6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  “Good!” said Dick. “We’ll pick a few among ourselves to impersonate overseers, then. Right?”

  The tall man said, “Overseers shave. That’s another badge. No slave ever has a blade he could use to shave— or cut his throat with.”

  Dick fumbled mentally. He had an idea. It might or might not work. He put it forward diffidently. But to his surprise, there was no enthusiasm.

  “That’s not what we want,” growled the man with the broken nose. “Get back to Earth? Sure! But only after we wipe out this gang! If I was by myself, I’d jump at the chance to escape. But there’s a lot of us here, and I aim to see some ruhks an’ overseers get theirs before I duck!”

  Growled agreement echoed his words. A man who has been enslaved and degraded wants two things above all others. One is freedom, to be sure, but the other is to get back his self-respect, which means the destruction of the cause of his degradation.

  “We’ll try the trick I mentioned,” said Dick, grimly. “I’ve got a pocket-knife of sorts. We’ll hone it up for shaving and use the robes of the overseers we’ve killed, and make more if we find suitable stuff on board, here. Let’s get to work.”

  His counsellors rose. But the tall man lingered. He touched Dick on the shoulder.

  “Just a moment. I used to be professor of physics. If you can tell me how your friend set about making that doorway between worlds... It can’t call for elaborate apparatus if it could be worked out five thousand years ago, as you explained.”

  Dick began helplessly to tell him what he knew. It was not much. Maltby had explained that the trick was a freak orientation of the molecules of an alloy. The tall man listened. Dick added that Maltby, working drearily and close to exhaustion, had said that what we call dimensions happen actually to be merely a set of directions in which the forces we know of work. Forms of energy interchange at right angles to each other. Electricity and magnetism, for example. One wraps wire around an iron core, so that a current in the wire will always be at right angles to the length of the core. The magnetic field which results is parallel to the core and at right angles to the current-flow.

  The tall man said, “Of course. It goes farther than that. There’s what they call the three-finger rule in elementary physics. Go on! What’s next?” [This of course, is the well-known principle by which dynamos; motors, ammeters, etc., work. The three-finger rule will be found in some form in any physics textbook which treats of electricity and magnetism.—Murray Leinster.]

  Dick frowned, trying to recall what Maltby had said. When Maltby had made his explanation, however, he had been already tired and Dick had been close to madness because of Nancy’s disappearance. He hadn’t really tried to understand the abstract principles Maltby was wearily putting into words.

  “All I can remember,” said Dick, “is that he said that the three forms of energy you mentioned as following the three-finger rule—electricity, magnetism, and kinetic energy—simply have to operate at right angles to each other. And he said that if two of them or all three were interdependent and yet somehow the apparatus was contrived so that they were not at right angles in our cosmos, then the whole system would tend to rotate into a cosmos in which they could be at right angles. And that such a system could be made to bend anything introduced into it into other cosmos. Does that make sense to you?”

  The tall man clasped his hands feverishly.

  “Of course! Of course! Go on!” Then as Dick looked at him in doubt, he said irritably. “The most obvious thing in the world!”

  “I—suppose so,” said Dick doubtfully. “Anyhow, Maltby said he thought he could produce the set-up he wanted with electricity and magnetism and so on because there wasn’t any—” He paused and said uncertainly, “Hall effect? Because there’s no Hall effect in liquids?”

  The tall man tensed.

  “There isn’t! Go on!”

  “I don’t remember anything else,” admitted Dick ruefully. “The only thing that had seemed strange to him was that the crux ansata we started with had bismuth in it. Actually, it was a freak bronze. Very early, perhaps earlier than the Fifth Dynasty. The Egyptians didn’t have tin at the beginning, you know. Egyptology is my specialty, though, and I could tell him that they had bismuth and antimony almost as early as they had copper. They used antimony for kohl—for eye-shadow, for the women to make their eyes look larger,” he finished unnecessarily.

  The tall man stared at him, his eyes intent. He reached up and thoughtfully tugged at one ear.

  “I shall have to think,” he said slowly. “I think I see the principle. Copper is just a trifle diamagnetic, and bismuth is much more so. Yes ... But—”

  “Maltby,” added Dick, “was pretty much astonished to know that the ancients knew one metal would displace another from solution. They actually electroplated gold and silver—using meteoric iron to displace the noble metals because it was considered magic.” [This is fact. Electroplated objects have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs—Murray Leinster.]

  The tall man’s eyes were still intent.

  “That would be it,” he said slowly. “Yes. No Hall effect in liquids. Displacement-deposition from liquids. The same as electroplating of a mixed metal. Absolutely. Given copper and bismuth, I think I could do it myself.” Then his features turned wry. “Where’ll I find some bismuth? The masters won’t let it loose, one may be sure! I’ve no idea even where its ore is found or what it looks like I But any drugstore on Earth could supply me with at least some bismuth compounds!” He asked hopelessly. “Would you know bismuth ore?”

  Dick shook his head.

