His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Quietly and persistently the invaders kept moving in, establishing bases as far as anyone could see. The personnel of the Intelligence Wing were dispersed throughout the colonial system to restore order and prevent hampering of the Fleet as it was making ready to attack.

  It was, of course, somewhat problematical as to just when that attack would come. The yellow-bellied Admiral Fitzjames was cowering in his flagship behind miles of steel and chewing his nails with sheer terror.

  For the ships he sent out—cruiser, destroyer, patroller, interceptor or miles-long battlewagon of the line—simply didn't come back. If they got within sighting distance of the invaders, they never survived to tell of it.

  And the ether was still jammed thick as apparently unlimited power could make it. Or was their power unlimited? Nobody knew.

  It was bidding fair to be the most successful invasion of all times; just as the successful exploration is the one without adventure to mark its high points so this invasion was completely unchronicled by those invaded. They simply didn't know.

  The galactic state of jitters is not easy to describe, but that's what it was.

  Tap a person on the shoulder and he'd turn with a shriek, fainting dead away. Suicide was on the upcurve, psychoses were increasing, messiahs popped up like mushrooms to lead the saved to glory and life everlasting. Bartok's men arrested these as fast as they could and even formed a few rival cults on the premise that a few million fanatic followers would be not at all bad things to have about, thus capitalizing on the stressful times.

  Production and distribution of commodities bade fair to break down; it was Bartok's men who saved them. Acting on an old-time tradition, Intelligence men stood with drawn guns at the doors of factories, offering to blow the guts out of the man who stopped working.

  The commander, on the fly between the stars of the colonial system, hadn't time to change his socks, let alone receive reports, notions and nostrums from cranks. Therefore it was natural that he refused to see the sailor from the flagship of the Fleet who said he had something awfully important to tell him, but that it wasn't official. It would have been better if Bartok had listened, for the sailor was going to tell him what the Admiral had said to his secretary while passing through the sailor's corridor. It had been: "By God, Hackenshaw, if something doesn't happen I sail for parts unknown and that beastly Bartok can fight his own war!" But the sailor never saw Bartok, in spite of deserting from the flagship and commandeering a lifeboat to make the trek from Venus to Algol. Instead he was shot for desertion when they picked him up in a math parlor where he was spending his last hours of life in the popular diversion of the day, capping formulas.

  Hence it came as a staggering blow to Bartok to learn that the Fleet—all the lineships, that is—had simply taken off into space after raiding all the cities near at hand for women. They were headed, when he heard the news, for a minor star-cluster near the edge of the universe, and in the opposite direction of that from which the invaders were coming.

  "Akh!" screamed Bartok when the news was broken to him. "The—the—

  the—" Words failed him. For hours afterwards he was in a daze. When he snapped out of it his first words were: "How about their commissariat?"

  A subaltern tactfully informed him that they had made no provisions of any sort for food and supplies. A couple of hours after, Bartok was heard to observe: "They're going to starve to death." Which was the exact truth.

  When the Fleet was eliminated from the scheme of things, Bartok found himself in more or less complete command of the colonial system.

  What vestiges of an executive committee there had been on Earth were quite shriveled away. Most of the committee had died of fright when they learned that the Fleet had left them high and dry.

  The Intelligence Wing took unto itself all authority of life and death, officially, at last. They had been shooting leaders for quite a while, but it hadn't been with sanction and consent from above. The Wing expanded legally to cover with its charter all those tenders, lighters and graving-ships which had been left behind by the backbone of the Fleet. It made them the most powerful unit then in the colonial system, with fire-power to match any that sporadic rebellions might bring up.

  Meanwhile the invaders progressed amazingly, almost forgotten as the cause of the system-wide crisis. They would have been totally lost from the public eye in the confusion had not reports come in about once a week that there was no further communication with such-and-such a sector. A few retired sailors moved forward pins on their star-maps and wondered how they managed it without once showing their hand.

  And Bartok, who had once wished at least six times a day that he might have a free hand to remake the colonial system "—and obstacles be damned!"—was wondering if a really sound case could be made out against his willfully inhibiting—by means of an overdose of cyanide—

  his metabolic process.

  It became apparent after four months of horrid confusion and blood-letting that things were quieting down, partly due to the able handling of the situation by the Intelligence Wing, which managed to keep the lid on practically everywhere and save the system from a complete premature smash-up, mostly because the populace had got used to the idea of being invaded, and successfully.

  The ordinary round of living began again, with perhaps a little more feverish gaiety in the math parlors and a little less solemn conviction in the houses of worship. When Systemic Coordinator Bartok (the title had been hung on him while his back was turned; he still swore that he was nothing more than the Wing Commander acting under emergency powers) was able to take a vacation, the last of the internal trouble was officially over and done with. It had been ugly, certainly, but there had been episodes in the system's history even less attractive, as when the docks broke down during the days of the old Nine Planet Federation and there had actually been people starving to death and homeless.

  It had occurred to Bartok as he lounged in his birthday suit with the other convalescents at Venus Springs, at the South Pole, that it would be touching and entirely appropriate to the spirit of the service to pay tribute to that deceased but magnificent female, Babe MacNeice.

