6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

Bokor Sub-One took the idiom literally. “Indeed I do know, Brent. It willed have beed easier with your aid, but even without you it will succeed.” He drew out his rod and contemplated it reflectively. “No,” he murmured, “there bees no point to taking you in and changing your mind. You be harmless to me, and your liberation of travelers will be useful.”

  The original Bokor opened his eyes. “We will meet again, Brent. And you will see what one man with daring mind can accomplish in this world.” Bokor and Bokor Sub-One walked to the door and turned. “And for bond,” they spoke in unison, in parody of the conventional Stapper’s phrase, “State thanks you,”

  Brent stood alone in the room, but the black-eyed domination of the two Bokors lingered about him. The plan was so damned plausible, so likely to succeed if put into operation. Man has always dreamed of power. But damn it, man has always dreamed of love, too, and of the rights of his fellow man. The only power worthy of man is the power of all mankind struggling together toward a goal of unobtainable perfection.

  And what could Bokor do against Kruj and Mimi and Nikobat and the others that Kruj reported sympathetic?

  Nevertheless there had been a certainty in those vast eyes that the double Bokor knew what he could do.

  ~ * ~

  The release of the travelers was a fabulous episode. Stephen had frowned and Brent had laughed when Martha said simply, “Only person who haves power to release them bees Head of State by will of Cosmos. Very well. We will persuade him to do so.” But she insisted, and she had been so uncannily right ever since the explosion of the second Barrier that at last, when Kruj had made his final report, Brent accompanied her on what he was certain was the damnedest fool errand he’d got himself into yet.

  Kruj’s report was encouraging. There were two, perhaps three, among the travelers who had Bokorian ideas of taking over the State for their own purposes. But these were far outweighed by the dozens who saw the tremendous possibilities of a reawakening of mankind. The liberation was proved a desirable thing, but why should the Head of State so readily loose disrupters of his Stasis?

  Getting to see the Head of State took the best part of a day. There were countless minor officials to be interviewed, all of them guarded by Stappers who looked upon the supposed Slanduch envoy with highly suspicious eyes. But one by one, with miraculous consistency, these officials beamed upon Brent’s errand and sent him on with the blessing of Cosmos.

  “You wouldn’t like to pinch me?” he murmured to Martha after the fifth such success. “This works too easy. It can’t be true.”

  Martha looked at him blankly and said, “I don’t understand it. But what be we going to say?”

  Brent jumped. “Hey! Look, madam. This was all your idea. You were going to talk the Head of State into—”

  But a Stapper was already approaching to conduct them to the next office, and Brent fell silent.

  It was in the anteroom of the Head of State that they met Bokor. Just one of him this time. He smiled confidentially at Brent and said, “Shocking accident today. Stapper killed in fight with prisoner. Odd thing—Stapper been second in succession to Chief of Stappers.”

  “You’re doing all right,” said Brent.

  “I be curious to see what you plan here. How do you hope to achieve this liberation? I talked with Head of State yesterday and he bees strongly opposed.”

  “Brother,” said Brent sincerely, “I wish I knew.”

  In a moment Bokor ushered them into the sanctum sanctorum of the Head of State. This great dignitary was at first glance a fine figure of a man, tall and well built and noble. It was only on second glance that you noticed the weak lips and the horribly empty eyes. The stern and hawk-nosed Chief of Stappers stood beside him.

  “Well!” the latter snapped. “Speak your piece!”

  Brent faltered and glanced at Martha. She looked as vacant and helpless as ever she had before the Barrier. He could only fumble on and pray that her unrevealed scheme would materialize.

  “As you know, sir,” he began, “I, as interpreter, have beed in very close contact with travelers. Having in my mind good of Cosmos and wishing to see it as rich and fully developed as possible, it seems to me that much may be accomplished by releasing travelers so that they may communicate with people.” He gulped and swore at himself for venturing such an idiotic request.

  The empty eyes of the Head of State lit up for a moment. “Excellent idea,” he boomed in a dulcet voice. “You have permission of State and Cosmos. Chief, I give orders that all travelers be released.”

  Brent heard Bokor’s incredulous gasp behind him. The Chief of Stappers muttered “Cosmos!” fervently. The Head of State looked around him for approval and then reverted to formal vacancy.

  “I thank State,” Brent managed to say, “for this courageous move.”

  “What bees courageous?” the Head demanded. His eyes shifted about nervously. “What have I doed? What have I sayed?”

  The Chief of Stappers bowed. “You have proclaimed freedom of travelers. May I, too, congratulate you on wisdom of action?” He turned to Bokor. “Go and give necessary orders.”

  Martha did not say a word till they were outside. Then she asked, “What happened? Why in Cosmos’ name doed he consent?”

  “Madam, you have me there. But you should know. It was all your idea.”

  Understanding came back to her face. “Of course. It bees time now that you know all about me. But wait till we be back in apartment. Stephen haves right to know this, too. And Martha,” Martha added.

  ~ * ~

  They had left Bokor behind them in the sanctum, and they met Bokor outside the building. That did not worry Brent, but he was admittedly perturbed when he passed a small group of people just off the sidewalk and noticed that its core was a third Bokor. He pulled Martha off the moving path and drew near the group.

