Preferred Risk

by Lester Del Rey

  I said with an effort, “I don’t mean to impose on any loyalty, but, in common decency, you ought to hear—”

  “Decency!” His face was cold. “You talk about decency! You and that dell’Angela traitor you joined. Decency! Wills, you’re a disgrace to the memory of a decent and honest woman like Marianna. I can only say that I am glad—glad, do you hear me?—that she’s dead and rid of you.”

  I said, “Wait a minute, Defoe! Leave Marianna out of this. I only—”

  “Don’t interrupt me! God, to think a man I trusted should turn out to be Judas himself! You animal, the Company has protected you from the day you were born, and you try to destroy it. Why, you pitiful idiot, you aren’t fit to associate with the dogs in the kennel of a decent human being!”

  There was more. Much, much more. It was a flow of abuse that paralyzed me, less because of what he said than because of who was saying it. Suave, competent Defoe, ranting at me like a wounded Gogarty! I couldn’t have been more astonished if the portrait of Millen Carmody had whispered a bawdy joke from the frontispiece of the Handbook.

  I stood there, too amazed to be furious, listening to the tirade from the midget image in the viewplate. It must have lasted for three or four minutes; then, almost in mid-breath, Defoe glanced at something outside my range of vision, and stopped his stream of abuse. I started to cut in while I could, but he held up one hand quickly.

  He smiled gently. Very calmly, as though he had not been damning me a moment before, he said: “I shall be very interested to hear what you have to say.”

  That floored me. It took me a second to shake the cobwebs out of my brain before I said waspishly, “If you hadn’t gone through all that jabber, you would have heard it long ago.”

  The midget in the scanner shrugged urbanely. “True,” he conceded. “But then, Thomas, I wouldn’t have had you.”

  And he reached forward and clicked off the phone. Tricked! Tricked and trapped! I cursed myself for stupidity. While he kept me on the line, the call was being traced—there was no other explanation. And I had fallen for it!

  I slapped the door of the booth open and leaped out.

  I got perhaps ten feet from the booth.

  Then a rope dropped over my shoulders. Its noose yanked tight around my arms, and I was being dragged up, kicking futilely. I caught a glimpse of the broad Latin faces gaping at me from below, then two men on a rope ladder had me.

  I was dragged in through the bottom hatch of a big helicopter with no markings. The hatch closed. Facing me was a lieutenant of expediters.

  The two men tumbled in after me and reeled in the rope ladder, as the copter dipped and swerved away. I let myself go limp as the rope was loosened around me; when my hands were free I made my bid.

  I leaped for the lieutenant; my fist caught him glancingly on the throat, sending him reeling and choking backward. I grabbed for the hard-pellet gun at his hip—he was pawing at it—and we tumbled across the floor.

  It was, for one brief moment, a chance. I was no copter pilot, but the gun was all the pilot I’d need—if only I got it out.

  But the expediters behind me were no amateurs. I ducked as the knotted end of the rope whipped savagely toward me. Then one of the other expediters was on my back; the gun came out, and flew free. And that was the end of that.

  I had, I knew, been a fool to try it. But I wasn’t sorry. They had too much rough-and-tumble training for me to handle. But that one blow had felt good.

  It didn’t seem as worthwhile a few moments later. I was fastened to a seat, while the wheezing lieutenant gave orders in a strangled voice. “Not too many marks on him,” he was saying. “Try it over the kidneys again…”

  I never even thought of maintaining a heroic silence. They had had plenty of experience with the padded club, too, and I started to black out twice before finally I went all the way down.

  * * * *

  I came to with a light shining in my eyes.

  There was a doctor putting his equipment away. “He’ll be all right, Mr. Defoe,” he said, and snapped his bag shut and left the circle of light.

  I felt terrible, but my head was clearing.

  I managed to focus my eyes. Defoe was there, and a couple of other men. I recognized Gogarty, looking sick and dejected, and another face I knew—it was out of my Home Office training—an officer whose name I didn’t recall, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general of expediters. That meant at least an expediter corps in Naples!