  “Given time, we might find a slave who could. Probably not here, though. In some other slave pen of some other villa. Which gives an aspect of reason to my acquired instinct to kill overseers and ruhks. I shall concentrate on that. We will try to destroy our master here, and then wage a holy war on others—for bismuth!”

  “We’re going to try to capture a doorway back to Earth from a cage-trap,” protested Dick.

  The tall man shook his head, in turn.

  “Our masters are fools—our master and all the others,” he observed dispassionately. “They waste all the intelligence of their slaves by brutality which has no purpose but the protection of their stupidity. But they are not such fools as to keep any slave-traps out, with doorways to Earth in them, while there’s a galley full of slaves at large and in revolt! They’ll have called in all slave-traps and the doorways in them. Every one will be at the villa. And they’ll destroy every one of them if they have to run away from us to get help to destroy us. In absolute emergency they might even retreat to Earth. But I don’t think they’d like Earth!”

  He grinned at that idea and went to the others. Dick turned his attention to the immediate problem of preparing to shave and otherwise disguise as many slaves as they had costumes for, to play the part of overseers.

  Men continued to fish and to babble at the top of their voices. The galley was perhaps two hundred yards from shore, but this was the shore that was the Bronx on Earth. It was separate alike from Manhattan Island and from the Long Island equivalent where Queens should have existed, and on which the villa of the master stood. With all the known boats of the villa in their hands, Dick’s followers had no reason to fear bullets from the shore.

  But now, suddenly, a naked figure appeared on a bluff where deep water apparently came close to the land. The figure was bent low and running. Behind it, gaining at every bound, there was the snarling shape of a ruhk. The naked man ran like a deer, reached the edge of the bluff no more than three yards ahead of the beast, and leaped magnificently. The ruhk seemed to falter in its stride, and then plunged savagely after the man. Its faltering had come with a glimpse of the galley at anchor offshore. But it plunged. Man and beast were in the air at the same time, though the man splashed and went deep before the ruhk touched water. The beast had estimated with cold ferocity that he should be able to overtake and kill the man before help could come from the galley.

&nb
sp; The man stayed under for seconds. The ruhk rose almost instantly and paddled dog-fashion, snarling as it looked about for the man to reappear. On the galley and in the cutters howlings arose. Dick’s voice straightened out the confusion. Men piled into a single cutter and hastily shipped oars, while one with a spear crouched at the bow, grinning savagely. The cutter got under way.

  The fugitive broke water, flinging back his head. The ruhk started for him, blood-curdling sounds coming from its throat. The man in the water faced it. He dived, suddenly. The men in the cutter strained at their oars as they had never strained even under their overseer’s lashes. The ruhk growled and made for where the man had been. It swam, of course, but diving was not a part of its instinct or of its intelligence.

  It screamed suddenly, and thrashed violently in the water. The man’s head momentarily appeared, five feet away. He gasped for breath and dived again. The ruhk suddenly swam powerfully for the shore. But the man rose behind it. He grabbed fiercely at its tail. His other arm rose and fell, and rose and fell, and the ruhk whirled, snarling, and a confusion of spray and foam erupted.

  From the galley, Dick could see nothing but spray and battling portions of man and beast. The cutter sped for the spot, its crew straining every nerve. Then, abruptly, a sobbing cry sounded, and there was only stillness with ripples around something quite unrecognizable.

  Then the man’s head popped up. The men in the cutter extended hands to him as the boat’s bow reached the floating thing. The spearman in the bow stabbed it and stabbed it and stabbed it. It did not stir.

  Minutes later the cutter came back with the man who had been swimming. He was pale, but grinning. He held fast to one arm with the hand of the other, to stop the blood that came welling out from a deep bite in the flesh. A galley slave shouted, “Bring him here! I’m a doctor!”

  They handed him up. Cloth that would have made part of an overseer’s robe went to make a bandage—a tight compress dipped in the salt tidal water overside for lack of a better antiseptic. Dick went to the improvised surgery and asked questions.

  The newly-escaped slave, still grinning, told his tale. He had been sent—with a ruhk as guard—to carry a message to the nearest other villa up the Hudson. It should have been a two days’ journey. There was a small, one man boat still at the villa, and it had put him and his guard ashore. He’d started up-river. He’d made the journey before. As the trail ran close by the water, over a rise in the ground he caught a glimpse of the galley and the cutters at anchor. He knew of the bluff beyond him and the deep water below it. The ruhk, its eye-level lower than his, had not seen the galley. When it heard the chattering, babbling noise the exuberant slaves were making, it stopped short to listen. The slave had gone on. When it growled to him to stop, he’d started to run. It had been close, but he’d made it to the water.

  “And I was in the Pacific, once,” he said, grinning more widely still. “Stationed on an atoll with a lotta natives that could swim from ‘way back. I learned some tricks from them. I’d been figurin’ on tryin’ a getaway anyhow. I hadda dagger-thorn hid in my hair. I figured if I could kill a shark, I oughta handle a ruhk. An’ I did ...”

