The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  Marnota sat at the counsel table, his bearing that of a monarch deigning to appear before his subjects. There was an aura of power, of dominance, about him, and in the sharp blackness of his eyes there was a glow of triumph. Overflowing the seat beside him, the flabby, bulging contours of him gross and sensual, was Rants, head of the Adams Company’s legal forces.

  At the other end of the long table Salom sat, his face an imperturbable mask. Save for the clerk of the court at his desk, and a single attendant policeman contrasting ludicrously with Marnota’s armed display, he was alone. He seemed the leader of a forlorn hope, checking for the last of innumerable times the disposition of the enemy and his sparse preparations for battle.

  He glanced at the huge, bronze entrance portal, at the small door behind the bench that led to Layton’s chambers. And, finally at two screened openings in the ceiling, openings that Dunning might have identified, had he been present, as the voice outlets for the communication system of this twenty-fourth century world.

  “The matter of the settlement of the estate of Thantala of the House of Adams.” Judge Layton’s voice was thin and quavering. “Any motions?” Ranta rose with a mock bow.

  “Your Honor.” His mellow accents filled the great chamber. “I appear for Marnota of the House of Adams, brother of the decedent and his sole surviving kin. We move that the title to all property of the estate be vested in us.”

  Salom was on his feet.

  “Your Honor, I appear to oppose this motion.”

  “Representing whom?”

  “Representing Thalma of the House of Adams, daughter of the decedent.”

  A little rustle passed through the great room.

  “I object,” Ranta thundered. “Thalma of the House of Adams is dead. No attorney can represent a dead person?”

  Salom’s voice remained calm and low. “I submit, your Honor, that the death of my client has not been proved before the court. The presumption is, therefore, that she continues to live. I move that the guardianship of Marnota of the House of Adams over the body and goods of my client, as set up by the decedent’s will, be declared at an end, and that title to the property of the estate be vested in my client.”

  Ranta riposted, quickly.

  “We have submitted affidavits from several persons who state definitely that a stratocar, in which Thalma of the House of Adams was known to be, was seen by them to explode in the air above the Pacific Ocean. We have the affiants in court and are ready to produce them.”

  Judge Layton turned again to Salom.

  “That seems to settle the matter, counselor. Do you demand that these witnesses be placed on the stand?”

  “That will not be necessary, your Honor. I can prove the existence of my client to the court’s satisfaction.”

  “I defy you to,” Ranta roared. “You cannot prove what is not true!”

  Salom’s voice never rose.

  “I can prove Thalma of the House of Adams to be alive.”

  The lawyer turned, and pointed to the massive entrance doors. As if his gesture were a signal, they started to swing slowly open. Eternity seemed to pass as the space between the huge bronze leaves widened. Salom’s quiet words thudded into a deathly silence.

  “Your Honor, Thalma of the House of Adams.”

  A slim figure stood in the aperture. The paleness of Thalma’s set face matched her white garment. Only her eyes were alive, darkly grey, as they sought and held Marnota’s gaze.

  The crack of the judge’s gavel cut short a rising murmur.

  “The motion of Marnota of the House of Adams is denied. I grant—”

  “Stop!” Marnota’s cry cut short the words. He was on his feet. As if at an unvoiced command his helots had also risen. “I’ve had enough of this farce. What you grant or deny is no concern of mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and your law have no power over me. My men have surrounded the White House, have invested every army barracks, every police headquarters, in the nation.” He raised his right arm high above his head: “When my arm drops, the signal will be flashed, and the government whose law you administer will be at an end. From now on I am the law!”

  “Marnota!” Thalma’s voice rang sharply from the door. “Marnota! You will never give that signal!”

  The bronze doors clanged, shutting her out. Swift action exploded in the courtroom. Salom, with agility beyond his years, lifted himself over the barrier, and leaped to the little door behind the judge’s seat through which Layton, the clerk and the lone attendant had already darted. A roaring sound filled the chamber.

