Calhoun cleaned the paint gun. He was meticulous about it. He filled its tank with Dextrethyl brought down from the laboratory. He piled the empty containers out of sight.
“This trick,” he observed, as he picked up the paint gun again, “was devised to be used on a poor devil of a lunatic who carried a bomb in his pocket for protection against imaginary assassins. It would have devastated a quarter-mile circle, so he had to be handled gently.”
He patted his pockets. He nodded.
“Now we go hunting - with an oversized atomizer loaded with dextrethyl. I’ve polysulfate and an injector to secure each specimen I knock over. Not too good, eh? But if I have to use a blaster I’ll have failed.”
He looked out a window at the sky. It was now late afternoon. He went back to the gate to the service road. He went out and piously closed it behind him. On foot, with many references to the photomaps, he began to find his way toward the landing grid. It ought to be something like the center of the invaders’ location.
It was dark when he climbed other service stairs from the cellar of another building. This was the communications center of the city. It had been the key to the mopping-up process the invaders began on landing. Its call board would show which apartments had communicators in use. When such a call showed, a murder-party could be sent to take care of the caller. Even after the first night, some individual isolated folk might remain - perhaps unaware of what went on. So there would be somebody on watch, just in case a dying man called for the solace of a human voice while still he lived.
There was a man on watch. Calhoun saw a lighted room. Paint gun at the ready, he moved very silently toward it. Murgatroyd padded faithfully behind him.
Outside the door, Calhoun adjusted his curious weapon. He entered. There was a man nodding in a chair before the lifeless board. When Calhoun entered he raised his head and yawned. He turned.
Calhoun sprayed him with smoke rings - vortex rings. But the rings were spinning fissiles of vaporized dextrethyl - that anaesthetic developed from ethyl chloride some two hundred years before, and not yet bettered for its special uses. One of its properties was that the faintest whiff of its odor produced a reflex impulse to gasp. A second property was that - like the ancient ethyl chloride - it was the quickest-acting anaesthetic known.
The man by the call board saw Calhoun. His nostrils caught the odor of dextrethyl. He gasped.
He fell unconscious.
Calhoun waited patiently until the dextrethyl was out of the way. It was almost unique among vapors in that at room temperature it was lighter than air. It rose toward the ceiling. Calhoun moved forward, brought out the polysulfate injector, and bent over the unconscious man. He did not touch him otherwise.
He turned and walked out of the room with Murgatroyd piously marching behind him.
Outside, Calhoun said:
“As one medical man to another, maybe I shouldn’t have done that! I doubt these invaders have a competent physician among them. But even he would be apt to think that that man had collapsed suddenly and directly into the coma of the plague. That polysulfate’s an assisting anaesthetic. It’s not used alone, because when you knock a man out with it he stays out for days. It’s used just below the quantity that would affect a man, and then the least whiff of another anaesthetic puts him under, and he can be brought out fast and he’s better off all around. But I’ve got this man knocked out! He’ll stay unconscious for a week.”
Murgatroyd piped, “Chee!”
“He won’t die,” said Calhoun grimly, “but he won’t come out fighting - unless somebody wakes him earlier. And of course, he is a murderer!’’
“Chee!” agreed Murgatroyd.
He reached up a furry paw and took hold of Calhoun’s hand. They walked out into the street together.
It is notorious that the streets of a city at night are ghostly and strange. That is true of a city whose inhabitants are only asleep. There is more and worse of eeriness in a deserted city, whose inhabitants are dead. But a city which has never lived, which lies lifeless under the stars because its people never came to live in it - that has the most ghastly feel of all.
Calhoun and Murgatroyd walked hand in paw through such a place. That the invaders felt the same eeriness was presently proved. Calhoun found a place where a light shone and voices came out into the tiny, remote night sounds of Maris III. Men were drinking in an unnecessarily small room, as if crowding together to make up for the loneliness outside. In the still night they made a pigmy tumult with their voices. They banged drunkenly on a table and on the floor.
Calhoun stood in the doorway and held the paint-gun trigger down. He traversed the room twice. Whirling rings of invisible vapor filled the place. Men gasped.
Calhoun waited a long time, because he had put a great deal of dextrethyl into a small space. But presently he went in and bent over each man in turn, while Murgatroyd watched with bright, inquisitive eyes. He arranged one figure so that it seemed to have been stricken while bending over another, fallen companion. The others he carried out, one at a time, and placed at different distances as if they had fallen while fleeing from a plague. One he carried quite a long distance, and left him with dusty knees and hands as if he had tried to crawl when strength failed him.
“They’d have been immunized at pretty well the same time, before they were shipped on this job,” Calhoun told Murgatroyd. “It’ll seem very plaguelike for them to fall into comas nearly together. If I found men like this, and didn’t know what to do, I’d suspect that it was a delayed-action effect of some common experience - like an immunization shot. We’d better try the ship, Murgatroyd.”