  Bokor was not being a Stapper this time. He was in ordinary iridescent robes. “I tell you I know,” he was insisting vigorously. “I am ... I be Slanduch from State of South America, and I can tell you deviltry they be practicing there. Armament factories twice size of laboratories of Cosmos. They plan to destroy us; I know.”

  A Stapper shoved his way past Brent. “Here now!” he growled. “What bees going on here?”

  Bokor hesitated. “Nothing, sir. I was only—”

  “Was, huh?”

  “Pardon, sir. Beed. I be Slanduch, you see, and—”

  One of the men in the crowd interrupted. “He beed telling us what all State needs to know—plans of State of South America to invade and destroy us.”

  “Hm-m-m!” the Stapper ejaculated. “You be right, man. That sounds like something to know. Go on, you.”

  Bokor resumed his rumor mongering, and the Stapper lent it official endorsement by his listening silence. Brent moved to get a glimpse of the Stapper’s face. His guess was right. It was another Bokor.

  This significant byplay had delayed them enough so that Brent’s three travelers had reached the apartment before them. When they arrived, Stephen was deep in a philosophical discussion with the Venusian of the tragic nobility of human nature, while Kruj and Mimi were experimenting with bond. Their respective civilizations could not have been markedly alcoholic; Kruj had reached the stage of sweeping and impassioned gestures, while Mimi beamed at him and giggled occasionally.

  All three had discarded the standardized robes of the Stasis and resumed, in this friendly privacy, the clothes in which they had arrived—Kruj a curiously simplified and perverted version of the ruffled court costume of the Elizabethan era he had hoped to reach, Mimi the startling armor of an unfamiliar metal which was her uniform as Amazon warrior, and Nikobat a bronze-colored loincloth against which his green skin assumed an odd beauty.

  Brent introduced Martha’s guests to their hostess and went on, “Now for a staff meeting of G.H.Q. We’ve got to lay our plans carefully, because we’re up against some stiff opposition. There’s one other traveler who—”

  “One moment,”
said Martha’s voice. “Shouldn’t you introduce me, too?”

  “I beg your pardon, madam. I just finished that task of courtesy. And now—”

  “I be sorry,” her voice went on. “You still do not understand. You introduced Martha, yes—but not me.”

  Stephen turned to the travelers. “I must apologize for my sister. She haves goed through queer experiences of late. She traveled with our friend John and meeted herself in her earlier life. I fear that shock has temporarily— and temporally—unbalanced her.”

  “Can none of you understand so simple thing?” the woman’s voice pleaded. “I be simply using Martha’s voice as instrument of communication. I can just as easily—”

  “ ‘Steeth!” Kruj exclaimed. “ ‘Tis eke as easy and mayhap more pleasant to borrow this traveler’s voice for mine explications.”

  “Or,” Mimi added, “I cou taw li thih, but I do’ like ih vey muh.”

  Stephen’s eyes popped. “You mean that you be traveler without body?”

  “Got it in one,” Brent heard his own voice saying. “I can wander about any way I damned please. I picked the woman first because her mind was easy to occupy, and I think I’ll go on using her. Brent here’s a little hard to keep under control.”

  Stephen nodded. “Then all good advice Martha haves beed giving us—”

  “Bees mine, of course.” The bodiless traveler was back in Martha now.

  Brent gasped. “And now I see how you wangled the release of the travelers. You got us in by usurping the mind and speech of each of the minor officials we tackled, and then ousted the Head of State and Chief of Stappers to make them give their consent.”

  Martha nodded. “Exactly.”

  “This is going to be damned useful. And where do you come from, sir? Or is it madam?”

  “I come from future so far distant that even our Venusian friend here cannot conceive of it. And distinction between sir and madam bees then meaningless.”

  The dapper Kruj glanced at the hulking Amazon beside him. “ ‘Twere a pity,” he murmured.

  “And your intentions here, to go on with the State linguist’s questionnaire?”

  “My intentions? Listen, all of you. We cannot shape ends. Great patterns be shaped outside of us and beyond us. I beed historian in my time. I know patterns of mankind even down to minute details. And I know that Stephen here bees to lead people of this Age of Smugness out of their stupidity and back to humanity.”

  Stephen coughed embarrassedly. “I have no wish to lead. But for such cause man must do what he may.”

  “That bees ultimate end of this section of pattern. That bees fixed. All that we travelers can do bees to aid him as wisely as we can and to make the details of the pattern as pleasing as may be. And that we will do.”

  Stephen must have been so absorbed in this speech that his hearing was dulled. The door opened without warning, and Bokor entered.

  “ ‘Swounds!” Kruj cried out. “A Stapper!”

  Stephen smiled. “Why fear Stappers? You be legally liberated.”

  “Stapper, hell!” Brent snorted. “Well, Bokor? You still want to declare yourself in with your racket?”

  Bokor’s deep eyes swept the room. He smiled faintly. “I merely wished to show you something, Brent. So that you know what you be up against. I have finded two young scientists dissatisfied with scholastic routine of research for Cosmos. Now they work under me and they have maked for me—this.” He held a bare rod in his hand.

