American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58

by Gary K. Wolfe

  Foyle started back. One of the bone-white figures had cuffed his brow. It was swaying and writhing, its face twitching. All the white slugs on their shelves were squirming and writhing. Sigurd Magsman’s constant telepathic broadcast of anguish and terror was reaching them and torturing them.

  “Shut up!” Foyle snapped. “Stop it. Find Lindsey Joyce and we’ll get out of here. Reach out and find him.”

  “Down there.” Sigurd wept. “Straight down there. Seven, eight, nine shelves down. I want to go home. I’m sick. I—”

  Foyle went pell-mell down the catacombs with Sigurd, reading off identification plates until at last he came to: “LINDSEY JOYCE. BOUGAINVILLE. VENUS.”

  This was his enemy, the instigator of his death and the deaths of the six hundred from Callisto. This was the enemy for whom he had planned vengeance and hunted for months. This was the enemy for whom he had prepared the agony of the port stateroom aboard his yawl. This was “Vorga.” It was a woman.

  Foyle was thunderstruck. In these days of the double standard, with women kept in purdah, there were many reported cases of women masquerading as men to enter the worlds closed to them, but he had never yet heard of a woman in the merchant marine . . . masquerading her way to top officer rank.

  “This?” he exclaimed furiously. “This is Lindsey Joyce? Lindsey Joyce off the ‘Vorga’? Ask her.”

  “I don’t know what ‘Vorga’ is.”

  “Ask her!”

  “But I don’t— She was . . . She like gave orders.”

  “Captain?”

  “I don’t like what’s inside her. It’s all sick and dark. It hurts. I want to go home.”

  “Ask her. Was she captain of the ‘Vorga’?”

  “Yes. Please, please, please don’t make me go inside her any more. It’s twisty and hurts. I don’t like her.”

  “Tell her I’m the man she wouldn’t pick up on September 16, 2436. Tell her it’s taken a long time but I’ve finally come to settle the account. Tell her I’m going to pay her back.”

  “I d-don’t understand. Don’t understand.”

  “Tell her I’m going to kill her, slow and hard. Tell her I’ve got a stateroom aboard my yawl, fitted up just like my locker aboard ‘Nomad’ where I rotted for six months . . . where she ordered ‘Vorga’ to leave me to die. Tell her she’s going to rot and die just like me. Tell her!” Foyle shook the wizened child furiously. “Make her feel it. Don’t let her get away by turning Skoptsy. Tell her I kill her filthy. Read me and tell her!”

  “She . . . Sh-She didn’t give that order.”

  “What!”

  “I c-can’t understand her.”

  “She didn’t give the order to scuttle me?”

  “I’m afraid to go in.”

  “Go in, you little son of a bitch, or I’ll take you apart. What does she mean?”

  The child wailed; the woman writhed; Foyle fumed. “Go in!

  Go in! Get it out of her. Jesus Christ, why does the only telepath on Mars have to be a child? Sigurd! Sigurd, listen to me.

  Ask her: Did she give the order to scuttle the reffs?”

  “No. No!”

  “No she didn’t or no you won’t?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Did she give the order to pass ‘Nomad’ by?”

  “She’s twisty and sicky. Oh please! NAN-N-I-E! I want to go home. Want to go.”

  “Did she give the order to pass ‘Nomad’ by?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. Take me home.”

  “Ask her who did.”

  “I want my Nannie.”

  “Ask her who could give her an order. She was captain aboard her own ship. Who could command her? Ask her!”

  “I want my Nannie.”

  “Ask her!”

  “No. No. No. I’m afraid. She’s sick. She’s dark and black. She’s bad. I don’t understand her. I want my Nannie. I want to go home.”

  The child was shrieking and shaking; Foyle was shouting.

  The echoes thundered. As Foyle reached for the child in a rage, his eyes were blinded by brilliant light. The entire catacomb was illuminated by the Burning Man. Foyle’s image stood before him, face hideous, clothes on fire, the blazing eyes fixed on the convulsing Skoptsy that had been Lindsey Joyce. The Burning Man opened his tiger mouth. A grating sound emerged. It was like flaming laughter.

