The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “This is one for the C.C. of the Constitutionists. The Central Committee. It’s a breach of the Freiberg Compromise. It means we call the Sociocrats, and if they don’t make full restitution—war.”

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “You and I. You’re the source of the story; you’re the one who’d be lie-tested.”

  You’ve got him, Orsino told himself, but don’t be fool enough to count on it. He’s been light-headed from hunger and no sleep and the shock of his father’s death. You helped him in a death struggle and there’s team spirit working on him. The guy covering my back, how can I fail to trust him, how could I dare not to trust him? But don’t be fool enough to count on it after he’s slept. Meanwhile, push it for all it’s worth.

  “What are your plans?” he asked gravely.

  “We’ve got to slip out of Ireland by sub or plane,” the jaygee brooded. “We can’t go to the New Portsmouth or Com-Surf organizations; they’re Sociocrat, and Grinnel will have passed the word to the Sociocrats that you’re out of control.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Death,” the jaygee said.

  XII

  Commander Grinnel, after reporting formally, had gone straight to a joint. It wasn’t until midnight that he got The Word, from a friendly O.N.I. lieutenant who had dropped into the house.

  “What?” Grinnel roared. “Who is this woman? Where is she? Take me to her at once!”

  “Commander!” the lieutenant said aghast. “I just got here!”

  “You heard me, mister! At once!”

  While Grinnel dressed he demanded particulars. The lieutenant dutifully scoured his memory. “Brought in on some cloak-and-dagger deal, Commander. The kind you usually run. Lieutenant-Commander Jacobi was in Syndic Territory on a recruiting, sabotage and reconnaissance mission and one of the D.A.R. passed the girl on him. A real Syndic member. Priceless. And, as I said, she identified this fellow as Charles Orsino, another Syndic. Why are you so interested, if I may ask?”

  The Commander dearly wanted to give him a grim: “You may not,” but didn’t dare. Now was the time to be frank and open. One hint that he had anything to hide or cover up would put his throat to the knife. “The man’s my baby, lieutenant,” he said. “Either your girl’s mistaken or Van Dellen and his polygraph tech and I were taken in by a brand-new technique.” That was nice work, he congratulated himself. Got in Van Dellen and the tech.… Maybe, come to think of it, the tech wascrooked? No; there was the way Wyman had responded perfectly under scop.

  O.N.I.’s building was two stories and an attic, wood-framed, beginning to rot already in the eternal Irish damp.

  “We’ve got her on the third floor, Commander,” the lieutenant said. “You get there by a ladder.”

  “In God’s name, why?” They walked past the Charge of Quarters, who snapped to a guilty and belated attention, and through the deserted offices of the first and second floors.

  “Frankly, we’ve had a little trouble hanging on to her.”

  “She runs away?”

  “No, nothing like that—not yet, at least. Marine G-2 and Guard Intelligence School have both tried to snatch her from us. First with requisitions, then with muscle. We hope to keep her until the word gets to Iceland. Then, naturally, we’ll be out in the cold.”

  The lieutenant laughed. Grinnel, puffing up the ladder, did not.

  The door and lock on Lee Bennet’s quarters were impressive. The lieutenant rapped. “Are you awake, Lee? There’s an officer here who wants to talk to you.”

  “Come in,” she said.

  The lieutenant’s hands flew over the lock and the door sprang open. The girl was sitting in the dark.

  “I’m Commander Grinnel, my dear,” he said. After eight hours in the joint, he could feel authentically fatherly to her. “If the time isn’t quite convenient—”

  “It’s all right,” she said listlessly. “What do you want to know?”

  “The man you identify as Orsino—it was quite a shock to me. Commander Van Dellen, who died a hero’s death only days ago accepted him as authentic and so, I must admit, did I. He passed both scop and polygraph.”

  “I can’t help that,” she said. “He came right up to me and told me who he was. I recognized him, of course. He’s a polo player. I’ve seen him play on Long Island often enough, the damned snob. He’s not much in the Syndic, but he’s close to F. W. Taylor. Orsino’s an orphan. I don’t know whether Taylor’s actually adopted him or not. I think not.”

  “No—possible—mistake?”

  “No possible mistake.” She began to tremble. “My God, Commander Whoever-You-Are, do you think I could forget one of those damned sneering faces. Or what those people did to me? Get the lie detector again! Strap me into the lie detector! I insist on it! I won’t be called a liar! Do you hear me? Get the lie detector!”

  “Please,” the Commander soothed. “I do believe you, my dear. Nobody could doubt your sincerity. Thank you for helping us, and good night.” He backed out of the room with the lieutenant. As the door closed he snapped at him: “Well, mister?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “The lie detector always bears her out. We’ve stopped using it on her. We’re convinced that she’s on our side. Almost deserving of citizenship.”

