Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol X

by Various

  As he shuffled forward, he felt a snick! snick! of pain in his ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.

  It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he was no longer connected to them.

  It was too late. He was already falling.

  He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.

  His hand lay, where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His body fell to the floor with a resounding thud! His head bounced once and then rolled under the bed.

  When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.

  A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went zzzt! and then there was silence.

  V

  When Representative Edway Tarnhorst cut off the call that had come from Harry Morgan, he turned around and faced the other man in the room. "Satisfactory?" he said.

  "Yes. Yes, of course," said the other. He was a tall, hearty-looking man with a reddish face and a friendly smile. "You said just the right thing, Edway. Just the right thing. You're pretty smart, you know that? You got what it takes." He chuckled. "They'll never figure anything out now." He waved a hand toward the chair. "Sit down, Edway. Want a drink?"

  Tarnhorst sat down and folded his hands. He looked down at them as if he were really interested in the flat, unfaceted diamond, engraved with the Tarnhorst arms, that gleamed on the ring on his finger.

  "A little glass of whiskey wouldn't hurt much, Sam," he said, looking up from his hands. He smiled. "As you say, there isn't much to worry about now. If Morgan goes to the police, they'll give him the same information."

  Sam Fergus handed Tarnhorst a drink. "Damn right. Who's to know?" He chuckled again and sat down. "That was pretty good. Yes sir, pretty good. Just because he thought that when you voted for the Belt Cities you were on their side, he believed what you said. Hell, I've voted on their side when it was the right thing to do. Haven't I now, Ed? Haven't I?"

  "Sure you have," said Tarnhorst with an easy smile. "So have a lot of us."

  "Sure we have," Fergus repeated. His grin was huge. Then it changed to a frown. "I don't figure them sometimes. Those Belt people are crazy. Why wouldn't they give us the process for making that cable of theirs? Why?" He looked up at Tarnhorst with a genuinely puzzled look on his face. "I mean, you'd think they thought that the laws of nature were private property or something. They don't have the right outlook. A man finds out something like that, he ought to give it to the human race, hadn't he, Edway? How come those Belt people want to keep something like that secret?"

  Edway Tarnhorst massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, his eyes closed. "I don't know, Sam. I really don't know. Selfish, is all I can say."

  Selfish? he thought. Is it really selfish? Where is the dividing line? How much is a man entitled to keep secret, for his own benefit, and how much should he tell for the public?

  He glanced again at the coat of arms carved into the surface of the diamond. A thousand years ago, his ancestors had carved themselves a tiny empire out of middle Europe--a few hundred acres, no more. Enough to keep one family in luxury while the serfs had a bare existence. They had conquered by the sword and ruled by the sword. They had taken all and given nothing.

  But had they? The Barons of Tarnhorst had not really lived much better than their serfs had lived. More clothes and more food, perhaps, and a few baubles--diamonds and fine silks and warm furs. But no Baron Tarnhorst had ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice; he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit to govern themselves a thousand years ago.

  Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of themselves instead?

  Edway Tarnhorst didn't honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability, out in the Belt. He didn't dare tell anyone--he hardly dared admit it to himself--but he thought those people were better somehow than the common clods of Earth. Those people didn't think that just because a man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas, making outré and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They didn't think that just because a man could write nonsense and use erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs, too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as every other, that a man had a right to be respected, that he deserved it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to what he earned.

  But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on occasion--on very special occasion--could his native intelligence override the "common sense" that he had been taught. Only when an emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.

  Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.

  "Now we've got to be careful, Sam," he said. "Very careful. We don't want a war with the Belt Cities."

  Sam Fergus snorted. "They wouldn't dare. We got 'em outnumbered a thousand to one."

  "Not if they drop a rock on us," Tarnhorst said quietly.

  "They wouldn't dare," Fergus repeated.

  But both of them could see what would happen to any city on Earth if one of the Belt ships decided to shift the orbit of a good-sized asteroid so that it would strike Earth. A few hundred thousand tons of rock coming in at ten miles per second would be far more devastating than an expensive H-bomb.

  "They wouldn't dare," Fergus said again.

  "Nevertheless," Tarnhorst said, "in dealings of this kind we are walking very close to the thin edge. We have to watch ourselves."

  VI

  Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was herded into a prison cell, given a shove across the smallish room, and allowed to hear the door slam behind him. By the time he regained his balance and turned to face the barred door again, it was locked. The bully-boys who had shoved him in turned away and walked down the corridor. Harry sat down on the floor and relaxed, leaning against the stone wall. There was no furniture of any kind in the cell, not even sanitary plumbing.

  "What do I do for a drink of water?" he asked aloud of no one in particular.

  "You wait till they bring you your drink," said a whispery voice a few feet from his head. Morgan realized that someone in the cell next to his was talking. "You get a quart a day--a halfa pint four times a day. Save your voice. Your throat gets awful dry if you talk much."

