The Second H. Beam Piper Omnibus

by H. Beam Piper

  "Not quite everything,” MacLeod said. “Kato's going to put that capsule in another cigarette pack, and he'll send one of his lab girls to Oppenheimer Village with it, with a message from Lowiewski to the effect that he couldn't get away. And when this chauffeur takes it out, he'll run into a Counter Espionage road-block on the way to town. They'll shoot him, of course, and they'll probably transfer Nayland to the Mississippi Valley Flood Control Project, where he can't do any more damage. At least, we'll have him out of our hair."

  "If we have any hair left,” Heym ben-Hillel gloomed. “You've got Nayland into trouble, but you haven't got us out of it."

  "What do you mean?” Suzanne Maillard demanded. “He's found the traitor and stopped the leak."

  "Yes, but we're still responsible, as a team, for this betrayal,” the Israeli pointed out. “This Nayland is only a symptom of the enmity which politicians and militarists feel toward the Free Scientists, and of their opposition to the research-contract system. Now they have a scandal to use. Our part in stopping the leak will be ignored; the publicity will be about the treason of a Free Scientist."

  "That's right,” Sir Neville Lawton agreed. “And that brings up another point. We simply can't hand this fellow over to the authorities. If we do, we establish a precedent that may wreck the whole system under which we operate."

  "Yes: it would be a fine thing if governments start putting Free Scientists on trial and shooting them,” Farida Khouroglu supported him. “In a few years, none of us would be safe."

  "But,” Suzanne cried, “you are not arguing that this species of an animal be allowed to betray us unpunished?"

  "Look,” Rudolf von Heldenfeld said. “Let us give him his pistol, and one cartridge, and let him remove himself like a gentleman. He will spare himself the humiliation of trial and execution, and us all the embarrassment of having a fellow scientist pilloried as a traitor."

  "Now there's a typical Prussian suggestion,” Lowiewski said.

  * * * *

  Kato Sugihara, returning alone, looked around the table. “Did I miss something interesting?” he asked.

  "Oh, very,” Lowiewski told him. “Your Junker friend thinks I should perform seppuku."

  Kato nodded quickly. “Excellent idea!” he congratulated von Heldenfeld. “If he does, he'll save everybody a lot of trouble. Himself included.” He nodded again. “If he does that, we can protect his reputation, after he's dead."

  "I don't really see how,” Sir Neville objected. “When the Counter Espionage people were brought into this, the thing went out of our control."

  "Why, this chauffeur was the spy, as well as the spy-courier,” MacLeod said. “The information he transmitted was picked up piecemeal from different indiscreet lab-workers and students attached to our team. Of course, we are investigating, mumble-mumble. Naturally, no one will admit, mumble-mumble. No stone will be left unturned, mumble-mumble. Disciplinary action, mumble-mumble."

  "And I suppose he got that microfilm piecemeal, too?” Lowiewski asked.

  "Oh, that?” MacLeod shrugged. “That was planted on him. One of our girls arranged an opportunity for him to steal it from her, after we began to suspect him. Of course, Kato falsified everything he put into that report. As information, it's worthless."

  "Worthless? It's better than that,” Kato grinned. “I'm really sorry the Komintern won't get it. They'd try some of that stuff out with the big betatron at Smolensk, and a microsecond after they'd throw the switch, Smolensk would look worse than Hiroshima did."

  "Well, why would our esteemed colleague commit suicide, just at this time?” Karen Hilquist asked.

  "Maybe plutonium poisoning.” Farida suggested. “He was doing something in the radiation-lab and got some Pu in him, and of course, shooting's not as painful as that. So—"

  "Oh, my dear!” Suzanne protested. “That but stinks! The great Adam Lowiewski, descending from his pinnacle of pure mathematics, to perform a vulgar experiment? With actual things?” The Frenchwoman gave an exaggerated shudder. “Horrors!"

  "Besides, if our people began getting radioactive, somebody would be sure to claim we were endangering the safely of the whole establishment, and the national-security clause would be invoked, and some nosy person would put a geiger on the dear departed,” Sir Neville added.