  He had arranged in his mind's eye a procession of notables to lay wreaths on a simple block of tungsten. He had just begun to work out the details of the speech he would make when there came a faint blatting noise from his wrist, the only part of him that was dressed, and that purely for utility. From the tiny transceiver came: "Barry, this is Central in New Metropole. The recorder in your private office has just begun to squawk. Who's it hooked up to?"

  Bartok thought, furrowed his brow like a plowed field. "MacNeice," he said at last. "She's the only one hooked up to G7. I'm coming right up."

  In about the time it took him to dress he had called a plane, one of the very special racer models that he had fallen into using during the quick-moving past months when a second clipped was a score of lives saved.

  In two hours flat he was slamming his office door behind him and jiggling the dials of the transceiver set on G7. No answer.

  "Babe!" he snapped. "Are you in? Speak up!" No answer. His fingers jittery, he set the machine for rewind and replay. The letterhead spoke its piece tinnily, then the voice of Babe MacNeice snapped out briskly over the wires:

  "Hello, Barty. This'll get to you sooner or later if you survive. It'd be too much to hope that I'd have you on the wire. Things must be pretty whacky down there—eh? I'll begin the report in good order.

  "Took off—hell, you saw me. Went toward Arided without any trouble.

  Was hailed by a lot of freighters and sundry obsolete crates that had no business being in the ether. They seemed to think that I was going the wrong way. Few billion off Arided transceiving got muddy; then I slapped right into a zone where there simply wasn't any getting electricity or magnetism through at all.

  "I sighted something in the deeps where there wouldn't be any Earthly ships around, so I did a quick fade. That's greekish for dodging and twistin
g so fast that I caught up with my own light-waves. After a few minutes of that I streaked straight behind a star. They probably hadn't seen anything move so fast, so they weren't ready. Damned good thing you put racing motors into my scow—otherwise you wouldn't be hearing this. For that matter, maybe you aren't. I'll get on.

  "Those of my instruments that weren't chasing their tails because of the freak fields floating around there told me that I was being followed twist for twist. They had a tracer of some kind on me, because they didn't know where I was—just where I was going. Which isn't good. I stayed perfectly quiet, waiting for them to show up so I could shoot a torpedo at them. Show up they did. They had a funny craft, Barty—

  damned funny.

  "It was open to space—just a skeleton ship. Not very big, either. Twenty times my length, about. Couldn't get any details, but there was something awfully peculiar about it. Anyway, I fired my torpedo, which was a mistake. It was a magnetic, and since the fields were thrown out of kilter it buzzed around, skinned past me once, and lost itself in space. Then they got gay and began throwing things at me—odd design, all of them. There was a skeleton-shell, like their ship, that packed an awful wallop when it exploded on time a thousand to my starboard.

  And they have rays.

  "Yes, honest-to-God rays, like you read about in the story books! Not having the experience of an Aarn Munro or the ray-screens of a Richard Seaton, also like you read about in the story-books, I just ran like a scared rabbit. And then it occurred to me to open that mysterious package you handed me. I did so. What did I find? Another mysterious package inside it, with the note: 'So you think this is a tough spot? Think it over again before opening this.'

  "It was a dirty trick, Barty, but it worked. I gave 'em the old one-two.

  'One' being a cloud of smoke thick enough to confuse any tracer, 'two'

  being the space-mines you so thoughtfully shoved onto my scow at the last moment over my protests that I didn't want to be a flying powder-keg.

  "I scattered the mines like bird-shot through the fog, and later had the intense satisfaction of seeing the ship that was on my tail explode in several pieces. That must make the first blood for our side in this war.

  "I figure that blood-drawing saved my life for the moment, because exactly three hours later I was taken in tow by five more of their ships, same pattern and size. And that was where your little joke began to wear thin, because I opened the second box and found inside it another box and another note, which said: 'And this too shall pass away. Don't open this one unless the going's really bad. Cheer up; the worst is yet to come.' Who the hell do you think you are—Elbert Hubbard?

  "As I was saying, they must have taken me prisoner to find out how I managed to knock off one of their boys. I couldn't see a thing except the skeletons of the ships and buggy creatures crawling around on the beams. Disgusting sensation, really.

  "They landed me on one of Arided's planets, considerately one with an atmosphere. I got out in cold blood. My God! Barty, you never saw such a place! I don't know what it was like before; the usual colony-planet, I suppose, with labor-barracks and factories and semi-detached homes.

  But what I saw! Towers, Barry all towers, spiring into the heavens like mountain peaks! I'll swear that most of them went way above the atmosphere line. And there was machinery, machinery, machinery—

  the ground was solid with it, heaving pistons, reaction jets like volcanoes. You don't know what I'm talking about, Barty. You have to see it. I'm sneaking in these last words under very trying circumstances—undergoing what the tinny brutes call purification. I'm going to see the master after being kept waiting for months, and whatever he decides to do with me goes on this world. "

  "They—"

  The replay broke off. That was all. There weren't any sound-effects, not even the customary strangled wail, and glad enough Bartok was for that. Apparently she had been caught using the transceiver, and it had been smashed. Bartok straightened himself out tiredly. He'd kept the world fairly well up while the invasion was going on; there were others capable to take over now that the real crisis was past and there was nothing to do but wait for the taking-over by whatever the incredibly soulless creatures were that could ray all the life of a planet out of existence without a qualm.