  “She hurts,” he said.

  “Who are you?” Foyle whispered.

  The Burning Man winced. “Too bright,” he said. “Less light.”

  Foyle took a step forward.

  The Burning Man clapped hands over his ears in agony. “Too loud,” he cried. “Don’t move so loud.”

  “Are you my guardian angel?”

  “You’re blinding me. Shhh!” Suddenly he laughed again.

  “Listen to her. She’s screaming. Begging. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to be hurt. Listen to her.”

  Foyle trembled.

  “She’s telling us who gave the order. Can’t you hear? Listen with your eyes.” The Burning Man pointed a talon finger at the writhing Skoptsy. “She says Olivia.”

  “What!”

  “She says Olivia. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign.”

  The Burning Man vanished.

  The catacombs were dark again.

  Colored lights and cacophonies whirled around Foyle. He gasped and staggered. “Blue jaunte,” he muttered. “Olivia. No. Not. Never. Olivia. I—”

  He felt a hand reach for his. “Jiz?” he croaked.

  He became aware that Sigurd Magsman was holding on to his hand and weeping. He picked the boy up.

  “I hurt,” Sigurd whimpered.

  “I hurt too, son.”

  “Want to go home.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  Still holding the boy in his arms, he blundered through the catacombs.

  “The living dead,” he mumbled.

  And then: “I’ve joined them.”

  He found the stone steps that led up from the depths to the monastery cloister above ground. He trudged up the steps, tasting death and desolation. There was bright light above him, and for a moment he imagined that dawn had come already. Then he realized that the cloister was brilliantly lit with artificial light. There was the tramp of shod feet and the low growl of commands. Halfway up the steps, Foyle stopped and mustered himself.

  'Sigurd,' he whispered. 'Who's above us? Find out'.

  'Sogers,' the child answered.

  'Soldiers? What soldiers?'

  'Commando sogers.' Sigurd's crumpled face brightened. "They come for me. To take me home to Nannie. HERE I AM! HERE I AM"

  The telepathic clamor brought a shout from overhead. Foyle accelerated and blurred up the rest of the steps to the cloister. It was a square of Romanesque arches surrounding a green lawn. In the centre of the lawn was a giant Cedar of Lebanon. The flagged walks swarmed with Commando search parties and Foyle came face to face with his match; for an instant after they saw his blur whip up from the catacombs they accelerated too, and all were on even terms.

  But Foyle had the boy. Shooting was impossible. Cradling Sigurd in his arms, he wove through the cloister like a broken-field runner hurtling towards a goal. No one dared block him, for at plus-five acceleration a head-on collision between two bodies would be instantly fatal to both. Objectively, this break-neck skirmish looked like a five-second zigzag of lightning.

  Foyle broke out of the cloister, went through the main hall of the monastery, passed through the labyrinth, and reached the public jaunte stage outside the main gate. There he stopped, decelerated and jaunted to the monastery airfield, half a mile distant. The field, too, was ablaze with lights and swarming with Commandos. Every anti-grav pit was occupied by a Brigade ship. His own yawl was under guard.

  A fifth of a second after Foyle arrived at the field, the pursuers from the monastery jaunted in. He looked around desperately. He was surrounded by half
a regiment of Commandos, all under acceleration, all geared for lethal-action, all his equal or better. The odds were impossible.

  And then the Outer Satellites altered the odds. Exactly one week after the saturation raid on Terra, they struck at Mars.

  Again the missiles came down on the midnight to dawn quadrant. Again the heavens twinkled with interceptions and detonations, and the horizon exploded great puffs of light while the ground shook. But this time there was a ghastly variation, for a brilliant nova burst overhead, flooding the nightside of the planet with garish light. A swarm of fissionheads had struck Mars' tiny satellite, Phobos, instantly vaporizing it into a sunlet.