  "Nervous collapse.” Karen said. “According to the laity, all scientists are crazy. Crazy people kill themselves. Adam Lowiewski was a scientist. Ergo Adam Lowiewski killed himself. Besides, a nervous collapse isn't instrumentally detectable."

  Heym ben-Hillel looked at MacLeod, his eyes troubled.

  "But, Dunc; have we the right to put him to death, either by his own hand or by an Army firing squad?” he asked. “Remember he is not only a traitor; he is one of the world's greatest mathematical minds. Have we a right to destroy that mind?"

  Von Heldenfeld shouted, banging his fist on the table: “I don't care if he's Gauss and Riemann and Lorenz and Poincare and Minkowski and Whitehead and Einstein, all collapsed into one! The man is a stinking traitor, not only to us, but to all scientists and all sciences! If he doesn't shoot himself, hand him over to the United States, and let them shoot him! Why do we go on arguing?"

  * * * *

  Lowiewski was smiling, now. The panic that had seized him in the hallway below, and the desperation when the cigarette pack had been opened, had left him.

  "Now I have a modest proposal, which will solve your difficulties,” he said. “I have money, papers, clothing, everything I will need, outside the reservation. Suppose you just let me leave here. Then, if there is any trouble, you can use this fiction about the indiscreet underlings, without the unnecessary embellishment of my suicide—"

  Rudolf von Heldenfeld let out an inarticulate roar of fury. For an instant he was beyond words. Then he sprang to his feet.

  "Look at him!” he cried. “Look at him, laughing in our faces, for the dupes and fools he thinks we are!” He thrust out his hand toward MacLeod. “Give me the pistol! He won't shoot himself; I'll do it for him!"

  "It would work, Dunc. Really, it would,” Heym ben-Hillel urged.

  "No,” Karen Hilquist contradicted. “If he left here, everybody would know what had happened, and we'd be accused of protecting him. If he kills himself, we can get things hushed up: dead traitors are good traitors. But if he remains alive, we must disassociate ourselves from him by handing him over."

  "And wreck the prestige of the Team?” Lowiewski asked.

  "At least you will not live to see that!” Suzanne retorted.

  Heym ben-Hillel put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “Is there no solution to this?” he almost wailed.

  "Certainly: an obvious solution,” MacLeod said, rising. “Rudolf has just stated it. Only I'm leader of this Team, and there are, of course, jobs a team-leader simply doesn't delegate.” The safety catch of the Beretta clicked a period to his words.

  "No!” The word was wrenched almost physically out of Lowiewski. He, too, was on his feet, a sudden desperate fear in his face. “No! You wouldn't murder me!"

  "The term is ‘execute',” MacLeod corrected. Then his arm swung up, and he shot Adam Lowiewski through the forehead.

  For an instant, the Pole remained on his feet. Then his knees buckled, and he fell forward against the table, sliding to the floor.

  * * * *

  MacLeod went around the table, behind Kato Sugihara and Farida Khouroglu and Heym ben-Hillel, and stood looking down at the man he had killed. He dropped the automatic within a few inches of the dead renegade's outstretched hand, then turned to face the others.

  "I regret,” he addressed them, his voice and face blank of expression, “to announce that our distinguished colleague, Dr. Adam Lowiewski, has committed suicide by shooting, after a nervous collapse resulting from overwork."

  Sir Neville Lawton looked critically at the motionless figure on the floor.

  "I'm afraid we'll have trouble making that stick, Dunc,” he said. “You shot him at a
bout five yards; there isn't a powder mark on him."

  "Oh, sorry; I forgot.” MacLeod's voice was mockingly contrite. “It was Dr. Lowiewski's expressed wish that his remains be cremated as soon after death as possible, and that funeral services be held over his ashes. The big electric furnace in the metallurgical lab will do, I think."

  "But ... but there'll be all sorts of formalities—” the Englishman protested.

  "Now you forget. Our contract,” MacLeod reminded him. “We stand upon our contractual immunity: we certainly won't allow any stupid bureaucratic interference with our deceased colleague's wishes. We have a regular M.D. on our payroll, in case anybody has to have a death certificate to keep him happy, but beyond that—” He shrugged.

