Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  He looked up at the ceiling again. "What can I do?" he said softly.

  * * * * *

  On the second day after the arrival of the communique, Malloy made his decision. He flipped on his intercom and said: "Miss Drayson, get hold of James Nordon and Kylen Braynek. I want to see them both immediately. Send Nordon in first, and tell Braynek to wait."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And keep the recorder on. You can file the tape later."

  "Yes, sir."

  Malloy knew the woman would listen in on the intercom anyway, and it was better to give her permission to do so.

  James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered, and thirty-eight. His hair was graying at the temples, and his handsome face looked cool and efficient.

  Malloy waved him to a seat.

  "Nordon, I have a job for you. It's probably one of the most important jobs you'll ever have in your life. It can mean big things for you--promotion and prestige if you do it well."

  Nordon nodded slowly. "Yes, sir."

  Malloy explained the problem of the Karna peace talks.

  "We need a man who can outthink them," Malloy finished, "and judging from your record, I think you're that man. It involves risk, of course. If you make the wrong decisions, your name will be mud back on Earth. But I don't think there's much chance of that, really. Do you want to handle small-time operations all your life? Of course not.

  "You'll be leaving within an hour for Saarkkad V."

  Nordon nodded again. "Yes, sir; certainly. Am I to go alone?"

  "No," said Malloy, "I'm sending an assistant with you--a man named Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?"

  Nordon shook his head. "Not that I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?"

  "Not necessarily. He's a pretty shrewd operator, though. He knows a lot about interstellar law, and he's capable of spotting a trap a mile away. You'll be in charge, of course, but I want you to pay special attention to his advice."

  "I will, sir," Nordon said gratefully. "A man like that can be useful."

  "Right. Now, you go into the anteroom over there. I've prepared a summary of the situation, and you'll have to study it and get it into your head before the ship leaves. That isn't much time, but it's the Karna who are doing the pushing, not us."

  As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy said softly: "Send in Braynek, Miss Drayson."

  Kylen Braynek was a smallish man with mouse-brown hair that lay flat against his skull, and hard, penetrating, dark eyes that were shadowed by heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked him to sit down.

  Again Malloy went through the explanation of the peace conference.

  "Naturally, they'll be trying to trick you every step of the way," Malloy went on. "They're shrewd and underhanded; we'll simply have to be more shrewd and more underhanded. Nordon's job is to sit quietly and evaluate the data; yours will be to find the loopholes they're laying out for themselves and plug them. Don't antagonize them, but don't baby them, either. If you see anything underhanded going on, let Nordon know immediately."

  "They won't get anything by me, Mr. Malloy."

  * * * * *

  By the time the ship from Earth got there, the peace conference had been going on for four days. Bertrand Malloy had full reports on the whole parley, as relayed to him through the ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek to Saarkkad V.

  Secretary of State Blendwell stopped off at Saarkkad IV before going on to V to take charge of the conference. He was a tallish, lean man with a few strands of gray hair on the top of his otherwise bald scalp, and he wore a hearty, professional smile that didn't quite make it to his calculating eyes.

  He took Malloy's hand and shook it warmly. "How are you, Mr. Ambassador?"

  "Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything on Earth?"

  "Tense. They're waiting to see what is going to happen on Five. So am I, for that matter." His eyes were curious. "You decided not to go yourself, eh?"

  "I thought it better not to. I sent a good team, instead. Would you like to see the reports?"

  "I certainly would."

  Malloy handed them to the secretary, and as he read, Malloy watched him. Blendwell was a political appointee--a good man, Malloy had to admit, but he didn't know all the ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.

  When Blendwell looked up from the reports at last, he said: "Amazing! They've held off the Karna at every point! They've beaten them back! They've managed to cope with and outdo the finest team of negotiators the Karna could send."

  "I thought they would," said Malloy, trying to appear modest.

  The secretary's eyes narrowed. "I've heard of the work you've been doing here with ... ah ... sick men. Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?"

  Malloy nodded. "I think so. The Karna put us in a dilemma, so I threw a dilemma right back at them."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Nordon had a mental block against making decisions. If he took a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble making up his mind whether to kiss her or not until she made up his mind for him, one way or the other. He's that kind of guy. Until he's presented with one, single, clear decision which admits of no alternatives, he can't move at all.

  "As you can see, the Karna tried to give us several choices on each point, and they were all rigged. Until they backed down to a single point and proved that it wasn't rigged, Nordon couldn't possibly make up his mind. I drummed into him how important this was, and the more importance there is attached to his decisions, the more incapable he becomes of making them."

  The Secretary nodded slowly. "What about Braynek?"

  "Paranoid," said Malloy. "He thinks everyone is plotting against him. In this case, that's all to the good because the Karna are plotting against him. No matter what they put forth, Braynek is convinced that there's a trap in it somewhere, and he digs to find out what the trap is. Even if there isn't a trap, the Karna can't satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced that there has to be--somewhere. As a result, all his advice to Nordon, and all his questioning on the wildest possibilities, just serves to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.