  The Recognition-Lag of the Commandos to this appalling attack gave Foyle his opportunity. He accelerated again and burst through them to his yawl. He stopped before the main hatch and saw the stunned guard-party hesitate between a continuance of the old action and a response to the new. Foyle hurled the frozen body of Sigurd Magsman up into the air like a Scotsman tossing the caber. As the guard party rushed to catch the boy, Foyle dived through them into his yawl, slammed the hatch and dogged it.

  'Still under acceleration, never pausing to see if anyone was inside the yawl, he shot forward to controls, tripped the release lever, and as the yawl started to float up the anti-grav beam threw on full 10 G propulsion. He was not strapped into the pilot chair. The effect of the 10 G drive on his accelerated and unprotected body was monstrous.

  A creeping force took hold of him and spilled him out of the chair. He inched back towards the rear wall of the control chamber like a sleep-walker. The wall appeared, to his accelerated senses, to approach him. He thrust out both arms, palms flat against the wall to brace himself. The sluggish power thrusting him back split his arms apart and forced him against the wall, gently at first, then harder and harder until face, jaw, chest and body were crushed against the metal.

  The mounting pressure became agonizing. He tried to trip the switchboard in his mouth with his tongue, but the propulsion crushing him against the wall made it impossible for him to move his distorted mouth. A burst of explosions, so far down the sound spectrum that they sounded like sodden rockslides, told him that the Commando Brigade was bombarding him with shots from below. As the yawl tore up into the blueblack of outer space, he began to scream in a bat-screech before he mercifully lost consciousness.

  Fourteen

  Foyle awoke in darkness. He was decelerated, but the exhaustion of his body told him he had been under acceleration while he had been unconscious. Either his power pack had run out or . . . He inched a hand to the small of his back. The pack was gone. It had been removed.

  He explored with trembling fingers. He was in a bed. He listened to the murmur of ventilators and air-conditioners and the click and buzz of servo-mechanisms. He was aboard a ship. He was strapped to the bed. The ship was in free fall.

  Foyle unfastened himself, pressed his elbows against the mattress and floated up. He drifted through the darkness searching for a light switch or a call button. His hands brushed against a water carafe with raised letters on the glass. He read them with his fingertips. SS, he felt. V, O, R, G, A. VORGA. He cried out.

  The door of the stateroom opened. A figure drifted through the door, silhouetted against the light of a luxurious private lounge behind it.

  “This time we picked you up,” a voice said.

  “Olivia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s true?”

  “Yes, Gully.”

  Foyle began to cry.

  “You’re still weak,” Olivia Presteign said gently. “Come and lie down.”

  She urged him into the lounge and strapped him into a chaise longue. It was still warm from her body. “You’ve been like this for six days. We never thought you’d live. Everything was drained out of you before the surgeon found that battery on your back.”

  “Where is it?” he croaked.

  “You can have it whenever you want it. Don’t fret, my dear.” He looked at her for a long moment, his Snow Maiden, his beloved Ice Princess . . . the white satin skin, the blind coral eyes and exquisite coral mouth. She touched his moist eyelids with a scented handkerchief.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Shhh. I know, Gully.”

  “You’ve known all about me. For how long?”

  “I knew Gully Foyle the spaceman off the ‘Nomad,’ was my enemy from the beginning. I never knew you were Fourmyle until we met. Ah, if only I’d known before. How much would have been saved.”

  “You knew and you’ve been laughing at me.”

  “No.”

  “Standing by and shaking with laughter.”

  “Standing by and loving you. No, don’t interrupt. I’m trying to be rational and it’s not easy.” A flush cascaded across the marble face. “I’m not playing with you now. I . . . I betrayed you to my father. I did. Self-defense, I thought. Now that I’ve met him at last I can see he’s too dangerous. An hour later I knew it was a mistake because I realized I was in love with you. I’m paying for it now. You need never have known.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Then why am I here?” She trembled slightly. “Why did I follow you? That bombing was ghastly. You’d have been dead in another minute when we picked you up. Your yawl was a wreck. . . .”

