The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  The Sheriff made a little speech after throwing the switch. He thanked them for their co-operation and thousands of man-hours of labor, not mentioning that it had been obtained, initially, at the point of his guns. He praised the scientists and noted that conquest of the comet might never have been achieved without the genius of their men of College Hill. He did not mention the attempts to destroy that genius.

  "I think we should all like to hear," he said, "from the man who has led this vast and noble effort from its inception. He will speak for all those who have worked so steadfastly to bring this effort to a successful conclusion. Professor Maddox!"

  There was a flurry of applause. Then it grew, and a shout went up. They called his name and cheered as he stood, a figure dwarfed against the background of the great projector bowl.

  Ken knew what he must be thinking as he waited for the cheers to subside. He must be thinking: they have forgotten already, forgotten the angers and the jealousies and the fears, their attempts to destroy the small kernel of scientific hope in their midst. They had forgotten everything but the warming belief that perhaps the worst of the terror was over and they had lived through it.

  "I'm grateful," Professor Maddox was saying, "for the assistance you have given this project, although you had no personal knowledge of what it was meant to do. We asked for your faith and we asked for your confidence that we knew what we were about, at a time when we did not know it even for ourselves. We were nourished and cared for at your expense in order that our work might go on. It would not have succeeded without you."

  Ken realized his father was not speaking ironically but meant just what he said. And it was true.

  The vengeful Meggs and the psychotic Granny Wicks had fought them and incited others who were frightened beyond reason. Yet there had been Hilliard and Johnson, the Council, and many others who had supported them. There were those who had built the projector, even though at the point of a gun, and at the threat of starvation. All of them together had made the project possible.

  It was a miniature of the rise of the whole human race, Ken supposed. More like a single individual with a multitude of psychoses, hopes, and geniuses, than a group of separate entities, they had come to this point. In the same way, they would go on, trying to destroy the weaknesses and multiply their strength.

  * * * * *

  By the middle of February the flu epidemic was over. Its toll had leveled the population to a reasonable balance with the food supply. Whether Mayor Hilliard's ironic suggestion reflected any real principle or not, the situation had worked out in accord with his macabre prediction.

  Ken had explained the comet's daily infinitesimal retreat and there was a kind of steady excitement in estimating how much it diminished each day. Actually, a week's decrease was too small for the naked eye to detect, but this did not matter.

  Radio reports continued to tell of increased construction of projectors throughout the world. Tests were showing they were effective beyond all previous hopes.

  The populace of Mayfield was enthusiastic about the construction of additional units. Two more had been built, and three others were planned. Serious attention had to be given now to the coming planting season. Every square foot of available ground would have to be cultivated to try to build up stores for all possible emergencies of the following winter.

  When the time came for making the first work assignments on the farms, Professor Maddox and Professor Larsen appeared to receive theirs. Sheriff Johnson was in the office at the time. "What are you two doing here? You can get back to your regular business," he stormed. "We aren't that hard up for farmers!"

  "We have no regular business," said Professor Maddox. "The projector work is being taken care of. Mayfield will probably not be the site of a university again during our lifetimes. We want to be assigned some acres to plow. By the way, did you hear Art Matthews has got three more tractors in operation this week? If we can find enough gasoline we may be able to do the whole season's plowing by machine."

  "You're sure you want to do this?" said Sheriff Johnson.

  "Quite sure. Just put our names down as plain dirt farmers."

  * * * * *

  Ken clung to the radio for reports of the outside world. The batteries were all but exhausted, but a motor generator could be allotted to the station as soon as other work was out of the way.

  In Pasadena, they told him a diesel railway engine had been successfully decontaminated and put into operation. Airtight packing boxes had been designed for the wheels to keep them from being freshly affected by the dust remaining in the air. It was planned to operate a train from the metropolitan area to the great farming sections to the east and north. A few essential manufactures had also been revived, mostly in the form of machine shops to decontaminate engine parts.

  Negotiations were under way to try to move the great wheat and other grain stocks of the Midwest down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Coast cities. Oldtime sailing vessels, rotting from years of disuse, were being rebuilt for this purpose.

