Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians)

by Don Pendleton

  Senator Wilson nodded curtly to one of the unnamed “agents.” The man stepped forward and placed an official paper on the desk in front of the President.

  “What’s this?” Brian snapped.

  “It is a Congressional subpoena. We are prepared to enforce the order for immediate appearance before the Congress. By physical force if necessary, although...” Wilson stopped talking and dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. “Don’t make this harder than necessary, Brian,” he said. “Hell, we’ve been friends for too long to—”

  “We’ve never been friends,” Brian told him in a soft voice. Then he sighed. “Well...I guess you’re right. May as well get it over with. But Secretary Hunter stays here.”

  “We would like for—” Wilson began, to be cut off immediately by Brian.

  “I don’t give a good damn what you would like, Senator,” he declared. “Now I’m humoring you. If you want me to accompany you to the Capitol, I’m ready to go. If you want me to leave the White House completely unmanned, however, you’ll have to carry us both. And the White House detail might not like that, particularly.”

  The Senator and the Attorney General exchanged glances, the latter nodding almost imperceptibly. “That sounds entirely reasonable,” Wilson said.

  Brian got to his feet, stepped around the corner of the desk, and placed a hand on Hunter’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be a little late for that game of conjunction control,” he said, smiling. “Why don’t you go on to the game room and get things set up. and I’ll join you as soon as I’ve satisfied these old women.” His hand was squeezing firmly on Hunter’s shoulder. “Don’t delay the game for me, though. You’re the Archer; it’s really your play anyway.”

  Hunter tried hard to swallow a lump as Brian moved away from his side. The Attorney General was trying to be friendly. “I’ve tried a bit of archery myself,” he confided chattily. “I’ve never heard of conjunction control, though. Target-doubling?”

  “No, no. Not that sort of game at all,” Hunter heard Brian explaining as the party began to clear the office. “It’s more like Monopoly, with a cosmic twist.”

  Brian halted at the door to look back at Hunter. “Don’t forget,” he said, winking. “You’re the Archer.”

  Hunter merely nodded. He felt frozen to the chair. Brian was completely out of his cotton-picking mind if he thought he was going to start the damn game!

  He sat there for fully ten minutes, thinking about it. Brian couldn’t possibly get back before midnight. Hunter had covered enough Congressional committee sessions to know how they went: On and on and on. Hell, Brian could be there all night.

  Another thought occurred to him. Brian might never get back. Those birds meant business. They’d gotten wind of the operation, somehow. He wondered if they’d stopped by the Pentagon and picked up the others. Probably not; they’d start off stepping lightly. You just don’t haul off and barefaced accuse the President of the United States of high crimes—not any President, regardless of how he got the office.

  Still, the United States Government wasn’t peopled by complete fools, either. It was true that Brian might never get back. They might even be coming back for Hunter as soon as Brian was safely chambered off.

  Brian’s message had been perfectly clear: Push the button. That was it, wasn’t it? Push the nuclear button? God! Brian was no fool either. He probably knew he’d had it. And if so, he knew there’d never be another chance. It was now or never.

  Now or never. Hunter pivoted between now and never. He swung like a pendulum between them. He could actually feel the pressure of Brian’s hand on his shoulder—that final squeeze. He could see his face as he stood there at the door to the Executive Office. “Don’t delay,” he’d said. “You’re the Archer.”

  Oh, shit! That was it, wasn’t it: The thing that had been bugging him all along. What was to be his role in all this? Why did they need him? Why had they seized upon him so readily despite his antagonism to them, despite his right down to the last minute reluctance? Why had they chosen him? All along, all along, they’d known this would happen. They’d known it! They had not foreseen, obviously, just how it would all come about, but they’d known Hunter would punch the button.

  The Omega of the old and the Alpha of the new, they’d called him. Oh, God! You are a fixed event, Hunter. And again: You are the unknown quantity, Hunter.

  He left the chair and moved mechanically out of the office and along the hall. A Secret Service man nodded to him and smiled. He smiled back, and kept going. It was a little past eleven-thirty when he entered the Vault.

  He had been there a couple times before, and Brian had gone to great pains to explain everything to him. Hunter had wondered why, at the time. Now he knew why. Now he knew the meaning of the Archer. The guy to fire the shot heard ’round the world. Good God!

  He was still undecided as to his course of action when the buzzer sounded at precisely 11:58 p.m. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the telephone. It was Libwitz. “Do we have a go?” the Scorpion asked.

  “Brian isn’t here,” Hunter said breathlessly.

  “Then you say, Archer,” Libwitz replied immediately.

  It seemed to Hunter that the other voice contained not a bit of surprise. He wondered if a person could have a three-month-long dream in just one night of fitful sleep.

  “You say, Archer,” Libwitz demanded again.

  The clock in the panel was reading exactly 11:59.

  “Go,” Hunter said.

  He slammed the telephone down and stared at it as though it were a live reptile. “Go, go, go,” he muttered inanely. Then he turned to a panel of switches, depressed one, and again picked up the phone. “This is Richard Hunter,” he said crisply. “Do whatever you do to put the country on a nuclear alert. I mean for real. This is no drill.” He listened for an instant, then barked, “I’m the only damn President you have right now! Nuclear alert, you idiot!” Again he slammed the phone to the desk.