  “So it’s a rod. So what next?”

  “But it bees different rod, Brent. It does not paralyze. It destroys.” The point of the rod wavered and covered in turn each individual in the room. “I want you to see what I can accomplish.”

  “You suvvabih!” Mimi yelled and started to rise.

  “State thanks you, madam, for making up my mind. I will demonstrate on you. Watch this, Brent, and realize what chance you have against me.” He pointed the rod firmly at Mimi.

  “Do something!” Martha screamed.

  It all happened at once, but Brent seemed to see it in slow motion even as he moved. Mimi lunged forward furiously and recklessly. Kruj dived for her feet and brought her to the floor out of the line of fire. At the same time Brent threw himself forward just as Bokor moved, so that the rod now pointed directly at Brent. He couldn’t arrest his momentum. He was headed straight at Bokor’s new instrument of death. And then the rod moved to Bokor’s own head.

  There was no noise, no flash. But Bokor’s body was lying on the floor, and the head was nowhere.

  “That beed hard,” said Martha’s voice. “I haved to stay in his mind long enough to actuate rod, but get out before death. Matter of fractions of seconds.”

  “Nice work, sir-madam,” Brent grunted. He looked down at the corpse. “But that was only one of him.”

  ~ * ~

  Brent quoted in his journal: Love, but a day, and the world has changed! A week, to be more exact, but the change is nonetheless sudden and impressive.

  Our nameless visitant from the future—they seem to need titles as little as sexes in that time—whom I have for convenience labeled Sirdam, has organized our plans about the central idea of interfering as little as possible-forcing the inhabitants of the Stasis to work out their own salvation. The travelers do not appear openly in this great change. We work through Stephen’s associates.

  There are some 40 of us (I guess I count as a traveler; I’m not too sure what the hell my status is by now), which means each of us can take on five or ten of Stephen’s boys (and girls), picking the ones whose interests lie closest to his own special fields. That means a working force of Under grounders running somewhere above 200 and under 500 ... fluctuating constantly as people come under or escape from Stapper observation, as new recruits come in, or (as will damnably happen despite every precaution) as one of our solid old-timers gets his mind changed and decides Stasis bees perfect after all.

  The best single example to show the results we obtain is the episode of Professor Harrington, whose special department of so-called learning is the preservation of the Nakamura Law of Spatial Acceleration, which had so conclusively proved to the founders of the Stasis the impossibility of interplanetary travel.

  This fell obviously within Nikobat’s field. A young scientist affiliated with the Underground—a nephew, I have since learned, of Alex’s—expounded the Nakamura doctrine as he had learned and re-proved it. It took the Venusian less than five minutes to put his finger on the basic flaw in the statement—the absolute omission, in all calculations, of any consideration of galactic drift. Once this correction was applied to the Nakamura formulas, they stood revealed as the pure nonsense which, indeed, Nikobat’s very presence proved them.

  It was not Nikobat but the young man who placed this evidence before Professor Harrington. The scene must have been classic. “I saw,” the young man later told us— they are all trying desperately to unlearn Farthing-ized English—”his mouth fall open and gap spread across his face as wide as gap he suddenly finded in universe.”

  For the professor was not stupid. He was simply so conditioned from childhood to the acceptance of the Stasis of Cosmos that he had never questioned it. Besides, he had doubtless had friends whose minds were changed when they speculated too far.

  Harrington’s eyes lit up after the first shock. He grabbed pencil and paper and furiously checked through the revised equations again and again. He then called in a half dozen of his best students and set them to what was apparently a routine exercise—interpolating variations for galactic drift in the Nakamura formulas.

  They ended as astonished as their instructor. The first one done stared incredulously at his results and gasped, “Nakamura beed wrong!”

  That was typical. The sheep are ready to be roused, each in his individual way. Kruj has been training men to associate with the writers of the Stasis. The man’s knowledge of literature of all periods, and especially of his beloved Elizabethan Age, is phenomenal and his memory somethin
g superhuman. And four writers out of five who hear his disciples discourse on the joys of creative language and quote from the Elizabethan dramatists and the King James Bible will never be content again to write Stasis propaganda for the sollies or the identically bound books of the State libraries.

  I have myself been contributing a fair amount to the seduction of the world by teaching cooks. I was never in my own time acknowledged as better than a fair-to-middling non-professional, but here I might be Escoffier or Brillat-Savarin. We steal plants and animals from the scientific laboratories, and in our hands they become vegetables and meat; and many a man in the street, who doesn’t give a damn if his science is false and his arts synthetic, has suddenly realized that he owes the State a grudge for feeding him on concentrates.

  The focus of everything is Stephen. It’s hard to analyze why. Each of us travelers has found among the Under-grounders someone far more able in his own special field, yet all of us, travelers and Undergrounders alike, unquestioningly acknowledge Stephen as our leader. It may be the sheer quiet kindliness and goodness of his nature. It may be that he and Alex, in their organization of this undercover group of instinctive rebels, were the first openly to admit that the Stasis was inhuman and to do something about it. But from whatever cause, we all come to depend more and more on the calm reliability of Stephen.