Sherwood nodded. “Yes…it would be foolish to deny you won’t be exposing yourself to danger. And you’ll have to be wearing the insignia when you confront Wendel. But I’ve a feeling that Wendel’s goons will take you straight to him. I could be mistaken, of course. But somehow I can’t picture them firing pointblank at Target Number One without prior authorization. They’d be sticking out their necks with a vengeance, because their instructions to blast you on sight were issued before you pinned that bird on your shoulder.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “But goons are funny people.”
“I’ll be right here at my desk when the screen lights up,” he said. “Don’t worry too much. I’ll handle my end of it with very careful timing.…”
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later my tractor rumbled to a halt for the second time, directly in front of the Wendel plant.
Like the Endicott plant, it faced a big square and there were no pedestrians in sight on the side we parked on.
“This time I’m going with you,” Lynton said, very firmly.
So he was going with me! All right, it was an obligation I owed him, and I couldn’t pull rank on him, because he was a civilian and it wouldn’t have done the least bit of good. Moreover, he’d gotten over being dazzled by the silver bird, if it had ever really dazzled him, which I doubted. He was a too tough-fibered, independent, non-authority conscious kind of guy. You find them in every rugged, pioneering society—guys who will stand up in a public meeting and tell a governmental big shot that the speech he’s just delivered has a phony ring to it and he’d be well advised to try again.
I descended from the tractor a little more cautiously this time, keeping my eye on the ground-floor windows of the plant and wondering how long it would take me to cross from the car to the building’s wide main entrance and if the steel-mesh blinds on the windows might not be a cover-up for nuclear weapons pointed straight in our direction.
But actually, despite the uneasiness which we both felt, we crossed from the tractor to the plant without hurrying and with our shoulders held straight.
There were two guards in Wendel private police uniforms with nuclear hand-guns clamped to their hips standing just inside the entrance and the instant we came into view their hands darted to the holstered weapons and their eyes took on a steely glint.
Then—both guards did a swift double take. They didn’t stiffen to attention the way the guards at the gate of the nuclear fortress had done, but something happened to their faces which made them seem to be wearing frozen masks. Only their eyes remained alive, alert, the steely glint replaced by a look of stunned incredulity.
I spoke sharply, without giving them time to reach a decision on their own initiative which might have had tragic consequences, for you can never tell what desperate, completely unjustified measures a badly jolted man will take it into his head to resort to.
“I’m here to see Wendel,” I said. “Nobody else will do. I guess I don’t have to tell you that this is an order. You’d be very foolish not to unbar that gate, for I have the authority to take you into custody if you prevent me from entering the plant. You may be just guards, but that will not prevent the Colonization Board from imprisoning you on a treason charge.”
Their eyes never left the insignia while they were swinging open the big, iron-barred entrance gate for me. It was set well back from the street, with enough walled-in space in front of it to accommodate a dozen bloody corpses. I had an idea they would have tried to make use of it in that way, if I’d attempted to force my way past them with an armed escort and hadn’t been wearing the silver bird.
The strain and uncertainty eased a little once we were fairly sure we wouldn’t be blasted down without warning. It didn’t take long for that near-assurance to harden into a conviction, for what happened after the big gate clanged shut behind us was almost a repeat of what had taken place in the nuclear fortress.
More armed Wendel police guards fell into step on both sides of us, with much the same look on their faces the two at the entrance had worn ten seconds after their eyes had rested on the silver bird.
Just one small incident took place which made it a little unlike the reception which had been accorded me when I’d asked to see Sherwood. We were held up at the end of a branching corridor while one of the guards went into a small, blank-walled room and buzzed Wendel on an interplant communicator, announcing our arrival.
We didn’t know that until later, because he was careful to shut the door of the room before he spoke into the communicator. When he came out there was a hardness around his eyes, a look of grim satisfaction that should have warned me that we were in danger. But you don’t always attach as much weight as you should to a quick change of expression on the face of a man whose job requires him to resort to brutal violence two or three times a week. The face of such a man can harden just from habit.
Because it was the kind of mistake it was easy to make and the other guards were keeping their hostility under wraps we didn’t know or even suspect that we were walking straight into a trap until we were almost at the door of Wendel’s office on the second floor of the plant.
If you’re the head of a big power combine, and shrewd, as Wendel unquestionably was, and there’s a threat to your survival coming straight toward you along an echoing corridor and you want to be sure in advance he’ll be a broken man when you talk with him in strict privacy, with the chips scattered widely and the game almost at an end—you’ll either take care of it yourself, or assign just one man you can trust to do the job for you.
Not a dozen men—or half a dozen—but just one. It’s more efficient that way, more certain, the right way to go about it.
I had no way of knowing that, of course, no way of looking through a wall at Wendel standing motionless or possibly seated in a chair, his eyes gleaming triumphantly, as we approached the door of his office, with just one guard walking a few paces behind us.