  Odd, he thought, how easy it was to be an Olympian once you’d made the decision to be one.

  He thought of Brian. Brian would die, of course. Hunter would never see him again. There were no alterations in the stars tonight. Just in the earth. The Sagittarian was altering the earth. No No, he decided. He was building a peephole through the veil of horror. He had become a true Olympian.

  4: THE CALL

  Another man in another war room a third of the way across the globe was also making a difficult decision, and he had no gods, Olympian or otherwise, to fall back on. He paced back and forth before the display board, smacking his hands together with each change of direction. “Another one, sir,” a uniformed man reported, leaning forward urgently to intercept the fast-moving pacer. Even as he spoke, a third man was changing the board.

  “How do you know they aren’t orbital launchings?” he inquired excitedly.

  “The trajectories are too steep for orbital purposes,” the uniformed man replied. “No, these are re-entry trajectories.”

  The non-Olympian hesitated painfully in midstride, the muscles of his face jerking. Another uniformed man hurried forward, whispered something, then dashed back to his console.

  “So! Bombers too!” the officer exclaimed. “It is an attack! No mistake, Mr. Premier.”

  “It is a mistake!” the other cried. “They will call them back! They are always playing with war!”

  “They cannot call back missiles, Mr. Premier!”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Minutes! Only minutes!”

  “Will you make them get that call through!”

  “Mr. Premier, we must—”

  “The call, General! I will not react blindly!”

  “They are having difficulties. They—”

  Another man raced forward, carrying a telephone with a long cord. “I get only a man who identifies himself only as the Olympian,” he burbled.

  The President glanced edgily at the General. “Who is Olympian?” he asked. “Is he one of their
generals?”

  The General shook his head vehemently. “It is a trick; a delaying tactic. Our time is almost gone. We must—”

  An officer at the console just behind them had jumped to his feet, crying out: “Many missiles from the Black Sea!”

  Another jumped up. “And from the Adriatic...” His eyes jerked back to the console. “Four...no, five...no, six, no—”

  “See? See?” the General screamed.

  The Premier reeled, hands raised to his cheeks. “They could not... They would not...” he groaned.

  “They are doing it!”

  The man in the dark, drab suit sank to his knees, palms together and the tips of his fingers against his chin. “Our Father, Which art in Heaven,” he mumbled, “hallowed be...”

  The General’s massive body jerked back as though some physical force had been hurled against him, horrified eyes unable to accept the fact of the praying Premier. Then he clapped his hands smartly together, raising to his full height, insuring that he could be seen from each console. His right hand swung down in a vigorous judo-chop into the other palm, and the nuclear war was enjoined.

  “...Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...”

  “The man called Olympian will talk to you, Mr. Premier.”

  “...on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us...”

  “The man called Olympian sends you his respects, Mr. Premier.”

  “...and forgive us our...”

  “The man Olympian—”

  The General seized the hot-line interpreter by the scruff of the neck and jerked the phone from his hands. He stood stiffly for a second, glowering at the praying man. Then he raised the phone high above his head and hurled it with all his might at the kneeling Premier.

  “There’s your call!” he screamed.

  Man and telephone went to the floor, sprawling crazily, the receiver sliding to rest inches from the man’s ear. A voice was coming from the receiver, in a language strange to the ear: “Thanks for calling, just the same,” the voice was saying, but of course the Premier could not understand.

  And then the earth shook, and man and telephone abruptly started moving again—this time into the cosmos.

  5: THE UNDERSTANDING

  The console clock advised Hunter that he had been in the vault for twelve hours. He’d had no communication with the outside world for a little more than ten—since, actually, just after the large tremor. He understood, of course, the meaning of the tremor.

  He had been writing most of that time, and the room was littered with scattered sheets of paper. One note had begun: “If this place is ever found, I want the world to know why I did it. So I am...” Another was prefaced: “This is to be an explanation, not a defense, of the madman.”

  Another note simply said: “I gave my regrets to the Premier. I heard his interpreter incorrectly translate it as ‘respects.’ Well, I guess one word is no more inadequate than another at such a time.”

  Now, at the end of twelve hours, he sat at the console, still writing: At a time like this a man must either go completely mad or else come completely into a deeper understanding of himself and his world. I know that I am not mad, and I can only interpret this new quality of mind as a deeper understanding.

  Human life is relatively cheap. The planet Earth itself is relatively unimportant. Both statements are true, but with one tremendous exception. Consciousness of Self has arisen upon this otherwise unimportant planet. This consciousness has come through the instrumentality of human life, and the consciousness is much more important than the life itself. Without the consciousness, the life of the human being is of little more consequence than the life of the fern or the cabbage or the rabbit.