  "These two men are honestly doing their best to win at the peace conference, and they've got the Karna reeling. The Karna can see that we're not trying to stall; our men are actually working at trying to reach a decision. But what the Karna don't see is that those men, as a team, are unbeatable because, in this situation, they're psychologically incapable of losing."

  Again the Secretary of State nodded his approval, but there was still a question in his mind. "Since you know all that, couldn't you have handled it yourself?"

  "Maybe, but I doubt it. They might have gotten around me someway by sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon and Braynek have blind spots, but they're covered with armor. No, I'm glad I couldn't go; it's better this way."

  The Secretary of State raised an eyebrow. "Couldn't go, Mr. Ambassador?"

  Malloy looked at him. "Didn't you know? I wondered why you appointed me, in the first place. No, I couldn't go. The reason why I'm here, cooped up in this office, hiding from the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic bigshot should, is because I like it that way. I suffer from agoraphobia and xenophobia.

  "I have to be drugged to be put on a spaceship because I can't take all that empty space, even if I'm protected from it by a steel shell." A look of revulsion came over his face. "And I can't stand aliens!"

  * * *

  Contents

  INSTANT OF DECISION

  By Randall Garrett

  How could a man tell the difference if all the reality of Earth turned out to be a cosmic hoax? Suppose it turned out that this was just a stage set for students of history?

  When the sharp snap of a pistol shot came from the half-finished building, Karnes wasn't anywhere near the sandpile that received the slug. He was fifteen feet away, behind the much more reliable protection of a neat stack of cement bags that provided cover all the way to a window in the empty shell of brick and steel before him.

  Three hundred yards behind him, the still-burnin
g inferno of what had been the Assembly Section of Carlson Spacecraft sent a reddish, unevenly pulsating light over the surrounding territory, punctuating the redness with intermittent flashes of blue-white from flaring magnesium.

  For an instant, Karnes let himself hope that the shot might be heard at the scene of the blaze, but only for an instant. The roar of fire, men, and machine would be too much for a little pop like that.

  He moved quietly along the stacked cement bags, and eased himself over the sill of the gaping window into the building. He was in a little hallway. Somewhere ahead and to his left would be a door that would lead into the main hallway where James Avery, alias James Harvey, alias half-a-dozen other names, was waiting to take another pot-shot at the sandpile.

  The passageway was longer than he had thought, and he realized that he might have been just a little careless in coming in through the window. With the firelight at his back, he might make a pretty good target from farther down the hall, or from any of the dark, empty rooms that would someday be officers'.

  Then he found it. The slight light from the main hallway came through enough to show him where to turn.

  Keeping in the darkness, Karnes' eyes surveyed the broad hallway for several seconds before he spotted the movement near a stairway. After he knew where to look, it was easy to make out the man's crouched figure.

  Karnes thought: I can't call to him to surrender. I can't let him get away. I can't sneak across that hall to stick my gun in his ribs. And, above all, I cannot let him get away with that microfilm.

  Hell, there's only one thing I can do.

  Karnes lifted his gun, aimed carefully at the figure, and fired.

  * * * * *

  Avery must have had a fairly tight grip on his own weapon, because when Karnes' slug hit him, it went off once before his body spread itself untidily across the freshly set cement. Then the gun fell out of the dead hand and slid a few feet, spinning in silly little circles.

  Karnes approached the corpse cautiously, just in case it wasn't a corpse, but it took only a moment to see that the caution had been unnecessary. He knelt, rolled the body over, unfastened the pants, pulled them down to the knees and stripped off the ribbon of adhesive tape that he knew would be on the inside of the thigh. Underneath it were four little squares of thin plastic.

  As he looked at the precious microfilm in his hand, he sensed something odd. If he had been equipped with the properly developed muscles to do so, he would have pricked his ears. There was a soft footstep behind him.

  He spun around on his heel, his gun ready. There was another man standing at the top of the shadowy stairway.

  Karnes stood up slowly, his weapon still levelled.

  "Come down from there slowly, with your hands in the air!"

  The man didn't move immediately, and, although Karnes couldn't see his face clearly in the shimmering shadows, he had the definite impression that there was a grin on it. When the man did move, it was to turn quickly and run down the upper hallway, with a shot ringing behind him.

  Karnes made the top of the stairway and sent another shot after the fleeing man, whose outline was easily visible against the pre-dawn light that was now beginning to come in through a window at the far end of the hall.

  The figure kept running, and Karnes went after him, firing twice more as he ran.

  Who taught you to shoot, dead-eye? he thought, as the man continued to run.

  At the end of the hall, the man turned abruptly into one of the offices-to-be, his pursuer only five yards behind him.

  * * * * *

  Afterwards, Karnes thought it over time after time, trying to find some flaw or illusion in what he saw. But, much as he hated to believe his own senses, he remained convinced.

  The broad window shed enough light to see everything in the room, but there wasn't much in it except for the slightly iridescent gray object in the center.

  It was an oblate spheroid, about seven feet high and eight or nine feet through. As Karnes came through the door, he saw the man step through the seemingly solid material into the flattened globe.

