Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The next wave poured through the gap in the sea wall, like the paw of a giant beast forced into a hole to grope for prey. The next tore free another huge stone from the edge of the hole. The bones of the Tower quivered.

  Slaves and masters at the Tower’s foot scrambled desperately to move another massive rock into a defensive position.

  Brazil saw it was a futile thing for creatures weak as men to attempt. One roaring curl of water caught a Red, who dropped his whip and grabbed at the slippery rock to save himself. Brazil saw the upturned face, the eyes seemingly looking straight into his own, the mouth opened as if to yell something. The next wave tore the man away and dragged him out of sight.

  GALAMAND was roaring orders for more slaves to be brought. “You have strange powers and weapons,” he demanded suddenly of Foley. “Can you help me now?”

  Brazil pulled himself out of a hideous fascination with what was happening down below.

  “And if we can?” asked Foley.

  “It might be that the agreement you sought with me could be quickly reached.” The wind tore at Galamand’s words, and shot spray past his head, here ninety feet above the normal sea. A small wave-tossed rock clattered against the parapet, as if shot from a giant’s sling.

  “Then order those men from the sea down there,” Brazil demanded. “And give your word to make of Red and Blond one tribe.”

  “Then you can cure this,” barked the king. “And it may be you have caused it!”

  The other Reds glared at the Earthmen; some weapons were drawn. Then cries came from the stairway, distracting attention.

  Ariton and Trofand were suddenly at the top of the stair, in ceremonial robes half sodden with sea water.

  “My king, the Sea God pours his wrath into the very chapel. I—” Trofand jumped back, as if he thought the king’s sudden lunge was directed at him. But Galamand seized Ariton, had her arm twisted behind her back and his dagger at her throat in a moment.

  “Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” howled Trofand. The other Reds looked on, wavering, wide-eyed, undecided.

  The king swung Ariton to face the planeteers. “Now, aliens,” he roared. “Cause the waves to cease, and quickly, or I will butcher this so-called queen with whom you ally yourselves. You seek to put her on a throne, but I alone am king. And so I will remain!”

  “My lord.” Ariton’s low voice stopped the king in surprise. Doubtless it was the first time she had used any title of respect to him. “My death will not save our island. But I will marry you and bear your sons, if that be the only way to save it. And we will live here as one tribe.”

  For the first time in his experience, Brazil saw Galamand taken aback. But it was only for a moment.

  “No, I’ll not have it! I am the king here, I alone. Not you, or the aliens, or the Sea God himself, can order me, do this or that!”

  Trofand moaned and covered his face; every other Red was visibly shaken by the king’s defiance of the god. He’s weakening, Brazil thought, with a sudden turn of sympathy for Galamand, and he’s cutting himself off from his followers. Be ready for the moment . . .

  The sea-flung stone, the size of a grapefruit, actually missed Galamand’s helmeted head by less than a foot, and flew on to bounce off the opposite wall and down the stairway. The jolt from Brazil’s quick-drawn stun pistol took the king in the head about one second later, when all eyes were on Galamand. No native doubted that the rock had grazed the king’s helmet and caused his sudden collapse. Brazil’s pistol was reholstered as quickly as it had been drawn.

  The Red priests and soldiers stared at the fallen ruler in awe. Plainly he had been struck down for blasphemy. None of then moved to aid him.

  FOLEY went to him, pulling out his first-aid kit and beginning a quick radio conference with the medics of the Yuan Chwang. The stun-jolt should wear off in a matter of minutes; a carefully chosen tranquillizer administered now should ease the situation then considerably.

  A Red officer of apparent high rank spoke almost imploringly to Trofand: “We will obey you, my lord. Is there any way to save the island?” The priest looked uncertainly at Ariton.

  Brazil asked her: “Will you now marry the king, as you offered, and so unite your people with his?”