  The cosmos has been kind to this little hick planet at the rim of galactic time. Winfried has told me that our galaxy has made only about 20 rotations since its creation, yet our solar system is moving at somewhere around a million miles an hour around the galactic center. Trying to apply an earth concept of time, based on revolutions (such as the earth’s revolutions around the sun) we could say that our galaxy is only about 20 years old. A mere youngster of the cosmos—and there are more galaxies than there are grains of sands upon the earth. It seems a bit ludicrous, therefore, to envision a mere man throwing back his head and thumping his chest like a jungle ape, and proclaiming that he is the center of the universe and, moreover, the reason for it all, if not the master of it all. We can’t even master our own dark natures, yet we would master a universe of billions on billions of galaxies; we pride ourselves on our ability to remain alive for 70 or 75 earth years, yet it requires a hundred thousand years for a spark of light to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other, and there are those who say that this is longer than the lifetime of mankind.

  The cosmos has been kind, yes. Conditions have been created that would allow the rise of consciousness on this little outpost at the rim of things. Even more than consciousness—self consciousness. And more than that—a cosmic consciousness. How could human consciousness ever come into a realization of the cosmos—of anything so staggering to human imagination, anything so vast, so colossal—to such an extent, even, that we can measure the distances between the stars? How? Winfried has told me that if the sun were a softball lying in the center of an East Coast town, the earth would be no more than a speck of dust on the outskirts of the town. The nearest star would be as distant as Albuquerque or Denver. The center of the galaxy, I presume, would be over in Tokyo or someplace. How can sub-atomic particles cloistered on the face of that speck of dust at the edge of the East Coast town ever know anything about the softball lying at the center of town, much less Albuquerque, and for God’s sake not Tokyo! That gives some idea of the power of human consciousness. It is a precious thing. And yes, the Earthman can throw back his head and thump his chest and say, “It is all mine!” Yes, he can. He can in consciousness, and it isn’t important whether his claim is true or false. What is important is that he can even conceive the claim.

  I am moving into the understanding Brian spoke of. He was not so concerned with the preservation of society as with the preservation of civilization. Civilization, I understand now, is not a matter of architecture and machine technology, nor even of religion and morals, though all these have their importance. Civilization is knowledge. It is consciousness continually evolving. Human consciousness must be preserved at all costs; this is the guts of my new understanding. Consciousness, I understand now, is the cosmos knowing itself.

  Brian used the term “evolving gods,” or “godlets.” He was right; so right. This is the meaning of it all. And how tremendous—how marvelous! Man is the conscious mind of the cosmos! Perhaps there are others like us, out there somewhere. But we can’t be sure of this. After all, the self-consciousness of the individual man begins in a few brain cells, I am told—not scattered throughout the body, but seated up there at the rim of things. So...this human consciousness is an important thing to the cosmos, is it not? It must be developed, perfected, tested, tried, and perfected again. The failures must be cast aside, beginning again at zilch, if necessary, a total re-start...but the full and perfect consciousness of one individual is more important, more valuable, than the imperfections of a thousand-billion individuals.

  This manner of reasoning undoubtedly calls for an Olympian attitude; no getting around that. But I am certain that Brian didn’t regard himself as a perfect example of consciousness. He stood ready and willing to throw himself into the crucible along with all the other imperfections, and he did so. I cannot do less. I feel certain, in fact, that I too am now a part of the mass within the crucible. We are being boiled down to fashion the vehicle for those generations from the crags. And if this has been my only role in the drama, then it is role enough for any man.

  Just let the record show that Richard Hunter, the Archer, did not act blindly or dumbly. He knew what he was doing, and why he was doing it, if only instinctively at the moment, and he fulfilled Brian’s prediction: “You will.” I did, and I am
now. I am in the understanding.

  6: HOME IS

  It had been 36 hours. Hunter had taken stock of the emergency supplies in the vault, and was wondering if he would die of thirst, starvation or loneliness. He was beginning to bet on loneliness when the sounds of scraping and thumping were borne in on his consciousness. He leapt from the console-chair and moved quickly to the heavy steel and lead door, his ears straining.

  There! He heard it again. Sure as hell, somebody was...

  Hunter scooped up a tin of food and began banging it against the door. The sounds ceased momentarily, then started again, this time in rhythmic knocks. Five of them, Hunter counted breathlessly. He replied with five of his own. The scraping and pounding resumed immediately, furiously, and Hunter sighed, pulled a chair over to the door and sat down. Minutes passed, with no change in the apparent nearness of the sounds, and Hunter waited patiently. He had come to believe in fixed events.

  Presently there came a blowing sound in the speaking-tube, and a male voice came behind it: “Anybody in there?”

  Hunter was already holding the tube to his mouth. “Richard Hunter,” he replied simply.

  “Do you have protective clothing in there?” Hunter was ready with the answer. “Yes.”

  “Get it on, and say when you’re ready.”

  Hunter got to his feet, pulled a bulky suit off the shelf and struggled into it, fought with the helmeted hood, and toyed with the visor for a moment, opening and closing it. Finally he left it open.

  He retrieved the speaking-tube and said, “Give me a few seconds to get the visor sealed, then open ’er up.”

  He dropped the tube, and snapped the visor shut as he moved back from the door. He waited, staring at the huge steel panel.