  He was getting old anyway. Time to make room for younger men. He might have a fling now as any time at applied mortality. He was going to build himself a cruiser and streak out to Arided and Babe.

  3

  His experience with the invaders was substantially the same as Babe's, though he reasoned—and correctly—that they would adjust for detection of a mine-field laid in a smoke-screen. Therefore he trotted out something so antiquated in concept that the invaders would surely have forgotten it, if ever they had known the device.

  In the neighborhood of the first invasion port, the star in Cygnus, he encountered the phenomena Babe had described—utterly scrambled fields. Experimentally he held an electromagnet to a bit of steel. First there was no reaction, then the steel slid to the magnet. Then it hurled away from it like a bullet!

  Throughout his experiments he hadn't failed to keep a lookout. The chime that signaled foreign bodies rang just once, and he trotted out his modernized version of the ancient Greek fire, forerunner of explosives. He squirted the blazing stuff through his rear jets in a wide-open pattern, obscuring the sight of him more effectively than any fog-cloud could have done. When his simpler instruments told him that the ship tailing him was quite lost in the Greek fire, he sprayed out a flock of tiny, powerfully explosive pellets.

  There was one blast and it was all over; the tailing ship was dispersed through space, and whatever had been its crew was lost beyond repair.

  Having effected this, Bartok set his motors to idling in the direction of the invasion star and lit a cigarette, waiting in almost perfect calm to be detected and taken in tow.

  He did not have long to wait; there were half a dozen ships on him in twenty minutes. They clamped onto him what he realized must be the perfected tractor ray, so long celebrated in song and story and never yet seen on any spaceway till now.

  As the tractors dragged him through space towards Arided he inspected very closely the ships that were applying it. They were six in number; as Babe had said, they were remarkable for the fact that they were quite open, being no more than a power-unit around which was built a framework containing emplacements for weapons of all sorts and conditions. There were catwalks as well, up and down which scuttled nasty things about the size and very nearly the shape of men.

  Bartok was baffled by the metallic sheen of the things, when it hit him that they were robots. "Damned clever," he mused. "Damned clever indeed. They don't need air, they don't need a commissariat; all they need is orders and oil. I wish we'd thought up that gag a few centuries ago!"

  They landed him skillfully and easily on the fourth planet. As Bartok looked about he realized slowly that Babe hadn't been under any hallucinations when she'd sworn that the engineering works that had been run up were the most remarkable things in the unknown universe.

  There were towers everywhere, great patches of concrete for landing and servicing ships; long lines of them hanging in the air waiting for room. Not one square inch of ground space except narrow catwalks could be seen free of any mechanism. What was not transmission gears was solar engine; what was not solar engine was unimaginably complex calculators clicking and buzzing away as robots stalked among them to tear off results and deliver them to the nearest building.

  Bartok got out of his ship; immediately a gang of robots sprang to attention after the fashion of a guard of honor. Bartok had never seen robots before; there were enough hands to do the work of the colonial system and the social problems that would have been raised caused any experimentation with robots to be frowned on by the Executive Committee. And where was the Executive Committee today? God only knew. It was a very sure bet that if any of it was left, this residue would be mopped up by the despised and s
trictly forbidden mechanical men.

  Somebody had beaten the colonial system to the punch. But who could it be?

  Commander Bartok nearly swooned when a robot-in-command came up to him and said in perfect, though toneless, English: "Pray excuse this temporary detention, Wing Commander. I can assure you that it shall be terminated in a brief while."

  The brief while extended itself into three days before they would tell him what was going on. During that time he had the run of a delightful apartment which lacked only books and magazines for his comfort and relaxation. Apparently to substitute for them the robot-in-chief, or whoever was in charge, sent in robots whose specialty was brilliant conversation and repartee.

  On the third day there entered the usual loquacious metal man. "Your bed is rumpled," he greeted Bartok. "I presume your feelings are the same at this opposite situation?"

  "Opposite?" said Bartok, knowing from past experiences that the creature would explain some elaborately buried pun or double meaning in his greeting, which it did. There was some complex word-play with "smoothing the way" and "weighing the smooth," likewise a series of faintly ribald jests concerning the metal men themselves.

  Bartok, bored though he was, could not but admire the intensive manner in which they went about working a subject, whether the unified field theory or the technique of the double-take. He hadn't the ghost of a chance of holding up his own end of the conversation with this copper-plated specialist in the whimsical and amusing. He realized glumly that he wasn't specialized. He could crack a joke that would be a fairly good joke, but not half as funny or well-timed as the robot conversationalists; he could plan an attack, but not half as deadly as the robot fighters.

  "Man," said Bartok, "is on the way out."

  "Weight out the consequences," snapped the creature promptly, "and you'll find your remark substantially correct. Man too is correct—or, to put it differently, wrecked at the core."