  “Come, now,” the Commander said. “You know better than that.”

  Behind the locked door, Lee Bennet had thrown herself on the bed, dry-eyed. She wished she could cry, but tears never came. Not since those three roistering drunkards had demonstrated their virility as males and their immunity as Syndics on her…she couldn’t cry any more.

  Charles Orsino—another one of them. She hoped they caught him and killed him, slowly. She knew all this was true. Then why did she feel like a murderess? Why did she think incessantly of suicide? Why, why, why?

  * * * *

  Dawn came imperceptibly. First Charles could discern the outline of treetops against the sky and then a little of the terrain before him and at last two twisted shadows that slowly became sprawling half-naked bodies. One of them was a woman’s, mangled by fifty-caliber slugs. The other was the body of a bearded giant—the one with whom they had struggled in the dark.

  Charles crawled out stiffly. The woman was—had been—a stringy, white haired crone. Some animal’s skull was tied to her pate with sinews as a head-dress, and she was tattooed with blue crescents. The jaygee joined him standing over her and said: “One of their witches. Part of the religion, if you can call it that.”

  “A brand-new religion?” Charles asked dubiously. “Made up out of whole cloth?”

  “No,” the jaygee said. “I understand it’s an old religion—pre-Christian. It kept going underground until the Troubles. Then it flared up again all over Europe. A filthy business. Animal sacrifices every new moon. Human sacrifices twice a year. What can you expect from people like that?”

  Charles reminded himself that the jaygee’s fellow-citizens boiled recalcitrant slaves. “I’ll see what I can do about the jeep,” he said.

  The jaygee sat down on the wet grass. “What the hell’s the use?” he mumbled wearily. “Even if you get it running again. Even if we get back to the base. They’ll be gunning for you. Maybe they’ll be gunning for me if they killed my father.” He tried to smile. “You got any aces in the hole, gangster?”

  “Maybe,” Orsino said slowly. “What do you know about a woman named Lee—Bennet? Works with O.N.I.?”

  “Smuggled over here by the D.A.R. A goldmine of information. She’s a little nuts, too. What have you got on her?”

  “Does she swing any weight? Is she a citizen?”

  “No weight. They’re just using her over at Intelligence to fill out the picture of the Syndic. And she couldn’t be a citizen. A woman has to marry a citizen to be naturalized. What have you got to do with her, for God’s sake? Did you know her on the other side? She’s death to the Syndic; she can’t do anything for you.”

  Charles barely heard him. That had to be it. The tr
igger on Lee Falcaro’s conditioning had to be the oath of citizenship as it was for his. And it hadn’t been tripped because this pirate gang didn’t particularly want or need women as first-class, all-privileges citizens. A small part of the Government’s cultural complex—but one that could trap Lee Falcaro forever in the shell of her synthetic substitute for a personality. Lie-tests, yes. Scopolamine, yes. But for a woman, no subsequent oath.

  “I ran into her in New Portsmouth. She knew me from the other side. She turned me in.…” He knelt at a puddle and drank thirstily; the water eased hunger cramps a little. “I’ll see what I can do with the jeep.”

  He lifted the hood and stole a look at the jaygee. Van Dellen was dropping off to sleep on the wet grass. Charles pried a shear pin from the jeep’s winch, punched out the shear pin that had given way in the transmission and replaced it. It involved some hammering. Cracked block, he thought contemptuously. An officer and he couldn’t tell whether the block was cracked or not. If I ever get out of this we’ll sweep them from the face of the earth—or more likely just get rid of their tom-fool Sociocrats and Constitutionists. The rest are probably all right. Except maybe for those bastards of Guardsmen. A bad lot. Let’s hope they get killed in the fighting.

  The small of his back tickled; he reached around to scratch it and felt cold metal.

  “Turn slowly or you’ll be spitted like a pig,” a bass voice growled.

  He turned slowly. The cold metal now at his chest, was the leaf-shaped blade of a spear. It was wielded by a red-haired, red-bearded, barrel-chested giant whose blue-green eyes were as cold as death.

  “Tie that one,” somebody said. Another half-naked man jerked his wrists behind him and lashed them together with cords.

  “Hobble his feet.” It was a woman’s voice. A length of cord or sinew was knotted to his ankles with a foot or two of play. He could walk but not run. The giant lowered his spear and stepped aside.

  The first thing Charles saw was that Lieutenant (j.g.) Van Dellen of the North American Navy had escaped forever from his doubts and confusions. They had skewered him to the turf while he slept. Charles hoped he had not felt the blow.