  At first like the growling of some vast impending cataclysm, it shot higher and higher in pitch. In seconds it was a shrill scream, slashing at the nerves of the imprisoned Marnota and his helots, invading their quivering brains with needling pain. Then there was no longer any appreciable sound. But Marnota, feeling thin agony whipping through his body, knew that the vibrations still kept on, high above the upper limit of human hearing.

  At the great bronze door, at the smaller exit through which Salom had escaped, frantic knots of green-clad men worked with their ray-tubes to force an escape. Some, deprived of reason by the searching torture of the unheard sound, clawed maniacally at the unyielding metal. A pandemonium of curiously muffled shouts burst out.

  As the myriad cells of tortured bodies shattered into dissolution under the inexorable, destroying vibrations that unceasingly poured out of the communication discs in the ceiling, cylinders dropped from palsied hands, legs crumpled. The courtroom was a tremendous shambles of writhing, dying humanity.

  The invisible, inaudible, vibration of vengeance kept on. Marnota, still holding himself erect by the force of the tremendous, twisted will that had been his undoing; his face empurpled by the bursting capillaries of his skin, his eyes dark pools of torment; glared through a blurring haze the heaving, dying mass that had been the flower of his army. He strove to speak, but the cords of his throat refused his bidding. Slowly, with a defiance still radiant from his pain-wracked form, he slid to the floor. The arm that was to have given the signal for flashup flung out, quivering—There was not the least stirring of any form in all that crowded room.

  Thalma’s eyes held no jubilance, nor Dunning’s as they stood in the doorway of that courtroom that was a tomb. After a while they turned silently away.

  “Just what happened, Thalma? I know that you arranged with your secret adherents to have some kind of machinery connected with the communication system that led into the courtroom and turned on at your cue. But I can’t understand how it could have done—that.”

  The girl’s voice was very very weary.

  “Some time in the twentieth century it was discovered that bacteria in milk could be killed by using sound waves above the upper limit of audibility. This process was extended to other foods, but when it was attempted to cure disease by the method, it was found that while the pathogenic bacteria were killed by the vibrations, the patient, also, was killed, or injured.

  “What we did was simply to connect the sound-sterilization machinery of the Central Milk Plant with the communication system of the courtroom, and turn the tremendously amplified vibrations into the courtroom.”

  Jim Dunning was silent again for long minute.

  “You’re safe now, Thalma, and all the great power of the Adams Company is yours,” he said finally. “You can carry out all your father’s plans, unhindered, and make this country a paradise.”

  The girl’s voice was very soft.

  “If it hadn’t been for you that could not have come to pass. I should still be—lost in time.” Silence, again; and at last she spoke. “It’s a great responsibility, Jim. Will you help me?”

  In the grey eyes that looked into his Dunning read something that thrilled him. He knew that the world was theirs—for always.

  FLIGHT OF THE SILVER EAGLE

  Chapter I

  The Empty Stratocar

  Against a sky glorious with flung stre
amers of scarlet and purple, New York’s leaping towers and arching aerial streetways traced a prismatic arabesque epitomizing the wonder and the beauty of the Twenty-first Century. But Don Atkins, his lithe, compact body poised on big-thewed legs widespread and firmly planted, was as oblivious to that far-off glory as to the bustle of the Federal Skyport all about him.

  He stood beneath the high loom of the landing trap, squinting into the west out of slitted eyes from whose corners weather wrinkles rayed threadlike, and he was conscious of only two things.

  Under the yellow silk of his airman’s tunic a small, hard lump was cold against his breast. It was the talisman of the Silver Eagle, the throbbing pulse in his temples reminded him, symbol of the gallant fellowship into whose fold he had been inducted at last. The secret that for months had lain prickling between him and his one close friend, Bart Thomas, was a secret no longer. Bart himself, darting from the distant Pacific, would be here in minutes now to receive from him the twisting handgrip of the order. In minutes—in seconds—now—

  A siren howled across the field. A black speck notched the low sun’s upper rim. “On time to the dot!” Atkins exclaimed. A white blur in the air was suddenly a silver, tear-drop shape caught in the high-reaching fingers of the landing trap’s gaunt girders, a thousand feet above him. The gigantic beam surged down, pivoting on its huge hinge, perilously fast at first, then more and more slowly as its hydraulic shock-absorbers sapped the stratocar’s incredible momentum.