  "Yeah, it would," Morgan agreed in the same whisper. "What about sanitation?"

  "That's your worry," said the voice. "Fella comes by every Wednesday and Saturday with a honey bucket. You clean out your own cell."

  "I thought this place smelled of something other than attar of roses," Morgan observed. "My nose tells me this is Thursday."

  There was a hoarse, humorless chuckle from the man in the next cell. "'At's right. The smell of the disinfectant is strongest now. Saturday mornin' it'll be different. You catch on fast, buddy."

  "Oh, I'm a whiz," Morgan agreed. "But I thought the Welfare World took care of its poor, misled criminals better than this."

  Again the chuckle. "You shoulda robbed a bank or killed somebody. Then theyda given you a nice rehabilitation sentence. Regular prison. Room of your own. Something real nice. Like a hotel. But this's different."
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  "Yeah," Morgan agreed. This was a political prison. This was the place where they put you when they didn't care what happened to you after the door was locked because there would be no going out.

  Morgan knew where he was. It was a big, fortresslike building on top of one of the highest hills at the northern end of Manhattan Island--an old building that had once been a museum and was built like a medieval castle.

  "What happens if you die in here?" he asked conversationally.

  "Every Wednesday and Saturday," the voice repeated.

  "Um," said Harry Morgan.

  "'Cept once in a while," the voice whispered. "Like a couple days ago. When was it? Yeah. Monday that'd be. Guy they had in here for a week or so. Don't remember how long. Lose tracka time here. Yeah. Sure lose tracka time here."

  There was a long pause, and Morgan, controlling the tenseness in his voice, said: "What about the guy Monday?"

  "Oh. Him. Yeah, well, they took him out Monday."

  Morgan waited again, got nothing further, and asked: "Dead?"

  "'Course he was dead. They was tryin' to get somethin' out of him. Somethin' about a cable. He jumped one of the guards, and they blackjacked him. Hit 'im too hard, I guess. Guard sure got hell for that, too. Me, I'm lucky. They don't ask me no questions."

  "What are you in for?" Morgan asked.

  "Don't know. They never told me. I don't ask for fear they'll remember. They might start askin' questions."

  Morgan considered. This could be a plant, but he didn't think so. The voice was too authentic, and there would be no purpose in his information. That meant that Jack Latrobe really was dead. They had killed him. An ice cold hardness surged along his nerves.

  * * * * *

  The door at the far end of the corridor clanged, and a brace of heavy footsteps clomped along the floor. Two men came abreast of the steel-barred door and stopped.

  One of them, a well-dressed, husky-looking man in his middle forties, said: "O.K., Morgan. How did you do it?"

  "I put on blue lipstick and kissed my elbows--both of 'em. Going widdershins, of course."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The guy in your hotel suite. You killed him. You cut off both feet, one hand, and his head. How'd you do it?"

  Morgan looked at the man. "Police?"

  "Nunna your business. Answer the question."

  "I use a cobweb I happened to have with me. Who was he?"

  The cop's face was whitish. "You chop a guy up like that and then don't know who he is?"

  "I can guess. I can guess that he was an agent for PMC 873 who was trespassing illegally. But I didn't kill him. I was in ... er ... custody when it happened."

  "Not gonna talk, huh?" the cop said in a hard voice. "O.K., you've had your chance. We'll be back."

  "I don't think I'll wait," said Morgan.

  "You'll wait. We got you on a murder charge now. You'll wait. Wise guy." He turned and walked away. The other man followed like a trained hound.

  * * * * *

  After the door clanged, the man in the next cell whispered: "Well, you're for it. They're gonna ask you questions."

  Morgan said one obscene word and stood up. It was time to leave.

  He had been searched thoroughly. They had left him only his clothes, nothing else. They had checked to make sure that there were no microminiaturized circuits on him. He was clean.

  So they thought.

  Carefully, he caught a thread in the lapel of his jacked and pulled it free. Except for a certain springiness, it looked like an ordinary silon thread. He looped it around one of the bars of his cell, high up. The ends he fastened to a couple of little decorative hooks in his belt--hooks covered with a shell of synthetic ruby.

  Then he leaned back, putting his weight on the thread.

  Slowly, like a knife moving through cold peanut butter, the thread sank into the steel bar, cutting through its one-inch thickness with increasing difficulty until it was half-way through. Then it seemed to slip the rest of the way through.

  He repeated the procedure thrice more, making two cuts in each of two bars. Then he carefully removed the sections he had cut out. He put one of them on the floor of his cell and carried the other in his hand--three feet of one-inch steel makes a nice weapon if it becomes necessary.

  Then he stepped through the hole he had made.

  The man in the next cell widened his eyes as Harry Morgan walked by. But Morgan could tell that he saw nothing. He had only heard. His eyes had been removed long before. It was the condition of the man that convinced Morgan with utter finality that he had told the truth.