  Ken found it hard to envision the Earth stirring with this much life after the destruction that had passed over it. In the civilized areas, it was estimated that fully two-thirds of the population had perished. Only in the most primitive areas had the comet's effect been lightly felt. Yet, around the world, the cities were stirring again. Food for the surviving was being found. The hates and the terrors were being put away and men were pulling together again to restore their civilization.

  Maria came to the radio shack to tell him dinner was ready. He invited her to join him for a moment. "It may be possible for you and your father to return to Sweden much sooner that we thought," he said.

  Maria shook her head. "We aren't going back, now. We've talked about it and decided to stay. It's as Papa always said: Where so much happens to you, that's the place you always call home. More has happened to us in a year here than in a lifetime back there."

  Ken laughed. "That's a funny way to look at it, especially after the kind of things that have happened to you here. Maybe your father is right, at that."

  "All our friends are here now," she said.

  "All I can say is that it's wonderful," Ken said with a rising surge of happiness in him. "I mean," he added in sudden confusion, "I'm glad you've decided this is the best place to live."

  He changed the subject quickly. "Dad's even talking of trying to start up a kind of college here again. We wouldn't have the buildings, of course, but it could be done in houses or somewhere else. He says he's been thinking a lot about it and considers it would be our greatest mistake to neglect the continuance of our education. So I guess you can finish school right here.

  "Personally, I think all the professors out there trying to be dirt farmers just got tired after a couple of days of plowing and decided something would have to be done about that situation!"

  Maria laughed. "Don't be too hard on them. Papa told me about the plan, too. He says Sheriff Johnson has agreed to guarantee their pay in food and other necessities. He's stepping down now, so there can be an election, but he's demanding approval of that program before he leaves office. I don't think they ought to let him go."

  "He'll be re-elected," said Ken. "He's on top of the heap now. I even heard old Hank Moss chewing out some guys in town for criticizing Johnson!"

  Ken closed down the transmitter and receiver for the night. Together, he and Maria walked to the house. They stopped on the back porch and glanced toward the distant projector bowls reflecting the light of the comet and of the sun.

  Soon there would be only the sun to shine in the sky. The Earth was alive. Man was on his way up again.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

  By Fritz Leiber

  CHAPTER 1

  Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out,
he would be on your trail.

  --The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by Herbert Best

  I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.

  I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or cattle.

  She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style of the old buckaroos.

  We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be.

  Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have been Sirius or Jupiter.

  The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody bronze of evening.

  The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the direction of their canting--they must have been only a few miles from blast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the blast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostly smoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely melted and run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark blobs up there that might be vultures perching.

  From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vultures pass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.

  Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the on-blast side.

  None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea of where Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in a general way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter County and Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.

  * * * * *

  It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If a time traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across the few intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of it, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort of disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, paper tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying names in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to nothingness.

  To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To the west, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--and there he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where three of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valley to the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'd find Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together near the Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the southwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inching up the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of the Fisher Sheriffs.

  Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise him--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to hang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very slowly and very jealously extend it.

  But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all those swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding most of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see the great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly pointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names like Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few nervous months or weeks.

  As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.

  * * * * *

  The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The black topping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told myself.

  In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun, pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an oddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing, I guessed.

  I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special in its open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (who knows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The one I'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me.

  She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weapon it held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She was hiding her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. We Deathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness.

  Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was. She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump.

  I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, I think, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowing for sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology.

  Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'd have to keep that in mind.

  * * * * *

  The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoiding swung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to the satchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that almost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinking whether I should attach any special significance to her carrying a Geiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interfered in any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kind of thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else.

  It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers can visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area more reliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it, though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate in unfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to do if they could feel heat blind.

  But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance some citizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher's unfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted out beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard such places, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they call themselves civilized, t
hose cultural queers!

  No, she looked like she belonged in the Deathlands. But then why the counter?

  Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her boot an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.

  Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back up knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met the super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.

  Maybe she was testing the counter, planning to use it some other way or trade it for something.

  Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter made good sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?