Except that—deep in my mind the alarm bells were ringing again. They were ringing, all right, but very, very faintly and I don’t know to this day what made me turn my head and look behind me just as he was whipping out the heavy metal thong.
I caught only the barest glimpse of the thong gleaming in the corridor light. But even if he’d kept it concealed for a few seconds longer his face would have given him away. His eyes were blazing with a savage enmity, and he started for me the instant he realized that I had been forewarned.
I gripped Lynton by the arm and fell back against the wall, tugging him around so that he was far enough behind me to give me a chance to grapple with Hard Eyes head-on, with complete freedom of movement.
He made the mistake of coming at me too fast. It might not have been a mistake if he hadn’t been so reckless with the thong, trying to lash me across the chest with it before he was sure of his balance. The sheer weight of the weapon carried him forward, straight past me, and it went swishing through the air without hitting anything.
I made a grab for his wrist and before he could recover his balance I was twisting it relentlessly and slamming my fist against the side of his head. He sank to his knees and I kept right on hammering away at him, hitting him first on the right temple and then on the left and not even stopping to take the thong away from him.
There was no need for me to relieve him of the thong, for he flattened out on the floor still holding on to it and passed out cold. It seemed only reasonable and just to let him keep it as a souvenir.
I was out of breath and feeling a little dizzy, because when you hit anyone as hard as I’d hit Hard Eyes, not caring much whether I killed him or not, it takes a minute or two to recover. I still hadn’t quite gotten my breath back when the door of Wendel’s office slammed open and Wendel himself stood there, staring down at the guard with a look of consternation on his face.
I became a little alarmed when I saw that Lynton had moved out from
the wall and was making straight for him with his arm drawn back. Hell—that’s an understatement. I became very much alarmed, because the one thing I didn’t want was to have Wendel belted unconscious and laid out on the floor at the guard’s side before I could have a talk with him.
I got between them just in time, and I grabbed Wendel by the shoulders and hurled him back into his office and when he staggered a little and almost fell I grabbed hold of him for the second time, and slammed him down in the chair in front of his big, metal-topped desk.
He looked up at me for a moment with a killing rage in his eyes, but I didn’t give him a chance to get his breath back. For the barest instant, though, if he had been quick enough, he might have succeeded in getting to his feet and lashing out at me, for I saw something on the opposite side of the room that seemed almost too good to be true, and I took three full seconds out to stare at it.
It was a big tele-communicator screen—just the kind of screen I had been sure I’d find somewhere in the plant, but hardly in Wendel’s private office. The fact that Sherwood had one in his office was not quite so surprising, for Sherwood’s custodianship of thermonuclear weapons had made him more communication-conscious.
I’d counted on being able to persuade Wendel to accompany me to wherever the plant’s screen happened to be located, after I’d had a serious talk with him. But since he hadn’t wanted me to have a talk with him until he’d done his best to get me killed or crippled for life, and I would now have to keep him boxed up in his office by force while we conducted the talk, having the screen so accessible was one hell of a lucky break.
“Shut the door,” I told Lynton. “And lock it.”
I waited until Lynton had complied, my hands on Wendel’s shoulders with so fierce a clamp-hold that he gave up trying to rise.
“You’ll never get out of here alive!” he choked. “If you think—”
“Don’t press your luck, Wendel,” I said, warningly. “I might be tempted to break your neck.”
“That insignia you’re wearing doesn’t mean a thing now, Graham. Don’t you understand? You couldn’t command a fly to crawl over a bread crumb. The Wendel Combine is taking over the Colony.”
“Not a fly, Wendel,” I said. “The Wendel Combine. A big boa constrictor has nothing in common with a fly and I’m not interested in bread crumbs. And this will surprise you. You’re going to do the commanding. You’re going to command the boa constrictor to start disgorging—every kill it’s ever swallowed. It’s going to flatten itself out until it’s just a mass of cold mottled skin, which the Board will know how to deal with.”
“Who’s going to make me?”
“I am,” I said. “You have just ten minutes to make up your mind. You either turn over all of the Combine’s nuclear weapons to the Board, break the back of the Wendel police force by arresting all of its officers and placing yourself under house arrest and order every Wendel employee to cooperate with the Board or—Joseph Sherwood will vaporize the plant with a thermonuclear bomb. The rocket will be guided by remote control and will hover directly above the plant until the bomb has been dropped. Only the plant will be destroyed. There will be no zone of spreading radio-active contamination.”
All of the color drained from Wendel’s face, leaving it ashen. “You must be mad!” he gasped. “You’d die too.”
“I’m aware of that,” I said. “We’ll all be vaporized together. But it isn’t too bad a way to die, Wendel. You feel no pain, never know—”
“Do you expect me to take that threat seriously?” he breathed.
“I’m afraid I do,” I said. I gestured toward the tele-communicator. “Sherwood will tell you how serious it is. He’s waiting to talk to you. Suppose we turn that screen on and listen to what he has to say. I’m sure you know how to get the right wave-length. The Wendel spy network would hardly fail to keep you informed when Sherwood changes the code frequencies.”