  Then globe, man and all, vanished. The room was empty.

  Karnes checked his headlong rush into the room and peered around in the early morning gloom. For a full minute his brain refused even to attempt rationalizing what he had seen. He looked wildly around, but there was no one there. Suddenly he felt very foolish.

  All right. So men can run into round gray things and vanish. Now use a little sense and look around.

  There was something else in the room. Karnes knelt and looked at the little object that lay on the floor a few feet from where the gray globe had been. A cigarette case; one of those flat, coat-pocket jobs with a jet black enamel surface laid over tiny checked squares that would be absolutely useless for picking up fingerprints. If there were any prints, they'd be on the inside.

  He started to pick it up and realized he must still be a bit confused; his hands were full. His right held the heavy automatic, and between the thumb and forefinger of his left were the four tiny sheets of microfilm.

  Karnes holstered the pistol, took an envelope from his pocket, put the films in it, replaced the envelope, and picked up the cigarette case. It was, he thought, a rather odd-looking affair. It--

  "Awright, you. Stand up slow, with your hands where I can see 'em."

  Great God, thought Karnes, I didn't know they were holding a tea party in this building. He did as he was told.

  There were two of them at the door, both wearing the uniform of Carlson Spacecraft. Plant protection squad.

  "Who are you, bud?" asked the heavy-jawed one who had spoken before. "And whataya doin' here?"

  Karnes, keeping his hands high, said: "Take my billfold out of my hip pocket."

  "Okay. But first get over against that wall and lean forward." Evidently the man was either an ex-cop or a reader of detective stories.

  * * * * *

  When Karnes had braced himself against the wall, the guard went through his pockets, all of them, but he didn't take anything out except the pistol and the billfold.

  The card in the special case of the wallet changed the guard's manner amazingly.

  "Oh," he said softly. "Government, huh? Gee, I'm sorry, sir, but we didn't know--"

  Karnes straightened up, and put his hands down. The cigarette case that had been in his right hand all along dropped into his coat pocket.

  "That's all right," he said. "Did you see the lad at the foot of the stairs?"

  "Sure. Jim Avery. Worked in Assembly. What happened to him?"

  "He got in the way of the bullet. Resisting arrest. He's the jasper that set off the little incendiaries that started that mess out there. We've been watching him for months, now, but we didn't get word of this cute stroke until too late."

  The guard looked puzzled. "Jim Avery. But why'd he want to do that?"

  Karnes looked straight at him. "Leaguer!"

  The guard nodded. You never could tell when the League would pop up like that.

  Even after the collapse of Communism after the war, the world hadn't learned anything, it seemed. The Eurasian League had seemed, at first, to be patterned after the Western world's United Nations, but it hadn't worked out that way.

  The League was jealous of the UN lead in space travel, for one thing, and they had neither the money nor the know-how to catch up. The UN might have given them help, but, as the French delegate had remarked: "For what reason should we arm a potential enemy?"

  After all, they argued, with the threat of the UN's Moonbase hanging over the League to keep them peaceful, why should we give them spaceships so they can destroy Moonbase?

  The Eurasian League had been quiet for a good many years, brooding, but behaving. Then, three years ago, Moonbase had vanished in a flash of actinic light, leaving only a new minor crater in the crust of Luna.

  There was no proof of anything, of course. It had to be written off as an accident. But from that day on, the League had become increasingly
bolder; their policy was: "Smash the UN and take the planets for ourselves!"

  And now, with Carlson Spacecraft going up in flames, they seemed to be getting closer to their goal.

  * * * * *

  Karnes accepted his weapon and billfold from the guard and led them back down the stairway. "Would one of you guys phone the State Police? They'll want to know what happened."

  The State Police copters came and went, taking Karnes and the late Mr. Avery with them, and leaving behind the now dying glow of Carlson Spacecraft.

  There were innumerable forms to fill out and affidavits to make; there was a long-distance call to UN headquarters in New York to verify Karnes' identity. And Karnes asked to borrow the police lab for an hour or so.

  That evening, he caught the rocket for Long Island.

  As the SR-37 floated through the hard vacuum five hundred miles above central Nebraska, Karnes leaned back in his seat, turning the odd cigarette case over and over in his hands.

  Except for the neat, even checking that covered it, the little three-by-four inch object was entirely featureless. There were no catches or hinges, or even any line of cleavage around the edge. He had already found that it wouldn't open.

  Whatever it was, it was most definitely not a cigarette case.

  The X-ray plates had shown it to be perfectly homogeneous throughout.

  As far as I can see, thought Karnes, it's nothing but a piece of acid-proof plastic, except that the specific gravity is way the hell too high. Maybe if I had cut it open, I could have--

  Karnes didn't push anything on the case, of that he was sure. Nor did he squeeze, shake, or rub it in any unusual way. But something happened; something which he was convinced came from the case in his hands.

  He had the definite impression of something akin to a high-pressure firehose squirting from the interior of the case, through his skull, and into and over his brain, washing it and filling it. Little rivers of knowledge trickled down through the convolutions of his brain, collected in pools, and soaked in.