  The dagger-thorn was a monstrosity, all of ten inches long with a point like a needle. Since slaves were never barbered, he had been able to conceal it in his long hair. No tree of Earth ever bore such thorns, but here—

  “What was the message you carried?” asked Dick. His face was tense. Their situation was bad enough without help coming to this villa from others.

  The messenger brought out a packet neatly wrapped in modern oiled silk. Inside was a brightly-polished section of chromium-plated brass tubing, with a cork in each end. The corks yielded readily. A rolled-up sheet tumbled into Dick’s hand.

  “It’s no good,” said the messenger. “It’s crazy picture-writing. I know that much!”

  But Dick regarded it professionally. It was a parchment-like paper, the most beautiful and thick and glossy of hand-made writing material. It was written on in colored inks, very beautifully, and the beginning and end glittered with gold-dust or gold-filings dropped upon adhesive ink while it was still wet. It was written in hieroglyphic Egyptian characters.

  They were not all familiar to Dick, to be sure. There were forms which doubtless dated back to the Fifth Dynasty, but the pictographs had been debased, and the language had undoubtedly changed, and there were probably abbreviations and quite certainly some entirely new words. But it was definitely derived from ancient Egyptian —and Dick was one of no more than a hundred men on all of Earth who would be able to puzzle out its meaning.

  “I think,” said Dick, “that I’ll be able to decipher this. It’s possibly a break. It’s especially a break because they’d never dream either that it wouldn’t be delivered, or that anybody but one of themselves would be able to read it. I only hope it’s explicit about their plans!”

  It was explicit, but it took him two hours to work out the meaning. He had to guess at words that had no parallel in ancient times from the stylized ideographic elements of the writing. But he read it.

  He was pale when he had finished. It was not a message to encourage him. It called for action in a hurry. And it meant that no help could possibly be had from Earth, unless he was prepared to call down on the civilized planet such turmoil and devastation as would make even the lootings and enslavings of the past five thousand years seem trivial.

  ~ * ~

  The ruhks which snarled at Sam Todd and Nancy and Kelly were intelligent animals, whose minds worked exactly in the pattern of illiterate intelligent peasants. When the three humans appeared in the cage-trap, they did not recognize Nancy as a member of the master-race because she no longer had the master-race scent upon her. Common-sense logic, that.

  Sam snapped to Kelly:

  “Look! I’ll hold the doorway if they try to get in. You heave Nancy up back through the doorway! The cops’ll grab her and take her somewhere else—”

  Then he heard a very tiny hissing sound. It was the sound of a woman’s purse perfume dispenser. A curiously clean, pungently pleasant smell smote his nostrils.

  And the snarlings died. Snuffings took their place. The ruhks were puzzled. Then they were abashed. And Nancy said to them severely:

  “You should be ashamed! You know better than to snarl at anyone with this scent on them!”

  And the ruhks, their ears flattened abjectly, groveled and whimpered before her. They made whining conversational noises. Kelly said curtly:

  “They say they’re sorry. Spray some of that stuff on me.”

  Sam Todd gasped a little. Then he turned to Nancy. She was very pale, but she smiled with a tiny silver object in her hand.

  “You forgot, Sam. But I wanted to come here particularly to give the master-scent to Dick. So I brought it!”

  And she showed him the jug in which all of one drug store’s supply of the needed odorous substances had been combined to make a gallon of master-scent solution.

  Their actions, now, were based upon a complete change in the situation. Kelly stepped out of the cage-trap. He was clad in garments which to the ruhks meant that he should be flung to the ground and stripped, but he smelled of godhead. They fawned upon him. Sam Todd stepped out next, his hands gripping pistols. But though his suspicions did not lessen, his apprehension inevitably died away as the beasts groveled at his feet.

  But as a matter of sheer common sense he refused to take any further action at all—even the dismantling of the doorway-between worlds which had dropped them into the cage—until he had filled all the empty small bottles in his pocket from the larger container. He had Nancy slip off her jacket, too, and hold it underneath as he poured, so that if any stray drops should spill, they would add to her divinity in the opinion of the ruhks. And his hands trembled a little, and drops did spill, so that when he had finished pouring all the air around Nancy was redolent of the fragrance that five thousand years of breeding had turned into a talisman of godhead that no ruhk could poss
ibly deny. She was in no danger from anything or anybody as long as a ruhk was near her.

  “See if these beasts know anything about the galley,” Sam told Kelly. He couldn’t speak to them directly because he wouldn’t understand their yelping.

  While Kelly spoke authoritatively to the fawning beasts, Sam went to the cage-trap. There was a round disk which was the doorway, at the roof of the cage. There was a pole by which it could be lifted out of reach from below. His hands in his pockets still holding his pistols, Sam inspected it. If it wasn’t lifted in time, an agile man might climb back out. But most men would be far too terrified to think of such a thing immediately.

  Kelly came over.

  “The galley’s somewhere in the Hudson,” he reported. “They heard howlings that carried the news. That’s all they knew.”