“You said ten minutes,” Wendel was breathing harshly now and the veins on his forehead were thick blue cords. “You’d have to let Sherwood know when to drop the bomb. You haven’t been in communication with him since you arrived here. Suppose I refuse to dial? That’s a very intricate, highly specialized communicator. You couldn’t operate it.”
That made me change my mind about letting him do the dialing. I was pretty sure I’d experience no difficulty in getting in contact with Sherwood and I didn’t want to give Wendel a chance to make the communicator even more specialized by ripping put some of the wiring.
I turned to Lynton and indicated by tapping Wendel forcibly on the shoulder that I was about to relinquish my hold on the Combine’s difficult president, and would he kindly take my place behind the chair.
“Don’t let him move,” I cautioned, when we’d changed places. “Keep a tight grip on his shoulders.”
“Don’t worry,” Lynton said. “If he moves an inch I’ll do what you said might not be a bad idea—break his neck.”
It didn’t take me long to discover that Wendel had lied about the communicator, which meant, of course, that he had been hoping I’d give him a chance to do a quick job of sabotage on the wiring.
It was just a run-of-the-mill, two-way televisual communicator, with nothing specialized about it.
There was a humming sound for a few seconds right after I’d finished dialing and it gave me a chance to scrutinize Wendel’s face to see how he was taking it.
He was terrified, all right. But his lips were still set in defiant lines and I was sure that if he could have gotten a grip on my throat right at that moment getting his fingers unlocked wouldn’t have been easy.
I thought that when Sherwood’s image appeared on the screen there would be just one minute of hard-to-live-through uncertainty—that he’d back up what I’d told Wendel with his hand on the rocket release button and look straight at me, as if awaiting a signal I had no intention of giving.
But I suddenly realized I didn’t know just how it was going to be. Would Wendel stay defiant right up to the end, would he defeat me through sheer stubbornness, even though he was mortally terrified?
But there was one thing I did know. For the first time, as I waited for Sherwood’s image to appear on the screen, I knew with absolute certainty, beyond any possibility of doubt, that I could never go through with it.
The rocket had to be prepared and ready—the nuclear deterrent had to be a reality—or I could never have carried the bluff through with the kind of confidence that just the knowledge that you’re holding the highest cards in the deck can give you.
I had to feel that I just might give the signal.
But vaporizing the plant would have cost the lives of thirty thousand people and not more than a fourth of them were vicious criminals. I just couldn’t see myself ordering a nuclear bomb to be dropped on more than twenty thousand completely innocent Wendel plant engineers and laboratory technicians.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt that way, because if the Wendel Combine took over the Colony three or four times that number of innocent people would perish, or sink into degradation and become completely enslaved. But I did feel that way and—well, I wouldn’t have to live with what I’d done, because I’d be killed by the blast. But I didn’t want that on my conscience even as a dead man.
I couldn’t go through with it, but had I ever really intended to? It didn’t mean I couldn’t win, didn’t change what I’d come to do. If I could carry my bluff through without flinching, right up to the zero-count instant, there was a very good chance that Wendel would crack. A very good chance still.
I had the highest cards in the deck and was only handicapped in one way. If the zero-count instant came and Wendel didn’t crack I couldn’t play them.
I’ve never really believed in miracles. But if you’re holding what you think are the highest cards, and something happens to your hand you never dreamed could happen—if you look and see
you’ve got a card that’s even higher, just slipped in between the others as a gift…well, that’s pretty close to a miracle, isn’t it?
I thought when Sherwood’s image appeared on the screen he’d be sitting alone behind his desk, with his thumb on the rocket-release button. But he wasn’t alone and when I saw who was with him I almost stopped breathing.…
Joan was with him and she was looking straight at me out of the screen.
“Don’t do it, Ralph!” she pleaded. “Oh, God, no—”
Then I saw that she was staring past me and without turning I knew that she was appealing to Wendel with the same look of pleading desperation in her eyes. “If he gives the signal his command will be obeyed. And he’ll do it unless you stop him! When you’ve lived with a man in the intimacy of marriage—yes, that’s important and I have to say it—you know him better than anyone else. You know what he’s capable of. He’ll give the signal unless you do as he says, because the insignia he’s wearing gives him no choice. If you don’t stop him now…you’ll die with him!”
I turned then and stared straight at Wendel. I’d never seen a man sag before in quite the way he did. All of the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His defiance gave way to a look of utter hopelessness, of abject surrender, and he sank so low in his chair that he seemed on the verge of slumping to the floor, despite Lynton’s grip on his shoulders.
His voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper. “All right, Graham,” he said. “You win.”
As I turned back to the screen and saw the look of overwhelming relief and gratefulness in Joan’s eyes I couldn’t help wondering how close she had been to being right. Had the insignia really given me any choice? If Wendel had stayed defiant and refused to crack—would I have gone through with it? How much does any man know about himself?
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 35