On the way he passed close to the control-building of the landing grid. There was a light inside it, too. There were four men to watch. Two remained inside, very, very still, when Calhoun went on. The others seemed to have fled and collapsed in the act. They breathed, to be sure. Their hearts beat solidly. But it would not be possible to rouse them to consciousness.
Calhoun didn’t get into the ship, though. A chance happening intervened, which seemed an unfavorable one. Its port was locked and his cautious attempt to open it brought a challenge and a blaze of lights.
He fled for the side of the landing grid with blaster-bolts searing the ground all about him. Murgatroyd leaped and pranced with him as he ran.
* * * *
VI
The probable complete success of a human enterprise which affects non-co-operating other human beings may be said to vary inversely as the fourth power of the number of favorable happenings necessary for complete success. This formula is admittedly empirical, but its accordance with observation is remarkably close. In practice, the probability of absolute, total success in any undertaking is negligible. For this reason, mathematics and sanity alike counsel the avoidance of complex plannings, and most especially the plans which must succeed totally to succeed at all.
Probability and Human Conduct, FITZGERALD
When morning came, Calhoun very wryly considered the situation. He couldn’t know the actual state of things, to be sure. He’d been shot at. But even so - though that fact did not allow his hopes to be realized in every detail - the probability of a considerable success remained. It was not likely that the invaders would ascribe the finding of unconscious, stertorously breathing members of their number to Calhoun. Making men unconscious was not the kind of warfare a plague-refugee would use. Still more certainly, it was not what the invaders themselves would practice. To devise and spread a plague, of course, was not beyond them. That had been done. But they would not disable an enemy and leave him alive. They would murder him or nothing. So when men of their group were found in something singularly close to the terminal coma of the plague, they’d think them victims. They’d guess that their supposed immunity was only to the early symptoms, not to the final ones and death.
It should not be an encouraging opinion.
But this morning Calhoun found himself hungry. He looked remorsefully at Murgatroyd.
“I gave our rations to those refugees,” he said regretfully. “I took no thought for the morrow - which has turned out to be today. I’m sorry, Murgatroyd!”
Murgatroyd said nothing.
“Maybe,” suggested Calhoun, “we can find some of these invaders at a meal.”
It was reckless, but recklessness was necessary in the sort of thing Calhoun had started. He and Murgatroyd ventured out into the streets. The emptiness of the city was appalling. If it had been dilapidated, if it had been partly ruined - the emptiness might have seemed somehow romantic. But every building was perfect. Each was complete but desolately unused.
Calhoun spotted a ground-car at a distance, stopped before a long, low, ground-hugging structure near the landing grid. It was perfectly suited to be the headquarters of the strangers in the city. Calhoun considered it for a long time, peering at it from a doorway.
“We shouldn’t try it,” he said at last. “But we probably will. If we can make these characters so panic-striken that they run out of the city like the earlier refugees - it would be a highly favorable happening. They might do it if their bosses were knocked out by what they thought was the plague. And besides, we should get a meal out of it. There’ll be food in there.”
He backtracked a long way. He darted across a road with Murgatroyd scampering beside him. He stalked the building, approaching it behind bushes, carrying the paint gun. He reached its wall. He began to crawl around the outside to reach the doorway. He heard voices as he passed the first windows.
“But I tell you we’re immune!” cried a voice furiously. “It can’t be the same thing those Dettrans died from! It can’t! And there was that man who ran from the ship last night—”
Calhoun crawled on. Murgatroyd skipped. Calhoun heard an exclamation behind him. He turned his head, and Murgatroyd was fifteen feet away from the building-wall, and plainly visible to those inside. And he’d been seen fleeing with Calhoun from the ship.
Calhoun swore softly. He ran. He reached the door before which a ground-car stood. He wrenched it open and set the paint gun at work firing a steady stream of vortex rings into the interior. He drew his blaster and faced the outside world.
There was a crashing of glass. Somebody had plunged out a window. There were rushing feet inside. They’d be racing toward this doorway from within. But the hallway - anteroom - foyer - whatever was immediately inside the door would be filled with dextrethyl vapor. Men would gasp and fall.
A man did fall. Calhoun heard the crash of his body to the floor. But also a man came plunging around the building’s corner, blaster out, searching for Calhoun. But he had to sight his target and then aim for it. Calhoun had only to pull the trigger. He did.
Shoutings inside the building. More rushing feet. More falls. Then there was the beginning of the rasping snarl of a blaster, and then a cushioned, booming, roaring detonation which was the explosive dextrethyl vapor, ignited by it. The blast lifted the building’s roof. It shattered partitions. It blew every window out.
Calhoun sprinted for the ground-car. A blaster-bolt flashed past him. He halted and deliberately traversed the building with the trigger held down. Smoke and flame leaped up. At least one more invader crumpled. Calhoun heard a voice yelling inside somewhere.