  She rubbed the arm that Galamand had twisted, and frowned. “There is no need for that now. The Sea God has rejected him. With your help, I will be ruler—”

  “Do you want the Tower to stand?” Brazil cut her off brutally. “Remember, too, that the Red soldiers are still strong, and perhaps not eager to serve you.”

  She nodded, meekly wide-eyed for once.

  Brazil turned to Trofand. “Can the marriage be done at once? As soon as the king awakes?”

  “If he can be made to agree to it; I see that the Sea God has spared his life, for now his eyelids move.”

  “I think he can be made to agree,” said the high-ranking officer, grimly. “I think it is time we had a certain heir to the throne, and also an end to this unprofitable fighting in our own land.”

  Brazil switched off his air speaker, with throat muscles beginning to quiver with the relaxation of tension. “Sam, start cutting down that hump. But better stand by to rebuild, until I give you the word that the honeymoon has started.”

  Five miles out at the sea and two hundred feet below the surface, scoutships Alpha and Omicron braced themselves on waterfilled space, and thrust noses equipped with jury-rigged bulldozer blades against the mound of mud and sand rising from the bottom, the mound they had carefully constructed in the same manner the day before. It was not much of a mound for size, really, and unimpressive-looking to any but an oceanographer. But it shallowed the water above it, and so it slowed the waves, refracting those from one certain direction, focussing them as a lens treats light, causing them to converge on one small area five miles away . . .

  BORIS BRAZIL opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, though he sat slouched in an easy chair in an alcove of the recreation lounge aboard the Yuan Chwang. Chandragupta was standing looking down at him.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you see behind your eyelids, my friend?” the Tribune asked.

  Brazil was not quick to answer.

  “Perhaps you see drowned men.” The Tribune sat down facing Brazil and spoke with quiet sympathy. “My friend, you have what must be one of the most difficult jobs in the known universe; you must be a researcher, a diplomat, a fighter, a linguist and a survival expert, by turns or all at once. And I know I have left out many things. I think you do very well in your job, considering that you are no more than human. We here agreed that your plan of threatening the Tower with waves should be tried. I still think it was good. It has set the islanders on the road to unity, and so no doubt averted more suffering than it caused. The next time a similar situation arises, no doubt it can be used with even greater success.”

  “Thanks, Chan. I can’t help feeling we could have avoided getting those men drowned—but there’s no use brooding on it now.” Brazil uncoiled slowly up from the chair to stretch. A little humor came back into his face.

  “I’m going to play it as lazy as I can for a couple of days.” He straightened his off-duty semiuniform, and said, half to himself: “Maybe I’ll just mosey over toward Oceanography and look up something. Hmmm—”

  “Boris?” Foley’s voice was heard before he came into sight. “There you are. Scout just sent back word from over nightside; they spotted one of those luminous water-rings over there, this one’s eight miles across. Our regular standby crew is out, so Gates wants you in the briefing room on the double. Oh yeah—” Foley gave the uncertain smile of the bearer of a joke who doesn’t understand it. “He says: “What would Thoreau have to say about that?”

  Brazil’s answer was probably inaccurate.

  SEVEN DOORS TO EDUCATION

  The man was a stranger, and an alien, and perhaps he was dying. But Kelsey had to choose: He could save the stranger’s life—or he could save his own.

  THE thing came down into atmospher
e over Lake Michigan at a velocity that should have built shock waves before it; there were none. Radars at the Nike and fighter-interceptor sites along and near the shoreline swept their beams toward the thing in the course of their normal search routine. The hurtling electromagnetic pulses were detoured precisely around the thing, to resume on the other side their straight and echoless flight. The thing was quite unseen.

  The descending mass, roughly spherical, hundreds of feet in diameter, slowed its plunge through the early summer night of North America. It hit the lake with hardly a splash, miles from shore.

  Not for the first time did it find concealment in the waters of Earth. A few people of Earth had been aware of it. Now none of them remembered it.