  I said weakly, “Hi.”

  Defoe stood over me. He said, “I’m very glad to see you, Thomas. Coffee?”

  He steadied my hands as I gulped it. When I had managed a few swallows, he took the cup away.

  “I did not think you would resist arrest, Thomas,” he said in a parental tone.

  I said, “Damn it, you didn’t have to arrest me! I came down here of my own free will!”

  “Down?” His eyebrows rose. “Down from where do you mean, Thomas?”

  “Down from Mount—” I hesitated, then finished. “All right. Down from Mount Vesuvius. The museum, where I was hiding out with the ringleaders of the anti-Company movement. Is that what you want to know?”

  Defoe crackled: “Manning!” The lieutenant-general saluted and left the room. Defoe said, “That was the first thing I wanted, yes. But now I want much more. Please begin talking, Thomas. I will listen.”

  I talked. There was nothing to stop me. Even with my body a mass of aches and pains from the tender care of the Company’s expediters, I still had to side with the Company in this. For the Cobalt-bomb ended all loyalties.

  I left nothing important out, not even Rena. I admitted that I had taken Benedetto from the clinic, how we had escaped to Rome, how we had fled to Vesuvius…and what I had learned. I made it short, skipping a few unimportant things like Zorchi.

  And Defoe sat sipping his coffee, listening, his warm eyes twinkling.

  I stopped. He pursed his lips, considering.

  “Silly,” he said at last.

  “Silly? What’s silly!”

  He said, “Thomas, I don’t care about your casual affairs. And I would have excused your—precipitousness—since you have brought back certain useful information. Quite useful. I don’t deny it. But I don’t like being lied to, Thomas.”

  “I haven’t lied!”

  He said sharply, “There is no way to get fissionable material except through the Company!”

  “Oh, hell!” I shook my head. “How about a dud bomb, Defoe?”

  For the first time he looked puzzled. “Dud bomb?”

  Gogarty looked sick. “There’s—there’s a report on your desk, Mr. Defoe,” he said worriedly. “We—well—figured the half-masses just got close enough to boil instead of to explode. We—”

  “I see.” Defoe looked at him for a long moment. Then, disregarding Gogarty, he turned back to me, shoved the coffee at me. “All right, Thomas. They’ve got the warhead. Hydrogen? Cobalt? What about fuel?”

  I told him what I knew. Gogarty, listening, licked his lips. I didn’t envy him. I could see the worry in him, the fear of Defoe’s later wrath. For in Defoe, as in Slovetski, there was that deadly fire. It blazed only when it was allowed to; but what it touched withered and died. I had not seen Defoe as tightly concentrated, as drivingly intent, before. I was sorry for Gogarty when at last, having drained me dry, Defoe left. But I was glad for me.

  * * * *

  He was gone less than an hour—just time for me to eat a Class-C meal a silent expediter brought.

  He thrust the door open and stared at me with whitely glaring eyes. “If I thought you were lying, Thomas…” His voice was cracking with suppressed emotion.

  “What happened?” I demanded.

  “Don’t you know?” He stood trembling, staring at me. “You told the truth—or part of the truth. There was a hideout on Vesuvius. But an hour ago they got away—while you were wasting time. Was it a stall, Thomas? Did you know they would run?”

  I said, �
��Defoe, don’t you see, that’s all to the good? If they had to run, they couldn’t possibly take the bomb with them. That means—”

  He was shaking his head. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Thomas. According to the director of the albergo down the hill, three skyhook helicopters came over—big ones. They peeled the roof off, as easy as you please, and they lifted the bomb out and then flew away.”

  I said stupidly, “Where?”

  He nodded. There was no emotion in his voice, only in his eyes. He might have been discussing the weather. “Where? That is a good question. I hope we will find it out, Thomas. We’re checking the radar charts; they can’t hide for long. But how did they get away at all? Why did you give them the time?”