  "It burns me up, though!” Suzanne Maillard cried. “After the spaceship is built, and the Moon is annexed to the Western Union, there will be publicity, and people will eulogize this species of an Iscariot!"

  Heym ben-Hillel, who had been staring at MacLeod in shocked unbelief, roused himself.

  "Well, why not? Isn't the creator of the Lowiewski function transformations and the rules of inverse probabilities worthy of eulogy?” He turned to MacLeod. “I couldn't have done what you did, but maybe it was for the best. The traitor is dead; the mathematician will live forever."

  "You miss the whole point,” MacLeod said. “Both of you. It wasn't a question of revenge, like gangsters bumping off a double-crosser. And it wasn't a question of whitewashing Lowiewski for posterity. We are the MacLeod Research Team. We owe no permanent allegiance to, nor acknowledge the authority of, any national sovereignty or any combination of nations. We deal with national governments as with equals. In consequence, we must make and enforce our own laws.

  "You must understand that we enjoy this status only on sufferance. The nations of the world tolerate the Free Scientists only because they need us, and because they know they can trust us. Now, no responsible government official is going to be deceived for a moment by this suicide story we've confected. It will be fully understood that Lowiewski was a traitor, and that we found him out and put him to death. And, as a corollary, it will be understood that this Team, as a Team, is fully trustworthy, and that when any individual Team member is found to be untrustworthy, he will be dealt with promptly and without public scandal. In other words, it will be understood, from this time on, that the MacLeod Team is worthy of the status it enjoys and the responsibilities concomitant with it."

  TIME AND TIME AGAIN

  Blinded by the bomb-flash and numbed by the narcotic injection, he could not estimate the extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was dying. Around him, in the darkness, voices sounded as through a thick wall.

  "They mighta left mosta these Joes where they was. Half of them won't even last till the truck comes."

  "No matter; so long as they're alive, they must be treated,” another voice, crisp and cultivated, rebuked. “Better start taking names, while we're waiting."

  "Yes, sir.” Fingers fumbled at his identity badge. “Hartley, Allan; Captain, G5, Chem. Research AN/73/D. Serial, SO-23869403J."

  "Allan Hartley!” The medic officer spoke in shocked surprise. “Why, he's the man who wrote ‘Children of the Mist', ‘Rose of Death', and ‘Conqueror's Road'!"

  He tried to speak, and must have stirred; the corpsman's voice sharpened.

  "Major, I think he's part conscious. Mebbe I better give him ‘nother shot."

  "Yes, yes; by all means, sergeant."

  Something jabbed Allan Hartley in the back of the neck. Soft billows of oblivion closed in upon him, and all that remained to him was a tiny spark of awareness, glowing alone and lost in a great darkness.

  * * * *

  The Spark grew brighter. He was more than a something that merely knew that it existed. He was a man, and he had a name, and a military rank, and memories. Memories of the searing blue-green flash, and of what he had been doing outside the shelter the moment before, and memories of the month-long siege, and of the retreat from the north, and memories of the days before the War, back to the time when he had been little Allan Hartley, a schoolboy, the son of a successful lawyer, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

  His mother he could not remember; there was only a vague impression of the house full of people who had tried to comfort him for something he could not understand. But he remembered the old German woman who had kept house for his father, afterward, and he remembered his bedroom, with its chintz-covered chairs, and the warm-colored patch quilt on the old cherry bed, and the tan curtains at the windows, edged with dusky red, and the morning sun shining through them. He could almost see them, now.

  He blinked. He could see them!

  * * * *

  For a long time, he lay staring at them unbelievingly, and then he deliberately closed his eyes and counted ten seconds, and as he counted, terror gripped him. He was afraid to open them again, lest he find himself blind, or gazing at the filth and wreckage of a blasted city, but when he reached ten, he forced himself to look, and gave a sigh of relief. The sunlit curtains and the sun-gilded mist outside were still there.