  VII

  Mr. Edway Tarnhorst felt fear, but no real surprise when the shadow in the window of his suite in the Grand Central Hotel materialized into a human being. But he couldn't help asking one question.

  "How did you get there?" His voice was husky. "We're eighty floors above the street."

  "Try climbing asteroids for a while," said Commodore Sir Harry Morgan. "You'll get used to it. That's why I knew Jack hadn't died 'accidentally'--he was murdered."

  "You ... you're not carrying a gun," Tarnhorst said.

  "Do I need one?"

  Tarnhorst swallowed. "Yes. Fergus will be back in a moment."

  "Who's Fergus?"

  "He's the man who controls PMC 873."

  Harry Morgan shoved his hand into his jacket pocket "Then I have a gun. You saw it, didn't you?"

  "Yes. Yes ... I saw it when you came in."

  "Good. Call him."

  When Sam Fergus came in, he looked as though he had had about three or four too many slugs of whiskey. There was an odd fear an his face.

  "Whats matter, Edway? I--" The fear increased when he saw Morgan. "Whadda you here for?"

  "I'm here to make a speech Fergus. Sit down." When Fergus still stood, Morgan repeated what he had said with only a trace more emphasis. "Sit down."

  Fergus sat. So did Tarnhorst.

  "Both of you pay special attention," Morgan said, a piratical gleam in his eyes. "You killed a friend of mine. My best friend. But I'm not going to kill either of you. Yet. Just listen and listen carefully."

  Even Tarnhorst looked frightened. "Don't move, Sam. He's got a gun. I saw it when he came in."

  "What ... what do you want?" Fergus asked.

  "I want to give you the information you want. The information that you killed Jack for." There was cold hatred in his voice. "I am going to tell you something that you have thought you wanted, but which you really will wish you had never heard. I'm going to tell you about that cable."

  Neither Fergus nor Tarnhorst said a word.

  "You want a cable. You've heard that we use a cable that has a tensile strength of better than a hundred million pounds per square inch, and you want to know how it's made. You tried to get the secret out of Jack because he was sent here as a commercial dealer. And he wouldn't talk, so one of your goons blackjacked him too hard and then you had to drop him off a bridge to make it look like an accident.

  "Then you got your hands on me. You were going to wring it out of me. Well, there is no necessity of that." His grin became wolfish. "I'll give you everything." He paused. "If you want it."

  Fergus found his voice. "I want it. I'll pay a million--"

  "You'll pay nothing," Morgan said flatly. "You'll listen."

  Fergus nodded wordlessly.

  "The composition is simple. Basically, it is a two-phase material-like fiberglass. It consists of a strong, hard material imbedded in a matrix of softer material. The difference is that, in this case, the stronger fibers are borazon--boron nitride formed under tremendous pressure--while the softer matrix is composed of tungsten carbide. If the fibers are only a thousandth or two thousandths of an inch in diameter--the thickness of a human hair or less--then the cable from which they are made has tremendous strength and flexibility.

  "Do you want the details of the process now?" His teeth were showing in his wolfis
h grin.

  Fergus swallowed. "Yes, of course. But ... but why do you--"

  "Why do I give it to you? Because it will kill you. You have seen what the stuff will do. A strand a thousandth of an inch thick, encased in silon for lubrication purposes, got me out of that filthy hole you call a prison. You've heard about that?"

  Fergus blinked. "You cut yourself out of there with the cable you're talking about?"

  "Not with the cable. With a thin fiber. With one of the hairlike fibers that makes up the cable. Did you ever cut cheese with a wire? In effect, that wire is a knife--a knife that consists only of an edge.

  "Or, another experiment you may have heard of. Take a block of ice. Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that the ice block remains whole--because the ice melts under the pressure of the wire and then flows around it and freezes again on the other side. But if you lubricate the wire with ordinary glycerine, it prevents the re-freezing and the ice block will be cut in two."

  Tarnhorst nodded. "I remember. In school. They--" He let his voice trail off.

  * * * * *

  "Yeah. Exactly. It's a common experiment in basic science. Borazon fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area. Under pressures like that, steel cuts easily. With silon covering to lubricate the cut, there's nothing to it. As you have heard from the guards in your little hell-hole.

  "Hell-hole?" Tarnhorst's eyes narrowed and he flicked a quick glance at Fergus. Morgan realized that Tarnhorst had known nothing of the extent of Fergus' machinations.

  "That lovely little political prison up in Fort Tryon Park that the World Welfare State, with its usual solicitousness for the common man, keeps for its favorite guests," Morgan said. His wolfish smile returned. "I'd've cut the whole thing down if I'd had had the time. Not the stone--just the steel. In order to apply that kind of pressure you have to have the filament fastened to something considerably harder than the stuff you're trying to cut, you see. Don't try it with your fingers or you'll lose fingers."