  He left me. Perversely, I was almost glad. It was part of the price of switching allegiance, I was learning, that shreds and tatters of loyalties cling to you and carry over. When I went against the Company to rescue Benedetto, I still carried with me my Adjusters’ Handbook. And I confess that I never lost the habit of reading a page or two in it, even in the Catacombs, when things looked bad. And when I saw the murderous goal that Slovetski’s men were marching toward, and I returned to Defoe, I still could feel glad that Benedetto, at least, had got away.

  But not far.

  It was only a few hours, but already broad daylight when Gogarty, looking shaken, came into the room. He said testily, “Damn it, Wills, I wish I’d never seen you! Come on! Defoe wants you with us.”

  “Come on where?” I got up as he gestured furiously for haste.

  “Where do you think? Did you think your pals would be able to stay out of sight forever? We’ve got them pinpointed, bomb and all.”

  He was almost dragging me down the corridor, toward a courtyard. I limped out into the bright morning and blinked. The court was swarming with armed expediters, clambering into personnel-carrying copters marked with the vivid truce-team insignia of the Company. Gogarty hustled me into the nearest and the jets sizzled and we leaped into the air.

  I shouted, over the screaming of the jets, “Where are we going?”

  Gogarty spat and pointed down the long purple coastline. “To their hideout—Pompeii!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  No one discussed tactics with me, but it was clear that this operation was carefully planned. Our copter was second in a long string of at least a dozen that whirled down the coastline, past the foothills of Vesuvius, over the clusters of fishing villages and vineyards.

  I had never seen Pompeii, but I caught a glimpse of something glittering and needle-nosed, upthrust in the middle of a cluster of stone buildings that might have been the ruins.

  Then the first ten of the copters spun down to a landing, while two or three more flew a covering mission overhead.

  The expediters, hard-pellet guns at the ready, leaped out and formed in a skirmish line. Gogarty and a pair of expediters stayed close by me, behind the line of attack; we followed the troops as they dog-trotted through a field of some sort of grain, around fresh excavations, down a defile into the shallow pit that held the ruins of first-century Pompeii.

  I had no time for archeology, but I remember tripping over wide, shallow gutters in the stone-paved streets, and cutting through a tiny villa of some sort whose plaster walls still were decorated with faded frescoes.

  Then we heard the spatter of gunfire and Gogarty, clutching at me, skidded to a halt. “This is specialist work,” he panted. “Best thing we can do is stay out of it.”

  I peered around a column and saw a wide open stretch. Beyond it was a Roman arch and the ruined marble front of what once had been a temple of some sort; in the open ground lay the three gigantic copters Defoe had mentioned.

  The vanes of one of them were spinning slowly, and it lurched and quivered as someone tried to get it off the ground under fire. But the big thing was in the middle of the area: The bomb, enormous and terrifying as its venomous nose thrust up into the sky. By its side was a tank truck, the side of it painted with the undoubtedly untrue legend that it contained crude olive oil. Hydrazine, more likely!

  Hoses connected it with the base of the guided-missile bomb; and a knot of men were feverishly in action around it, some clawing desperately at the fittings of the bomb, some returning the skirmish fire of the expediters.

  We had the advantage of surprise, but not very much of that. From the top of the ancient temple a rapid-fire pellet gun sprayed into the flank of the skirmish line, which immediately broke up as the expediters leaped for cover.

  One man fell screaming out of the big skyhook copter, but someone remained inside, for it lurched and dipped and roared crazily across the field in as ragged a takeoff as I ever saw, until its pilot got it under control. It bobbed over the skirmish line under fire, but returning the fire as whatever few persons were inside it leaned out and strafed the expediters. Then the skyhook itself came under attack as the patrol copters swooped in.

  The big ship staggered toward the nearest of them. It must have been intentional: We could see the faint flare of muzzle-blast as the two copters fired on each other; they closed, and there was a brutal rending noise as they collided. They were barely a hundred feet in the air; they crashed in a breath, and flames spread out from the wreckage.

  And Slovetski’s resources still had not run out. There was a roar and a screech of metal, and a one-man cobra tank slithered out of one of the buildings and came rapidly across the field toward the expediters.