  The second thing he saw was a supple and coltish girl of perhaps 20 tenderly removing the animal skull from the head of the slain witch and knotting it to her own red-tressed head. Even to Orsino’s numbed understanding, it was clearly an act of the highest significance. It subtly changed the composition of the six-men group in the little glade. They had been a small mob until she put on the skull, but the moment she did they moved instinctively—one a step or two, the other merely turning a bit, perhaps—to orient on her. There was no doubt that she was in charge.

  A witch, Orsino thought. “It kept going underground until the Troubles.” “A filthy business—human sacrifices twice a year.”

  She approached him and, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the group fell into a new pattern of which she was still the focus. Charles thought he had never seen a face so humorlessly conscious of power. The petty ruler of a few barbarians, she carried herself as though she were empress of the universe. Nor did a large gray louse that crawled from her hairline across her forehead and back again affect her in the slightest. She wore a greasy animal hide as though it were royal purple. It added up to either insanity or a limitless pretension to religious authority. And her eyes were not mad.

  “You,” she said coldly. “What about the jeep and the guns? Do they go?”

  He laughed suddenly and idiotically at these words from the mouth of a stone-age goddess. A raised spear sobered him instantly. “Yes,” he said.

  “Show my men how,” she said, and squatted regally on the turf.

  “Please,” he said, “could I have something to eat first?”

  She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the brush.

  * * * *

  His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent the daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature, maintenance and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine gun.

  They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less learned to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less learned to load, point and fire the gun.

  Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in shadow, then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again. But she had been listening. She said at last: “You are telling them nothing new now. Is there no more?”

  Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. “A great deal more,” he said hastily. “It takes months.”

  “They can work them now. What more is there to learn?”

  “Well, what to do if something goes wrong.”

  She said, as though speaking from vast experience: “When something goes wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do. When I make death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine does not kill, it is because something went wrong—a word or a sign or picking a plant at the wrong time. The only thing to do is make the poison again. As you grow in experience you make fewer mistakes. That is how it will be with my men when they work the jeep and the guns.”

  She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer grip on his spear.

  Death swooped low.

  “No!” Charles exploded. “You don’t understand! This isn’t like anything you do at all!” He was sweating, even in the late afternoon chill. “You’ve got to have somebody who knows how to repair the jeep and the gun. If they’re busted they’re busted and no amount of starting over again will make them work!”

  She nodded and said: “Tie his hands. We’ll take him with us.” Charles was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke. He realized that he had never, literally never, seen any person concede a point in quite that fashion. There had been no hesitation, there had been no reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of displeasure in the face. Simply, without forcing, she had said: “We’ll take him with us.” It was as though—as though she had re-made the immediate past, un-making her opposition to the idea, nullifying it. She was a person who was not at war with herself in any respect whatever, a person who knew exactly who she was and what she was—

  The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles, and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be numbered if he got separated from his captors.

  Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages. He fell, cursed, picked himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.

  Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few adults and a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in her movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles was a walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles on the long trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-naked brats swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances to the girl—all but one.

  This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence: “I see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has something happened to my sister?”

  “The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what I am; do not say ‘claim to be.’ I warn you once.”

  “Liar!” shrieked the harridan. “You killed her and stole the skull! St. Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts! Abaddon and Lucifer pierce your eyes!”

  An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: “I warn you the second time.”

  The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was a moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl fainted dead away.

  The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a million years and a million miles away: “This is the third warning; there are no more. Now the worm is
in your backbone gnawing. Now the maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels turn to water; your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will not beat at all.” As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the watchers broke and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-faced, but the harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles listened dully as the curse was droned, nor was he surprised when the harridan fell, blasted by it. Another sorceress, aided it is true by pentothal, had months ago done the same to him.

  The people trickled back, muttering and abject.

  Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived by an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the intricacies of the Syndic or the Government.

  A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: “I’m putting you with Kennedy.”

  “All right,” Charles groaned. “You take these cords off me?”

  “Later.” He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs from which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut the cords, rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved him through.

  The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs. The light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in some air. There was a latrine pit and an open stone hearth and a naked brown man with wild hair and a beard.

  Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: “Are you Kennedy?”

  The man looked up and croaked: “Are you from the Government?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, hope rekindling. “Thank God they put us together. There’s a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the two of us can bust out—”

  He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various stages of completion, as well as files and a hone.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Aren’t you interested?”

  “Of course I’m interested,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve got to begin at the beginning. You’re too general.” His voice was mild, but reproving.