  Atkins dashed for the spot where the duraluminum-skinned, man-carrying projectile would ground to end Thomas’ half-hour flight from ’Frisco Skyport.

  A knot of brown-garbed mechanics clotted around the tiny car. Their wrenches clanged against the bolt-heads that had clamped tight the hatch cover against the airlessness of upper space. Twirling metal rasped against metal. The shining oval door swung back. With eager impatience Atkins shoved past the mechanics, thrust head and shoulders into the aperture.

  “Happy landing, old sock,” he shouted. “Welcome to—”

  The greeting froze on his lips. The tiny cubicle was unoccupied; was starkly, staringly vacant. In the heatless light of the ceiling tube the teleview screen mirrored the Skyport tarmac, glimmered from the glossy leather of the cushion on which Thomas should have lain outstretched. But Thomas wasn’t there—

  Atkins’ skin was a tight, prickling sheath for his body. The thing was grotesquely, weirdly impossible! Impossible for his chum to have got out of the stratocar unless someone had unbolted the hatch from outside. Impossible for it to have landed somewhere so that that might have been done. To have arrived on the dot of its schedule the stratocar must never have relented from the uttermost limit of its speed. Time lost in any halt could not have been made up.

  Impossible for there to have been any halt; the device was propelled by the blast of an electrostatic catapult at its starting point and had no power of its own. Once stopped it could not have taken up its flight again. And it had come straight as an arrow to the landing-trap’s hooks at which ’Frisco had aimed it.

  A fleck of white on the cushion caught Atkins’ eye. He reached in, snatched it up. It was a bit of paper, and on it—

  “Mr. Atkins,” a peremptory voice battered at his giddy brain, “Conceal that and bring it to me at once.”

  The airman thrust the scrap into his pocket, whirled. The groundmen were crowding in around him, their swarthy countenances curious, but it was evident that none of them had spoken. Then he recalled the tiny receiver clamped against the bone behind his ear, and he knew whence the summons had come.

  “This device hasn’t been perfected yet,” the grey man in the hidden room had said, “but within the limits of the field I can speak to you through it secretly and at will.” There had been a view-screen before him, too, whose cosmic-ray eye could scan anything within fifty miles.

  “Close it up,” Don Atkins snapped, “and say nothing to anybody.” Then he was running across the long, level tarmac, was dashing up the broad steps of Flight Headquarters Building, was hurrying through the interminable maze of corridors within.

  The chaos within his skull took on a pattern as the amazing revelations of his initiation came back to him. The nation dreamed itself at peace with all the world. The Asafrican Alliance, Americans fatuously thought, having driven out the white races from the continents they had so long dominated, wanted nothing but to be left alone.

  * * * *

  They reckoned without the driving ambition of Hung-Chen, the new Genghis Khan, who had forged an irresistible war machine behind the inscrutable mask of the East and awaited the auspicious moment to launch it against the Occident and the Americas. If he could not be stopped, war, rapine, slaughter, must inevitably destroy the Golden Age to which civilization had at last attained.

  But here was the wall-panel, in a guarded corridor, whose curious quality he had been taught less than an hour before. Atkins halted, glanced cautiously left and right. He was unobserved. He bent to get his lips close against a certain whorl in the blue tracings with which the marble was figured, whispered a password. A whirring sound, seeming to come from the very stone itself, told him that the impact of his voice had set in motion the sound-lock within. The apparently solid marble slid open and the airman went through.

  The wall thudded shut behind him. In the windowless room he entered a short, grave-faced man, mouse-like in grey silk, looked up from his desk.

  “Let me see what you found,” he said without preamble.

  Atkins fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers, pushed the paper across the desk to the chief of the Silver Eagle. The red lines on it leered at him again, the ominous design that had pronged him with knowledge of the catastrophe that had overtaken Thomas. A deftly drawn dragon was coiled around the orb of Earth, one taloned claw sprawling triumphantly to obliterate the double triangles of the Americas.