  He reached out to check one sense against another, feeling the rough monk's cloth and the edging of maroon silk thread. They were tangible as well as visible. Then he saw that the back of his hand was unscarred. There should have been a scar, souvenir of a rough-and-tumble brawl of his cub reporter days. He examined both hands closely. An instant later, he had sat up in bed and thrown off the covers, partially removing his pajamas and inspecting as much of his body as was visible.

  It was the smooth body of a little boy.

  That was ridiculous. He was a man of forty-three; an army officer, a chemist, once a best-selling novelist. He had been married, and divorced ten years ago. He looked again at his body. It was only twelve years old. Fourteen, at the very oldest. His eyes swept the room, wide with wonder. Every detail was familiar: the flower-splashed chair covers; the table that served as desk and catch-all for his possessions; the dresser, with its mirror stuck full of pictures of aircraft. It was the bedroom of his childhood home. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. They were six inches too short to reach the floor.

  For an instant, the room spun dizzily; and he was in the grip of utter panic, all confidence in the evidence of his senses lost. Was he insane? Or delirious? Or had the bomb really killed him; was this what death was like? What was that thing, about “ye become as little children"? He started to laugh, and his juvenile larynx made giggling sounds. They seemed funny, too, and aggravated his mirth. For a little while, he was on the edge of hysteria and then, when he managed to control his laughter, he felt calmer. If he were dead, then he must be a discarnate entity, and would be able to penetrate matter. To his relief, he was unable to push his hand through the bed. So he was alive; he was also fully awake, and, he hoped, rational. He rose to his feet and prowled about the room, taking stock of its contents.

  There was no calendar in sight, and he could find no newspapers or dated periodicals, but he knew that it was prior to July 18, 1946. On that day, his fourteenth birthday, his father had given him a light .22 rifle, and it had been hung on a pair of rustic forks on the wall. It was not there now, nor ever had been. On the table, he saw a boys’ book of military aircraft, with a clean, new dustjacket; the flyleaf was inscribed: To Allan Hartley, from his father, on his thirteenth birthday, 7/18 ‘45. Glancing out the window at the foliage on the trees, he estimated the date at late July or early August, 1945; that would make him just thirteen.

  His clothes were draped on a chair beside the bed. Stripping off his pajamas, he donned shorts, then sat down and picked up a pair of lemon-colored socks, which he regarded with disfavor. As he pulled one on, a church bell began to clang. St. Boniface, up on the hill, ringing for early Mass; so this was Sunday. He paused, the second sock in his hand.

  There was no question that his present environment was actual. Yet, on the other hand, he possessed a set of memories completely at variance with it. Now, suppo
se, since his environment were not an illusion, everything else were? Suppose all these troublesome memories were no more than a dream? Why, he was just little Allan Hartley, safe in his room on a Sunday morning, badly scared by a nightmare! Too much science fiction, Allan; too many comic books!

  That was a wonderfully comforting thought, and he hugged it to him contentedly. It lasted all the while he was buttoning up his shirt and pulling on his pants, but when he reached for his shoes, it evaporated. Ever since he had wakened, he realized, he had been occupied with thoughts utterly incomprehensible to any thirteen-year-old; even thinking in words that would have been so much Sanscrit to himself at thirteen. He shook his head regretfully. The just-a-dream hypothesis went by the deep six.

  He picked up the second shoe and glared at it as though it were responsible for his predicament. He was going to have to be careful. An unexpected display of adult characteristics might give rise to some questions he would find hard to answer credibly. Fortunately, he was an only child; there would be no brothers or sisters to trip him up. Old Mrs. Stauber, the housekeeper, wouldn't be much of a problem; even in his normal childhood, he had bulked like an intellectual giant in comparison to her. But his father—

  Now, there the going would be tough. He knew that shrewd attorney's mind, whetted keen on a generation of lying and reluctant witnesses. Sooner or later, he would forget for an instant and betray himself. Then he smiled, remembering the books he had discovered, in his late ‘teens, on his father's shelves and recalling the character of the openminded agnostic lawyer. If he could only avoid the inevitable unmasking until he had a plausible explanatory theory.

  * * * *