  A JUNE day in Chicago can be uncomfortably hot. This particular day was too miserable, in the opinion of twenty year old Pete Kelsey, for him to spend it all sorting mail inside the Main Post Office. Not if he could find a way out. Besides the heat, it was one of those days when he just didn’t feel like working. He didn’t quite know why. The job was really all right, though it didn’t pay too much. If he stuck with it, he would be able to retire in his early forties.

  But today Kelsey’s morning, spent running a canceling machine, had been generally unpleasant; and he suspected from the way the mail was running that he would be assigned in the afternoon to a dim acre of the eighth floor, where long neglected bags and piles of low-class mail awaited a slackening of the first-class flow. It would be hot and chokingly dusty there. Kelsey decided to wangle half a day of his accumulated vacation time.

  In an hour and a half he was in his rooming house on the North Side. Half an hour after that he was sitting in swimming trunks on one of the massive rocks that guard land from lake along stretches of Chicago’s park-and-beach shoreline, clothing piled beside him, transistor portable blaring something with a beat.

  He was almost alone, on the edge of the great city. The rocks rose like stairs for five or six tiers above where he sat near water level, shutting out the sight of green park and distant buildings. To right and left the rock rampart curved out and then away, at about a hundred yards from where he sat, putting him out of sight of the rest of the shoreline. Only two or three other people were in sight, strolling in the cool lake breeze or sunbathing.

  If only some nice looking babe would come along now, to stretch out on the rocks for some sun . . . well, he wouldn’t hold his breath while waiting for her. The water looked inviting.

  The beaches were not officially open yet. He could have gone to one anyway, but he didn’t especially care for sand, or for wading a long way out to reach deep water. Here you could dive right in.

  He did. The water was cold, making him gasp as he surfaced.

  “Better than air conditioning,” he told himself aloud, treading water happily. He stroked out a few yards from shore, an easy, confident swimmer.

  When he felt the tight sudden grip on his foot his first unthinking reaction was: A joke. One of the guys from work, somehow . . . There was a sting at his ankle . . .

  KELSEY had not had time to get really frightened. When he woke, he was calm, but bewilderment came quickly. He was still in swimming trunks, and wet.

  He lay on his back on the floor of a small, square, windowless room, staring at a glowing ceiling that provided comfortable illumination. In the center of the ceiling was a metallic disk that looked like a closed door or hatch, with hinges at one side, and at the other small projections that might be an intricate latch.

  He rolled over dazedly. He had been swimming, and now . . . an old man lay stretched beside him, eyes closed, breathing heavily, dressed in rags and thinly bearded. The old man’s features were Oriental—Chinese, or maybe Japanese. Kelsey had never learned to tell the difference. Kelsey stood up.

  He felt fine, but where was he? Nothing looked familiar. The little room held no furniture. Floor and walls were some featureless neutral-colored stuff he could not identify. Set into one wall was a niche like a sort of berth, possibly just big enough for someone Kelsey’s size to squeeze into. A transparent sliding door, now half open, separated berth from room.

  He looked down at the old man, found him scrawny and ugly and generally unhealthy looking. Maybe when the old man woke up he could tell what this was all about.

  This was an odd, silent place. Kelsey paced around, somehow expecting every moment to get an explanation from somewhere. In one wall, just below the low ceiling, air circulated gently through a grill with darkness behind it. In one corner of the floor, a six-inch hole showed the inside of a pipe, leading down into more darkness.

  Kelsey investigated the berth-like niche; its door slid in grooves cut into a material that looked like rubber, but felt smooth as melting ice. In the top of the berth was another closed hatch, exactly like the one in the room’s ceiling.

  He sat on the edge of the berth, scratching his damp head and regarding his unconscious companion.

  The utter craziness of the whole business began to soak in on him. He had been swimming . . . He remembered the grab and sting at his ankle. There was no mark, no soreness.

  He looked up at the hatch in the ceiling. Was he in a submarine? He had never been aboard any kind of ship. He searched his memory for data from movie and television scenes; what he could remember didn’t help any. He formed a vague picture of kidnapping Russian frogmen. He wished he could wake up and And this was all a dream.

