothesmen, Jones in front beside the impassive driver. The car's electric engine hummed and it slid smoothly away into the traffic. They turned toward the city, on the outskirts of which the field lay.

  "Good Lord, how did you even know I was coming here?" babbled Fredison. "I didn't know myself till—"

  "We got our orders. Now shut up."

  Fredison lapsed, cursing himself with a new fury. Of course, of course! It was obvious from the very phrasing of the question. The Unionist bosses didn't trust their underlings any farther than they had to, and each plane must carry a magnetronic signal. It could be traced anywhere, around the world, by a man sitting in a room and watching a meter reading. Once they had known he was headed for Paris it had been simple to issue a few orders, have him picked up when he landed—with the full cooperation of the local authorities.

  But that meant that his guess about the government was right. If Clinton, Minister of Security, had given those orders, then Clinton's power was such that appeal to anyone in the government for help would be worse than useless. There would be political pressure, thinly veiled threats of assassination, bribery, ev
ery rotten influence in the Unionist armory brought to bear to hold Fredison.

  Even the Premier, staunch old Mikkelsen, might have to yield, one way or another. At that, Mikkelsen might decide that the best bet for the peace and security of Earth would be to have Fredison and his dangerous knowledge killed and the energy globe dissolved.

  It was chilling in its immensity and loneliness. In all the world there was no place to hide, they would hunt him down wherever he fled for he carried the rule of Earth in his hands and brain. Not, he thought desolately, that he would get any chance to flee. He was bound for some anonymous house at this moment, and after that would come the beatings and drugs.

  He looked out the windows. They had left the main boulevards with their thronging traffic and were into narrower, emptier streets—not bound for official Security headquarters! The car whispered past unending blocks of crowded, lightless tenements, thick with shadow. Here and there would be another vehicle, a truck or an auto murmuring by. Once in a while a late pedestrian, or a lighted window gleaming farther away than the remotest star.

  It was an evil section, somewhere in the neighborhood of Montparnasse he judged, with the Seine flowing black and quiet through the restless night. It was one of the slum sections, hastily rebuilt after the last atomic blitz and never improved subsequently, a place for murder and torture.

  He thought wearily, without hope: If I can somehow trick them, pretend cooperation, get a chance to activate the sphere . . . I'd take the whole city with me but it might be worth it. It might be worth it.

  The other car slipped from an alley with a sudden roar of speed. The plainclothes driver cursed in German and yanked his wheel hard over. Tires squealed and smoked as the strange car swung the same way. They met in a shattering crash, hood to hood.

  Fredison was hurled against the front seat. Even as he toppled, the flaming resolution was in him. He reached over the gasping body of one of the detectives and opened the door. His free fist caught the man under the jaw with a smack that jolted back into his own muscles. Wildly scrambling he got out, rolled over on the pavement, and began running.