“We’re attacked! Those refugees are throwing bombs! Rally! Rally! We need help!”
It would be a broadcast call for assistance. Wherever men lolled or loafed or tried desultorily to find something to loot, they would hear it. Even the standby crew in the spaceship would hear it. Those who repaired the grid-transformers Calhoun had burned out would hear it. Men would come running. Hunters would come. Men in cars—
Calhoun snatched Murgatroyd to the seat beside him. He turned the key and the tires screamed and he shot away.
The highways were, of course, superb. He raced forward, and the car’s communicator began to mutter as somebody in the undamaged part of the building chattered that he’d gotten in a car and away. It described his course. It commanded that he be headed off. It hysterically demanded that he be killed, killed, killed—
Another voice took its place. This voice was curt and coldly furious. It snapped precise instructions.
Calhoun found himself on a gracefully curving, rising roads. He was midway between towers when another car flashed toward him. He took his blaster in his left hand. In the split second during which the cars passed each other, he blasted it. There was a monstrous surge of smoke and flame as the stricken car’s Duhanne cell shorted and vaporized half the metal of the car itself.
There came other voices. Somebody had sighted the explosion. The voice in the communicator roared for silence.
“You,” he rasped. “If you got him, report yourself!”
“Chee-chee-chee!” chattered Murgatroyd excitedly.
But Calhoun did not report.
“He got one of us,” raged the icy voice. “Get ahead of him! And blast him!”
Calhoun’s car went streaking down the far side of the traffic-bridge. It rounded a curve on two wheels. It flashed between two gigantic empty buildings and came to a sideway, and plunged into that, and came again to a division and took the left-hand turn, and next time took the right. But the muttering voices continued in the communicator. A voice, by name, was ordered to the highest possible bridge from which it could watch all lower-level roadways. Others were to post themselves here, and there - and to stay still! A group of four cars was coming out of the storage-building. Blast any single car in motion. Blast it! And report, report, report—
“I suspect,” said Calhoun to the agitated Murgatroyd beside him, “that this is what is known as military tactics. If they ring us in— There aren’t but so many of them, though. The trick for us is to get out of the city. We need more choices for action. So—”
The communicator panted a report of his sighting, from a cobweblike bridge at the highest point of the city. He was heading—
He changed his heading. He had so far seen but one car of his pursuers. Now he went racing along empty, curving highways, among untenanted towers and between balconied walls with blank-eyed windows gazing at him everywhere.
It was nightmarish because of the magnificence and the emptiness of the city all about him. He plunged along graceful highways, across delicately arched bridges, through crazy ramifications of its lesser traffic arteries - and he saw no motion anywhere. The wind whistled past the car windows, and the tires sang a high-pitched whine, and the sun shone down and small clouds floated tranquilly in the sky. There was no sign of life or danger anywhere on the splendid highways or in the heart-wrenchingly beautiful buildings. Only voices muttered in the communicator of the car. He’d been seen here, flashing around a steeply banked curve. He’d swerved from a waiting ambush by pure chance. He’d—
He saw green to the left. He dived down a sloping ramp toward one of the smaller park areas of the city.
And as he came from between the stone guard rails of the road, the top of the car exploded over his head. He swerved and roared into dense shrubbery, jerked Murgatroyd free despite the tormal’s clinging fast with all four paws and his tail, and dived into the underbrush.
He ran, swearing and plucking solidified droplets of still-hot metal from his garments and his flesh. They hurt abominably. But the man who’d fired wouldn’t believe he’d missed, followed as his blasting was by the instant wrecking of the car. The man who’d fired would report his success before he moved to view the corpse of his supposed victim. But there’d be other cars coming. At the moment it was necessary for Calhoun to get elsewhere, fast.
He heard the rushing sound of arriving cars while he panted and sweated through the foliage of the park. He reached the far side and a road, and on beyond there was a low stone wall. He knew instantly what it was. Service highways ran in cuts, now and again roofed over to hide them from sight, but now and again open to the sky for ventilation. He’d entered the city by one of them. Here was another. He swung himself over the wall and dropped.
Murgatroyd recklessly and excitedly followed.
It was a long drop, and he was staggered when he landed. He heard a soft rushing noise above. A car raced past. Instants later, another.
Limping, Calhoun ran to the nearest service-gate. He entered it and closed it. Scorched and aching, he climbed to the echoing upper stories of this building. Presently he looked out. His car had been wrecked in one of the smaller park areas of the city. Now there were other cars at two-hundred-yard intervals all about it. It was believed that he was in the brushwood somewhere. Besides the cars of the cordon, there were now twenty men on foot receiving orders from an authoritative figure in their midst.
They scattered. Twenty yards apart, they began to move across the park. Other men arrived and strengthened the cordon toward which he was supposed to be driven. A fly could not have escaped.
Kornbluth, Mary (Ed) Page 20