  THE hatch in the ceiling was easy to reach, but getting it open was another matter. After trying for about a minute, Kelsey quit in annoyance and attempted to wake the old man.

  The old guy didn’t respond to gentle shaking. Was he drunk? Didn’t some Chinese still use opium or something? Kelsey shook harder.

  “Hey,” he called, self-consciously, his own voice sounding strange in the silence around him. “Wake up!” he said, louder. The old man’s head wobbled on his thin neck with the shaking. He breathed. He stayed out.

  Kelsey sat on the floor. Maybe the old guy was in bad shape. He would wait a while and try to think this out.

  Without warning water began to fountain up from the pipe-opening in the floor, in a jet that carried to ceiling height and filled the room ankle deep in seconds.

  After one paralyzed moment Kelsey jumped up and pounded on the ceiling hatch, yelling for help. The only answer was the continued splashing roar in the room.

  Remembering the old man, Kelsey spun around. Rising water framed the wrinkled face. Kelsey jumped to him and lifted him, surprised at the weight he felt. He would have to keep the old man afloat with one hand while he tried to get the hatch open . . . only now did he notice with horror the heavy metal chains that bound the old man’s limbs, nearly concealed by the ragged garments. There would be no keeping him afloat!

  Water lapped around Kelsey’s knees. Was it going to fill the room? The old man . . . Kelsey thought of the berth. He dragged the thin weighted body there, lifted and crammed it in, slid the transparent door shut. It looked like it might be waterproof.

  There was no possibility of getting in himself, unless he left the old man out to drown—the thought flitted across his mind, found itself in alien territory, and fled.

  Kelsey went back to the ceiling hatch, wading through water that was waist deep and still rising rapidly. He tried to work at the latch methodically, but panic grabbed at his fingers and made them fumble. The water reached his chest. Would it drain out through the ventilator when it got high enough? Would it leave him any air space? He could drown in this room. He was going to drown in this room.

  He looked around wildly. The old man lay peacefully behind his transparent door, dry, like an exhibit in some reversed aquarium. There was another hatch in the berth, another way out . . . but no, the hatch in the berth was no different from this one, no use risking two lives.

  “Help!” Kelsey shouted. The water had reached the ventilator and kept right on rising. Soon the room would be full; Kelsey was swimming now. “Help!” He twisted at the latch.

&nbs
p; The latch stung his hand.

  KELSEY woke up again.

  He lay with his eyes shut for a little while; there was something frightening he might see when he opened them. He could not remember at first what it was . . .

  He sat up with a jerk. But he was not drowning now, although still wet and in swimming trunks.

  The room was not the same one, but similar. Same glowing ceiling, same ventilator, but no berth. Again a closed hatch, or door, this time in one wall instead of the ceiling.

  Another hatch, in the floor, stood open. Kelsey crawled to it and looked down into the room where he had nearly drowned. It was empty of water now, but the floor still gleamed wetly. The sliding door to the berth was open; the old man was nowhere in sight.

  Kelsey sat with his legs dangling through the open hatch, trying to make sense of it all. He couldn’t remember climbing up from the lower room, or even getting the hatch open. The latch had stung his hand in a gentle way, leaving no mark or soreness, as something had earlier stung his ankle. Each time he had been knocked out.

  Had someone, pulled him up here? He looked around nervously. Was he being watched from somewhere?

  He couldn’t just sit thinking about it. He gripped the edge of the hatch and lowered himself easily back into the first room, noticing as he did so how well he felt physically. He examined the compartment where he had left the old man. Where the hatch had been in the top of it was now a flat metal plate that he could not move with his fingers. He pushed and pounded and yelled some more, with no result.

  The ceiling-glow died suddenly in this lower room; the only light now shone down through the open hatch from the room above.

  Was someone telling him to move up there?