  The chief’s grey face was almost expressionless as he touched the thing with a fingertip, but under his pale, inscrutable eyes little muscles twitched uncontrollably.

  “The token of Hung-Chen,” he said. “Like him to let us know that he’s defeated our last device against his spies.”

  “What does it mean?” Atkins groaned, mental agony making him forget rank for the moment. “What does it mean?”

  The other’s tones were very calm—only the vaguest flatting betrayed the despair that must be closing in on him like a pall.

  “It means that the key to the gaps in the West Coast electro-barrage is in his hands, the only thing he needed to enable him to strike. Thomas was bringing the plan to Army Headquarters, and he’s got Thomas.”

  “But—but you said that the Silver Eagle memorizes all its messages. You said that Hung-Chen’s spies had tapped every means of secret communication we’ve had and that’s why the Sliver Eagle was organized—”

  “Correct. We thought that a band of glorified couriers, shot across the continent at a speed greater than any yet known, would circumvent him. But we’ve failed. This lets us know that we have failed. They will get it out of Thomas—”

  “No!” Atkins’ fist pounded down on the desk. “Bart will never tell. He’ll die before he tells.”

  “He won’t die until they know. They’ll strip his brain—” The chief broke off. “But that may take time. If we can find him before—” He ripped a long tape from a machine on his desk. A straight purple line traced on it wavered at a single point. “Look here. This deflection in the flight-graph shows that an extra amount of power was being absorbed between three minutes, twelve seconds out of ’Frisco and seven minutes, forty-six seconds after the start. I noticed it and thought that the projectile had swerved slightly from its course, was taking additional energy to straighten it out. But it occurs to me—”

  “What, sir?” Atkins demanded, excitedly. “What?”

  “That something may have come into the field, there between three hundred and twenty and seven hundred and seventy miles from the Pacific, on the great circle course.
We might look that region over.”

  “I’m going, sir!”

  Grey eyes stabbed keenly at the trembling airman.

  “You’re new, Atkins. I don’t know—”

  “Bart Thomas is my friend, Chief. More than a brother—”

  “Very well,” the grey man made his decision. “You may go. And God help you if you are caught. Listen—”

  Chapter II

  The Kappa Ray

  A green light from Traffic Control flashed the “all clear” signal and Atkins thrust his throttle home. His gyrocopter leaped straight up from the fields, shot up through the night past the successive glows of the level markers. The red of the lumbering freighter-lane, the yellow of the local-flight zone, the cerulean blue of the five-thousand-foot level in which the great transoceanic liners plied cometlike; they surged past in his view-screen, dropped below.

  Sunburst came to him from over the bulge of the rounding terrain as his ’copter staggered logily. Its roaring vanes could no longer find any support in the near vacuum of the stratosphere. Atkins twisted the controls.

  The lifting-vanes collapsed into their slotted grooves. The flyer was a sleek silver fish from whose tail the crimson flame of rocket gases fanned out. It darted westward, silent and swift as a bat out of hell.

  Atkins throttled down, reluctant but obedient to the chief’s instructions. He must not overtake the sun; darkness would be his best aid. Two red spots burned bright on his cheeks and secret fires flickered in his glowing eyes.

  “I’m coming, old man,” he muttered between his teeth. “I’m coming, Bart. Stick to it. Don’t give in. Don’t tell them—”

  Endlessly blurred Earth streaked underneath him, endlessly the red position dot drifted with nerve-shredding slowness across the map framed at the flyer’s elbow. He shut off the feed, unfolded once more the gyrovanes. He drifted down through the darkness, silent as a cloud in a foggy night and as invisible. A rugged mountainside, forest-cloaked, swam up into dim view.

  Atkins checked the descent, hovered. A twist of his wrist, and the beam of his kappa-ray projector was searching the serried carpet of the trees. To the unaided eye that beam was utterly imperceptible, but on the specially treated screen at which the airman peered avidly a flickering disc cut through imaged foliage, through dark underbrush. To the kappa-ray all organic matter is transparent; only earth, stone, or metal can reflect it and become visible.