  Gogarty, beside me, was sobbing with fear; that little tank carried self-loading rockets. It blasted a tiny shrine into rubble, spun and came directly toward us.

  We ran. I didn’t even see the second expediter aircraft come whirling in and put the cobra tank out of action with its heavy weapons. I heard the firing, but it was swallowed up in a louder screaming roar.

  Gogarty stared at me from the drainage trench we had flung ourselves into. We both leaped up and ran back toward the open field.

  There was an explosion as we got there—the fake “olive-oil” truck, now twenty yards from the bomb, had gone up in a violent blast. But we hardly noticed. For at the base of the bomb itself red-purple fire was billowing out. It screamed and howled and changed color to a blinding blue as the ugly squat shape danced and jiggled. The roar screamed up from a bull-bass to a shrieking coloratura and beyond as the bomb lifted and gained speed and, in the blink of an eye, was gone.

  I hardly noticed that the sound of gunfire died raggedly away. We were not the only ones staring unbelievingly at the sky where that deadly shape had disappeared. Of the scores of men on both sides in that area, not a single eye was anywhere else.

  The bomb had been fueled; we were too late. Its servitors, perhaps at the cost of their own lives, had torched it off. It was on its way.

  The cobalt bomb—the single weapon that could poison the world and wipe out the human race—was on its way.

  CHAPTER XIV

  What can you do after the end? What becomes of any plot or plan, when an indigo-gleaming missile sprays murder into the sky and puts a period to planning?

  I do not think there ever was a battlefield as abruptly quiet as that square in old Pompeii. Once the bomb had gone, there was not a sound. The men who had been firing on each other were standing still, jaws hanging, eyes on the sky.

  But it couldn’t last. For one man was not surprised; one man knew what was happening and was ready for it.

  A crouching figure at the top of the ruined temple gesticulated and shouted through a power-megaphone: “Give it up, Defoe! You’ve lost, you’ve lost!” It was Slovetski, and beside him a machine-gun crew sighted in on the nearest knot of expediters.

  Pause, while the Universe waited. And then his answer came; it was a shot that screamed off a cracked capital, missing him by millimeters. He dropped from sight, and the battle was raging.

  Human beings are odd. Now that the cause of the fight was meaningless, it doubled in violence. There were fewer than a hundred of Slovetski’s men involved, and not much more than
that many expediters. But for concentrated violence I think they must have overmatched anything in the Short War’s ending.

  I was a non-combatant; but the zinging of the hard-pellet fire swarmed all around me. Gogarty, in his storm sewer, was safe enough, but I was more exposed. While the rapid-fire weapons pattered all around me, I jumped up and zigzagged for the shelter of a low-roofed building.

  The walls were little enough protection, but at least I had the illusion of safety. Most of all, I was out of sight.

  I wormed my way through a gap in the wall to an inner chamber. It was as tiny a room as ever I have been in; less than six feet in its greatest dimension—length—and with most of its floor area taken up by what seemed to be a rude built-in bed. Claustrophobia hit me there; the wall on the other side was broken too, and I wriggled through.

  The next room was larger; and it was occupied.

  A man lay, panting heavily, in a corner. He pushed himself up on an elbow to look at me. In a ragged voice he said: “Thomas!” And he slumped back, exhausted by the effort, blood dripping from his shirt.

  I leaped over to the side of Benedetto dell’Angela. The noise of the battle outside rose to a high pitch and dwindled raggedly away.

  * * * *

  I suppose it was inertia that kept me going—certainly I could see with my mind’s vision no reason to keep struggling. The world was at an end. There was no reason to try again to escape from the rubber hoses of the expediters—and, after I had seen the resistance end, and an expediter-officer appeared atop the temple where Slovetski had shouted his defiance, no possibility of rejoining the rebels.

  Without Slovetski, they were lost.

  But I kept on.

  Benedetto helped. He knew every snake-hole entrance and exit of all the hideouts of Slovetski’s group. They had not survived against the strength of the Company without acquiring skill in escape routes; and here, too, they had a way out. It required a risky dash across open ground but, even with Benedetto on my back, I made it.