  “Where are we now?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I’m stalling for time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Not for time . . . I’m stalling for courage.”

  “We’re orbiting earth.”

  “How did you follow me?”

  “I knew you’d be after Lindsey Joyce. I took over one of my father’s ships. It happened to be ‘Vorga’ again.”

  “Does he know?”

  “He never knows. I live my own private life.”

  He could not take his eyes off her, and yet it hurt him to look at her. He was yearning and hating . . . yearning for the reality to be undone, hating the truth for what it was. He discovered that he was stroking her handkerchief with tremulous fingers.

  “I love you, Olivia.”

  “I love you, Gully, my enemy.”

  “For God’s sake!” he burst out. “Why did you do it? You were aboard ‘Vorga’ running the reff racket. You gave the order to scuttle them. You gave the order to pass me by. Why! Why!”

  “What?” she lashed back. “Are you demanding apologies?”

  “I’m demanding an explanation.”

  “You’ll get none from me!”

  “Blood and money, your father said. He was right. Oh . . . Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

  “Blood and money, yes; and unashamed.”

  “I’m drowning, Olivia. Throw me a lifeline.”

  “Then drown. Nobody ever saved me. No— No . . . This is wrong, all wrong. Wait, my dear. Wait.” She composed herself and began speaking very tenderly. “I could lie, Gully dear, and make you believe it, but I’m going to be honest. There’s a simple explanation. I live my own private life. We all do. You do.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “No different from yours . . . from the rest of the world. I cheat, I lie, I destroy . . . like all of us. I’m criminal . . . like all of us.”

  “Why? For money? You don’t need money.”

  “No.”

  “For control . . . power?”

  “Not for power.”

  “Then why?”

  She took a deep breath, as though this truth was the first truth and was crucifying her. “For hatred . . . To pay you back, all of you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being blind,” she said in a smoldering voice. “For being cheated. For being helpless . . . They should have killed me when I was born. Do you know what it’s like to be blind . . . to receive life secondhand? To be dependent, begging, crippled? ‘Bring them down to your level,’ I told my secret life. ‘If you’re blind make them blinder. If you’re helpless, cripple them. Pay them back . . . al
l of them.’ ”

  “Olivia, you’re insane.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m in love with a monster.”

  “We’re a pair of monsters.”

  “No!”

  “No? Not you?” she flared. “What have you been doing but paying the world back, like me? What’s your revenge but settling your own private account with bad luck? Who wouldn’t call you a crazy monster? I tell you, we’re a pair, Gully. We couldn’t help falling in love.”

  He was stunned by the truth of what she said. He tried on the shroud of her revelation and it fit, clung tighter than the tiger mask tattooed on his face.

  “It’s true,” he said slowly. “I’m no better than you. Worse. But before God I never murdered six hundred.”

  “You’re murdering six million.”

  “What?”

  “Perhaps more. You’ve got something they need to end the war, and you’re holding out.”

  “You mean PyrE?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it, this bringer of peace, this twenty pounds of miracle that they’re fighting for?”

  “I don’t know, but I know they need it, and I don’t care. Yes, I’m being honest now. I don’t care. Let millions be murdered. It makes no difference to us. Not to us, Gully, because we stand apart. We stand apart and shape our own world. We’re the strong.”

  “We’re the damned.”

  “We’re the blessed. We’ve found each other.” Suddenly she laughed and held out her arms. “I’m arguing when there’s no need for words. Come to me, my love. . . . Wherever you are, come to me. . . .”

  He touched her and then put his arms around her. He found her mouth and devoured her. But he was forced to release her.

  “What is it, Gully darling?”

  “I’m not a child any more,” he said wearily. “I’ve learned to understand that nothing is simple. There’s never a simple answer. You can love someone and loathe them.”

  “Can you, Gully?”

  “And you’re making me loathe myself.”

  “No, my dear.”

  “I’ve been a tiger all my life. I trained myself . . . educated myself . . . pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth . . . quick and deadly. . . .”